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[BigBrainEnergy]

I could see it working on an alpha strike setup for a phase ship. Outfitting them with something like AM blasters, Heavy Blasters or Phase Lances and given that you will naturally run up your flux from phasing anyways, you could pop out and strike someone for alot of damage. But yeah with how wildly your flux goes in any given fight and losing the flux war is not ideal, its not something thats applicable everywhere.

Oh yeah, it's not useless. Phase ships can make decent use of it if you overflux their weapons because soft flux doesn't interfere with their defensive system. Some shielded ships like the tempest can also squeeze some value out of it, it's just super niche and even at its best provides an average damage bonus of like 10 percent. Maybe 15 if you get lucky, but then you run the risk of getting blown out. I still take it on those rare builds that can use it: damage is damage after all and the elite bonus is pretty nice.

Overall though, it's pretty sad when ballistic mastery is so broadly useful.

Another possible "fix" for EWM is make it start at a 10% damage bonus and scale up to 30% at maximum flux. This would guarantee you're always getting at least 10% bonus damage, except that it actually doesn't because you still need to be within 600 range of the target. EWM has a very high ceiling for its bonus at 30% damage, but the reality is you're going to spend most the time near the floor because it scales on range and flux at the same time. Adding a respectable floor to the flux scaling would nice considering BM gives you 10% damage and range all the time no matter what.

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm gonna make a post in suggestions...

[Brainwright]

I could see it working on an alpha strike setup for a phase ship. Outfitting them with something like AM blasters, Heavy Blasters or Phase Lances and given that you will naturally run up your flux from phasing anyways, you could pop out and strike someone for alot of damage. But yeah with how wildly your flux goes in any given fight and losing the flux war is not ideal, its not something thats applicable everywhere.

Yeah, I tend to use a small modded phase ship with an ion pulser and a thumper.  With phase anchor, it can win the flux war against most ships (but a Shade with phase anchor and a needler can do that, too).

What's really interesting is that the thumper outperforms high-explosive weapons on anything with midline levels of armor.  The ion pulser only really struggles to chew through low-tech armor, and once it has, the high-explosive property is pointless.  The raw damage of the thumper wins out.

[Salter]

Yeah, I tend to use a small modded phase ship with an ion pulser and a thumper.  With phase anchor, it can win the flux war against most ships (but a Shade with phase anchor and a needler can do that, too).

I would (and do) agree, but phase ships aint as good as last patch, where they didnt get any speed drop-off. It was way better when you could slide a shot or two in on high flux before darting out, but the speed drops in general kinda kill the skill and make it unappealing for fleet combat on phase ships. There are still some ships that work with EWM though, like Scarab with AM blaster or any variation of the Hyperion really but those are semi-rare and high maintenance ships that require a dedicated investment and setup.

[DaShiv]

I could see it working on an alpha strike setup for a phase ship. Outfitting them with something like AM blasters, Heavy Blasters or Phase Lances and given that you will naturally run up your flux from phasing anyways, you could pop out and strike someone for alot of damage. But yeah with how wildly your flux goes in any given fight and losing the flux war is not ideal, its not something thats applicable everywhere.

I find that purposely running up hard flux for the purposes of scaling up EWM to dump a lot of extra-damage alpha isn't a very practical strategy due to weapon flux spikes. For example, AMB and Phase Lance both cost 1.5k flux per shot, which really limits how much alpha you can dump at high hard flux. And even if you've successfully unloaded all your high flux weapons, your total flux is now so high that you're stuck at close range while being completely unable to use shields or escape with phase  - and high tech ships are not great at armor tanking to survive these circumstances.

For the EWM/alpha dump strategy, there's really only one ship that has the combination of high mobility to both close in and escape, large number/size of energy mounts, deep flux pool to power alpha strikes, and high armor for survival at max flux - and that's the Radiant, which as a capital tends to fight at longer range than is optimal for EWM (and can't use SO). In general, it's probably best to simply use EWM without purposely accumulating hard flux and accept the likelihood that EWM won't average out to very much +damage% over the course of an entire battle.

[Draba]

I think thumper's niche is too narrow for it to be a good choice in basically any case.
AI will fire it into both shields(bad efficiency) and non-stripped armor(almost completely useless). End result is just a big flux disadvantage.
When it hits stripped armor it's still not that hot, even general kinetic like arbalest/HAC have 4x/2x the hit strength and not many targets are light enough for thumper to really shine.
Only saving grace is decent accuracy/projectile speed at 700 range.

There is no way I'm giving it to anything over a combination of mauler/HMG/flaks/HAC/arbalest/needler/whatever.
For some player ships it might be a finisher option, but even then it's very situational.