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[delra]

... is absolutely required:

1. The biggest argument against it is that missiles are finite and you will run out of them eventually. This is utter BS. Yes, they are finite, but there are numerous ways to increase their number, missile racks, missile autoloader, officer skill. By the time you run out of missiles, the battle is already won, because your enemy has literally run out of ships. I say there's too many missiles at the moment and it's not uncommon for missiles to last the entirety of the battle, with plenty to spare.

2. They should cost flux to launch. One of principle rules of this game is that you need flux to attack and defend. The more you attack, the less you're able to defend, because your flux is nearing the danger levels. It's an elegant way of making glass cannon ships weaker, ships too focused on dealing damage and weak at defending themselves. Missiles break this rule, disregard it entirely, you can spam them very happily from glass cannon ships without any flux consequences whatsoever. If launching a wide salvo of harpoons or atropos built up your flux, you'd think twice how many of them you link and launch together. Now it's just: fire away.

3. They are too powerful. Too fast, too strong. Break through armor too easily, they actually make armor pretty useless when you think about it. Overload enemy shields, fire a Harpoon at him, done deal. You don't even need anti-armor weapons. Many of them become ridiculous with ECCM (Squall especially) and officer skill. While guns are specialized to be anti-shield or anti-armor, most missiles really aren't. Yea Squall and Sabot are specifically anti-shield, but everything else you can happily launch at fully shielded ships and overload them. Try a Hyperion with Typhoon in the middle slot, for example. A Pegasus with four MIRVs can erase entire fleets of destroyers and cruisers just by spamming same missile whether their shields are lowered or not. Crappiest frigates with heavy torpedoes can deal way more damage than they should be dealing. Say, Vigilances with Reapers.

4. AI ships aren't built to deal with missiles, PD is scattered and random on AI ships. Fighters have no role wiping out the incoming missiles. You land so many ridiculous hits even with unupgraded torpedoes. Worst of all, autopilot is really bad at dealing with missiles as well, ships keep backing away from missiles that can't hurt them. This mean a fleet that's heavy on missiles can create a lot of space around itself just by spamming things like Squall. This pushes enemies back, prevents them from engaging most of their weapons, gives you advantage if you're built for longer range engagements.

In summary: Too many, too strong, too cheap in DP and flux-free to fire. The "I win" button of this game. Something has to change here. Please kill the missile spam.

[Grievous69]

Remove the bonus missile hp from Missile Spec, that's a start to making PD relevant and fighters focused on stopping missiles. Flux free damage is the whole point of them, I wouldn't touch that. And they need to be powerful since they're both a finite resource that can get shot down in mid air. Look at Dragonfire which got a nice damage buff but is still considered weak and unreliable.

AI could be improved a bit though, I don't know why they would be so scared of a single Harpoon at 0% flux for example.

[intrinsic_parity]

@Grevious
Yes exactly, the fact that they can get shot down is another major downside, but the problem with missiles is that PD is not good enough to stop them. You shouldn't need skills and hullmods to make PD good enough to be functional against missiles.

Balancing with counters is much more interesting than just neutering missiles.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

I could see the HP bonus from MS decreased to 25%.

Other than that missiles are fine.

[Sendrien]

@Grevious
Yes exactly, the fact that they can get shot down is another major downside, but the problem with missiles is that PD is not good enough to stop them. You shouldn't need skills and hullmods to make PD good enough to be functional against missiles.

Balancing with counters is much more interesting than just neutering missiles.

I tend to agree with this take. Rather than nerf missiles, which feel like they're in a good place, we should take a good look at PD, which feel like they're in a terrible place instead.

[Megas]

One nerf to missiles for the fleet would be making Missile Specialization (and Systems Expertise) rarer across the board for NPCs.  Does not feel much of a capstone if high-level officers are everywhere in all endgame fleets.

Getting enough Combat for a capstone does not make the player character an ace like in the old days; it just makes him graduate basic officer training instead of being an incompetent sidekick that splatters against them.

[Verran]

I'm in agreement that looking at PD, including fighters that have the role of effectively being PD, rather than slashing missiles sounds more beneficial. I also agree that computer-controlled ships should work to respond appropriately to the threat at hand. As discussed, a vessel at no flux shouldn't treat a harpoon as a meaningful threat but should work to deal/avoid a sabot so it isn't walloped by that anti-shield damage. Opposite goes for armor only vessels. There could be some interesting discussion/balance surrounding how much a ship should react based on flux, its current armor, and available PD weapons. (EG, a ship with shields and zero flux but significant PD powers forward, despite a pair of sabots as it assumes it can intercept them.) But I'm not particularly familiar with programming. Let alone everything that is required to have the computer pilot a ship in any manner.

[TheLaughingDead]

I absolutely agree that it is too easy to amass missiles these days while also them incredibly difficult to shoot down (both in the same skill, in fact). I'd love to see the balance between missiles and PD be touched on some more.
I think an issue is the constant struggle to balance PD and missiles against each other has resulted in the addition of higher and higher bonuses for both, that leave behind ships that don't have those bonuses. For example, the Point Defense skill gets a massive +50% damage bonus against missiles and fighters. As a result (or perhaps caused by) Missile Specialization gives missiles a massive boost to missile HP and ammo. As a result, S-modded Advanced Turret Gyros gives a significant bonus to missile and fighter damage. Etc etc. The variety of sources for these buffs is great game design since it allows for stacking bonuses and really building towards what the player wants, but the issue is that all of these bonuses can stack on top of each other and that they compete with massive bonuses from other skills, and as a result ships with few to none of these bonuses are completely left in the dust.

So I think either the game should really dial down missiles and PD to give ballistics/energy weapons some breathing room, or double down on emphasizing missiles/PD; make it so most ships need missiles/PD or need those missile/PD bonuses to properly compete. An "if everyone has missiles/PD, no one does" sort of thing, and then use stacking bonuses, dedicated large-slot PD weapons, dedicated PD boats, dedicated missile ships, whathaveyou, to work within that framework. But as it is now, it just seems like missiles are a fundamental and important part of most ship builds, while PD is more or less a niche for some low-tech ships. Really, either you grab the Point Defense skill, IPDAI, maybe S-modded Advanced Turret Gyros, a couple Dual Flak Cannons; or you don't bother and skip out on all but a couple Vulcans/Burst PD Lasers on the back. I only partially exaggerate.

AI of course is something that is constantly being iterated upon and improved.

[CapnHector]

Really you just need to nerf missile HP. For example see the calculation by Hiruma Kai in https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=27251.msg402916#msg402916 . Summary: a skilled Gryphon puts out about three times the missile HP per second that a skilled Heron with Broadswords puts out fighter HP. That's a little silly. No wonder PD is useless.

Buffing PD instead of nerfing missiles seems attractive but consider that that will in addition to affecting missiles also further nerf fighters and boost SO builds which doesn't seem great. Basically just remove +missile HP  and maybe ROF boost, and should be much more manageable.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

For example see the calculation by Hiruma Kai in https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=27251.msg402916#msg402916 . Summary: a skilled Gryphon puts out about three times the missile HP per second that a skilled Heron with Broadswords puts out fighter HP. That's a little silly.

The only silly thing here is the comparison itself. Here, I can do bad faith math as well: if a Gryphon/Breach MS Gryphon puts out 1,181 HP/s in missiles, then you only need two Vulcan Cannons to stop 84% of them(useless BTW) Two unbonused Vulcans! Against a dedicated missile spam ship with an elite capstone skill! How unfair, missile HP should be buffed!

What interests me most is WHY people have such beef with missiles. The AI doesn't really have missile spam fleets(and even if they did most of their officers won't have MS) and most - as in "significant majority" - of players don't use missile spam fleets either(mostly because you need Derelict Ops for it to actually work and players don't like D-mods)

[CapnHector]

It's not really that silly, when the point is to compare what PD weapons have to deal with vs missiles or fighters. For what it's worth I agree with you that missiles are not overpowered - none of the strongest fleets I have ever created in this game, which are the 5 ships vs 5 Ordos fleets, used missile spam as a strategy.

It is probably instead perceived by many players as overpowered because it "breaks" the rules of the game by dealing significant damage at 0 flux cost and surprise death with Reapers. And missile slots are generally "always fill" unlike other weapon mounts.

However, another thing is that PD is very underpowered, and I know you disagree on this, but it's just generally really useless with a few exceptions since it doesn't actually stop missiles. The better way to fix that than buff PD would be reduce missile HP.

[Buggie]

I would also much rather see a missile hp nerf than a pd buff, taking that route doesn't induce power creep and doesn't needlesly screw over fighters who are already not overperforming.

[Void Ganymede]

Missile power is pretty nonlinear. They're weak until they start saturating PD, then they're powerful until they start running out, then they're weak again. They can also fill unique roles that have outsized impact (Salamander spam from slow fleets, Pilum spam from backline carriers, armor crackers on KE+frag gunboats, Harpoon finishers on midline escorts) and create a sort of rock-paper-scissors effect. A torpedo boat swarm can do a great per-DP job farming Hegemony while failing vs Tri-Tach, there's now laser missiles that counter certain PD types, it's complicated and great.

Gryphon's kind of an outlier. I don't think, given how rare they are, most people are capable of stacking up a fleet of them.

[TheLaughingDead]

What interests me most is WHY people have such beef with missiles. The AI doesn't really have missile spam fleets(and even if they did most of their officers won't have MS) and most - as in "significant majority" - of players don't use missile spam fleets either(mostly because you need Derelict Ops for it to actually work and players don't like D-mods)

Derelict Operations isn't needed for missile spam, it is just icing on the cake. And the point of dealing with missiles, is not just to deal with missile spam fleets. They are still plenty powerful in mixed-fleet settings. As CapnHector mentions, missile slots are generally "always fill". But my beef isn't even with missiles, just with Missile Specialization. The skill takes missiles, which are somewhat balanced on their own, and then shoots their efficacy into the stratosphere with a railgun. And then Elite Missile Spec takes that new efficacy and shoots that into its equivalent of the stratosphere.

It's not really that silly, when the point is to compare what PD weapons have to deal with vs missiles or fighters. For what it's worth I agree with you that missiles are not overpowered - none of the strongest fleets I have ever created in this game, which are the 5 ships vs 5 Ordos fleets, used missile spam as a strategy.

It isn't about missiles being the absolute best at killing the most everything all the time, but moreso that they have disproportional representation in ship builds that can beat all of the standard content that the game has to offer; ie, beat Zigg, beat 1.1mil bounty, beat phase fleets, beat any faction fleet, beat any ordo or even two, beat any station, etc. And when I say "disproportional representation in ship builds", I'm not just talking about filling a couple small missile slots. I moreso am talking about Missile Specialization.
And I also mean on the whole, the entirety of the game and its ongoing development. You see newer ships with larger and more numerous missile mounts compared to older ships. You see larger and more numerous bonuses to point defense that allow it to compete with missile HP while completely demolishing fighters. You see the base stats of missile weapons (large especially) being nerfed.

I remember in BigBrainEnergy's Skill Rebalancing thread Thaago mentioned the following-

It might be interesting to "promote" Ballistic and Energy Weapon Mastery to capstone status, trading places with the neural link and system expertise, and make them as impactful as Missile Spec.

Which I thought was a really interesting idea. People hate it when things get nerfed (as evident to repeated outcries against any nerf ever, but especially against nerfing the admittedly fun but definitely overpowered Missile Specialization skill) and bringing missile weapons in line with other mounts doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. And if ballistic and energy weapons got buffed via some sort of skill on par with Missile Specialization, then PD from respective weapon types would probably feel some of that buff as well and perform better against the (still high-quantity high-HP high-burst zero-flux long-range no-bad-Dmod all-content-beating) Missile Specialization. And who knows, maybe people would even put non-missile weapons in universal mounts?

[Grievous69]

The AI actually uses missile spam fleets, just fight a big Persean League bounty where every single officer has elite Missile Spec. That is pure fun /s. (I'm not even saying that the fight is crazy hard, just compare it to other human bounties of similar size)

Buffing literally everything else apart from missiles seems like a dumb way to balance missiles themselves. Sure there is always someone not happy with nerfs but you have to do it at one point. And it seems to me that the vast majority of forum members agree with removing the bonus hp perk from the Missile Spec skill.