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[BigBrainEnergy]

So I want to start off by saying I'm very happy with the weapon balance right now. So many weapons that seemed doomed to a mediocre existence now have distinct, valuable niches. A good example of this is the gallery of small kinteic weapons: railguns, needlers, autocannons, and dual autocannons. With this many weapons competing in the same slot with the same damage type it feels like some of them should turn out useless, but I find myself considering the qualities of each weapon carefully and picking out every one of these options for different ships.

Recent patches have extended this to a lot of weapons like the hephaestus, storm needler, heavy autocannon, phase lance, graviton, and none of these directly outshine any of the options I was using before. Except the hellbore. It still has a niche, being cheaper and having lower flux/second than the hephaestus, but that niche got a lot smaller. The difference in performance is massive, so if you can sacrifice somewhere else to make the upgrade, you will, and most of the time, you can.

Before talking about how it could get buffed, let me lay out how it shouldn't get buffed: accuracy and speed. The hephaestus is meant to be a better generalist providing good armor and hull damage against all targets, while the hellbore is meant to be atrocious against smaller targets but very effective against larger ones. Buffing the accuracy would serve make it more like the hephaestus which is not what we want to do here even if it would make it more effective.

As for how it should get buffed, I think the hellbore needs to do more hull damage. I forget who pointed it out, but someone mentioned that even against larger ships the hephy massively outperforms the hellbore because you spend a lot more time shooting hull than armor, and while the hellbore is impressive against heavy armor its damage against hull is a bit underwhelming for such a slow and inaccurate weapon. What I'd like to see is maybe an extra 750 fragmentation damage added on top of its existing damage, plus some extra flux cost to go along with it. Maybe bump up the flux/shot up to 1000. I'd prefer this over increasing the explosive damage because that would make its anti-armor capabilities too good; at present some armor setups can tank multiple hellbore shots in the same spot before being stripped. I don't think it needs any help against armor, but its effectiveness against hull leaves much to be desired. And if I do somehow hit a frigate's hull with one of these, I don't think it's too much to ask for it to pop in one shot.

[Killer of Fate]

I've never felt like Hellbore would be considered underpowered, but truth be told I'm more of an old patch guy. The way I see it is that Hellbore is probably one of the most valuable weapons in the game, offering the most straightforward anti-armour damage that heavily exploits the fact that most ships in Starsector are very slow.

The anti-hull damage is negligible, because one of the more important aspects of dealing high anti-armour damage is the fact that you begin to disable weapons and sometimes engines. This is only not that prevalent when facing off against elite officers or whatever. Truth be told Hephaestus is meant to be better against hull, cause it has higher dps. And if it was both worse against high armour and hull compared to Hellbore, its only job would be being good against nimble ships, which usually rely on shields anyway. Which is why it was bad.

I feel like the way to increase Hellbore's strength would be to lower its hit strength and increase fire rate, so it gains a more generalist anti-armour role. Because a singular shot from Hellbore can pretty much tear most armour in the game. And it feels kinda like an overkill, especially considering how difficult it may be to land those shots in the first place. But at the same time, that is just my random on the go made proposition, so it's probably really bad. Please, ignore it.

ps. I've usually paired Hellbore with Ballistic RAGE-finder railguns. And railguns strangely enough do very high anti-hull damage, because they're strong enough to pierce left-over armour and have exceptionally high dps and accuracy for a small kinetic weapon. Maybe the Hellbore's weakness comes from the fact that it's paired with budget kinetic weapons which are horrible against anything but shields. And also the fact that players might be using needlers which are bad at hit strength. Unless utilising medium variants which is rare. For example I can't imagine medium needlers working on a Dominator.

[Megas]

Hellbore used to shoot twice as fast, during the days when HAG was less efficient, had terrible accuracy, and (during the old releases with ammo) burned through ammo faster.

Hellbore as-is is okay as a budget or entry-level weapon.  It is Open Market grade, after all.

[Selfcontrol]

I agree with BigBrainEnergy. The Helbore deserves a buff.

The HAG got 2 buffs in 2 patches in a row. Except on Flux Dissipation (which is important only on what, Dominator and Legion ?), I consider the Hellbore to be now strictly inferior. The HAG is a very very good general purpose gun now, also good against frigates/destroyers shields (and outstanding against hull) while the Hellbore is only good at destroying armor and against large targets (and the HAG is still very competitive at this job too).

[prav]

Wasn't the whole point of the hephag buff to make it a reasonable alternative to hellbores?

[Hatter]

If you had to buff Hellbore change it to mag-based, 4 ammo 750 burst 250 constant DPS. Essentially give it the storm needler treatment.

[Amoebka]

Wasn't the whole point of the hephag buff to make it a reasonable alternative to hellbores?

Yes, but now that HAG is buffed, we need hellbore to be buffed to keep it good too. And then after that, HAG would be worse than hellbore again, so we would ask for another HAG buff, and then...

[Selfcontrol]

Wasn't the whole point of the hephag buff to make it a reasonable alternative to hellbores?

Yes, but now that HAG is buffed, we need hellbore to be buffed to keep it good too. And then after that, HAG would be worse than hellbore again, so we would ask for another HAG buff, and then...

The HAG is now good. 2 patches ago, it wasn't (well, it was already good during 0.96 imo). It deserved to be buffed.

However, the Hellbore is now completely outshined by the HAG. It deserves a buff and BigBrainEnergy suggestion is sensible. Giving it increased damages against hull would not make the HAG bad : both weapons would keep their identity intact. The Hellbore would still be a terrible weapon against anything but large ships and it would still have less DPS against hull compared to the HAG. But at least, it would not be the "eeeeeeeeh" weapon it is currently.

[Thaago]

No thanks, Hellbore is still very good. Even as someone who's also thought that HAG has been good for several versions, they are just different weapons with different jobs. 1) Anti armor hole puncher for very cheap (flux and OP). 2) Anti hull/smaller ship chewer with decent anti-armor as well, for moderate OP and lots of flux.

Compare for a moment the heavy mauler (a good weapon) at 12 OP to the Hellbore at 16 OP. The hellbore crushes the heavy mauler on every metric but its big obvious downsides of shot speed and accuracy (and 100 base range); both things that there are tools to deal with. It uses a large slot, but comparing for example 2 heavy maulers for 24 to a single hellbore, the hellbore still wins, handily, at both DPS and effective efficiency, and saves 8 OP.

The ships built around the weapons will be different: HAGs use 440 vs 250 flux, so there will be less supporting weapons. Hellbores are low DPS for their slot type, so needs other guns to fill that gap, but its also low flux/OP for the slot, so those other weapons have plenty of power to fire. On something with multiple L slots, they even work well together.

[Wyvern]

We just got the HAG buffed to the point where it's competitive with the Hellbore outside of niche situations like single-sided Conquests. We don't need to follow that with power-creeping the Hellbore up.

If you really feel the balance is completely out of line between the two guns, then you should be calling for nerfs to the HAG.

(I, by contrast, feel that the balance is still largely in favor of the Hellbore. But it's not as one-sided a comparison as it used to be.)

[Draba]

Compare for a moment the heavy mauler (a good weapon) at 12 OP to the Hellbore at 16 OP. The hellbore crushes the heavy mauler on every metric but its big obvious downsides of shot speed and accuracy (and 100 base range); both things that there are tools to deal with.

And the slooow turn rate but yep, the raw stats are very good on it.
I think it's not very practical  because there aren't many ships with L ballistics that don't rely on them as main weapons.
Onslaught might want a hole puncher for TPCs and maybe thumpers, but it also wants the wide arc mid L to do lots of heavy lifting where DPS and high speed are big selling points.

We don't need to follow that with power-creeping the Hellbore up.
...
(I, by contrast, feel that the balance is still largely in favor of the Hellbore. But it's not as one-sided a comparison as it used to be.)

Generally like the Heph more but yeah, L ballistics all feel pretty strong.
If anything most ballistics are generally on the stronger side, with small mount HE being the only real hole.

[eert5rty7u8i9i7u6yrewqdef]

I've always disliked HB, and always used the HAG, even as far back as 0.9.1. The reasons for this have not changed since then.
The HB's job is anti-armor. There are plenty of weapons that fill the role of anti-hull. That being said it will pretty much never do its job until the enemy is overloaded, at which point it will already be functionally dead and out of armor making the HB worthless.

It suffers from the same issue as the Tachyon Lance does in the fact that the enemy will just shield flick vs it. However, the TL pierces shields at high flux, and does enough soft flux to force the enemy to shield drop near overload.

Furthermore, the HB shots get eaten by shielded fighters, Broadswords, Warthogs, and maybe Sarissa. Not to mention random frigates that get in the middle of capital fights. It cannot afford to lose shots to fighters, it doesn't have the DPS unlike HAG.

So, it needs two buffs to be reliable. One that helps convince the enemy to drop its shields at high flux so the HB can actually do its job, and one that allows the shot to just kill fighters like the plasma cannon.
Maybe have it deal energy damage to shields based on current hard flux levels of the enemy craft? So, at 75% it's dealing full damage i.e. 750 damage per shot and 250 DPS to the enemy's shields. Then you throw in the typical weapons to convince the AI to keep its shields raised, annihilators, HAG, unironically mortars, support ion weaponry, etc.
With such a buff and the right build, a HB shot should make it to the enemy's armor before they can retreat and vent.

[Goumindong]

In addition to “actually the Hellbore is very good already” it’s worth noting that there is and should be space in the game for “second best weapons”. It is OK for a weapon to be “worse” if it also is cheaper in OP or much easier to find.

On this forum we end up talking a lot about “optimal” and “but is it good Vs ordo” or whatever but most of the game is fooling around with a ragtag group of officers of varying quality and skills. With an uncertain set of ships that came to you because you salvaged a good one or got lucky on a contract order that just happened to have your dream ship.

The game needs these weapons. Both for the player to system mastery away from as they understand and also for to fight against.

[ErKeL]

The hellbore is flux efficient, dirt cheap and incredibly damaging against armour. Its only weakness is against end-game enemies with shields strong enough to absorb it.
Against most enemies even with shields it's actually quite effective.

[TaLaR]

Hellbore is definitely easier to block for player, but AI doesn't flicker shield with that much precision. As long as you fire somewhat mixed HE + kinetics, Hellbore will do fine vs AI.