Crap.
Now I have to decide, Sabre or Hornet MkII for my Non-Hawk Carrier Fighter.
Based on the MM Q&A the Sabre should be faster and more agile, where the Hornet should be tankier with more firepower
Should be, however; all the Hornets got a boost to lateral gees everyone expects to be nerfed. (
30.5 gees lateral is far too much for any ship in game. Should be 20.5. The Sabre is 21. These are cheater figures, probably designed to get players buying an old ship.). It turns like it’s on rails and the Sabre skids heavily through turns by comparison. If you swap out your Sabre for a Hornet, leave a way to swap back when they nerf the lateral acceleration. It really is OP for the Hornet to out turn less heavily armed and armored medium fighters, (and all the light fighters), and especially after taking the Sabre’s third shield, CIG is going to need a serious rebalance. The linear is too high as well, and I’m sure will be knocked back as it is about 25% higher than the 350R. Right now, the Ghost is considered the premium stealth fighter and CIG can’t leave that as is. Is just a buff that went wrong a couple patches back., though it is very hard to see this as a real “mistake”. It’s not. It’s meant to drive sales.
However since we’re on the subject, just a quick catch up on what CIG has been doing with stealth. Instead of using a 0.5 coefficient for S1 radar, 0.75 for S2, 1.0 for S3 and 1.5 for S4, CIG first knocked them all to 1.0 and is now trying different values.
So currently it appears S1 is 0.7 and S2 is 0.8. That is not enough difference and really the original values worked better. This looks like more wasted time pretending they’re working than actually working. Most annoying.
The Ghost’s armor is where she gets the -40% across the board cut in signature. That improvement should be possible with almost any ship that isn’t already sporting Void Armor or its equivalent, like the Sabre and Talon. So in a nutshell, until armor releases and we have a stealth update we can trust, it is a bad idea to get locked into any one particular fighter, if you have an interest in stealth. If the Arrow had the same -40% boost to signature as the Ghost, it would be the premium stealth fighter. If the Tracker had the same boost, it would be the premium long range stealth fighter. Etc. ad nausium. We have no idea where CIG is going to put the limits. If you can put void armor on a Buckee, that is a game changer.
Likewise, they’ve said they know missiles need another balancing pass and that they need to be better, but they haven’t said if that means harder hitting or harder to evade. Missiles don’t usually get counted in comparisons but having at least a single quad shot could easily become the new meta.
So, don’t trade anything you can’t untrade.