4.7 = huge changes in armor, shields, radar and all ships combat

Serious rebalance with bigger, heavier, turreted ships getting many buffs. The Paladin is looking stellar with armor resilient to light weapons, twice the shielding, and enough power to use its S3 radar to get weapons assist at greater ranges. The weapon assist based upon radar size looks to be the biggest single change but we’ll know better once the stats come in.

Certainly, it’s going to be much harder for light fighters to attack Gunships, Corvettes and Frigates. Radar size matters for the first time in years, and seems to matter much more than it did when the steps were larger (0.5, 0.75, 1.0, 1.5). This looks to be the turret fix CIG has been looking for. My first impression is that with some balancing, this can work. Eventually, gone will be the days of light fighters kicking the crap out of Gunships.

So yeah, huge changes in all combat related issues.

One big change is the Strife ballistic cannons are back with a vengeance. For those unfamiliar, the big bolt throwers fire too seldom for most players and don’t do enough damage over time, meaning dps. However, they have gigantic alpha damage which means most of the damage is going through the armor. They are extremely fast to target and have a 5km range.

So a great killing machine might be take the remote quad S3 turrets off a pair of Shiv, load up Strife and put them on a Paladin. These are the fastest, farthest reaching fighter size guns and they only lose 1/5 their damage going through Perseus armor. They can shoot through anything and with 8 of them, targets will die very fast.

The Paladin has S3 radar and plenty of power for max assist at 5km. The Strife are going god tier, at least for a bit. Looks worth buying a pair of Shiv just for the remote quad turrets.

With Uber guns, Uber targeting, Uber armor, and Uber shields, the Paladin is coming into its own. Looks like both a fighter and a Perseus killer to me. Need to run some stats. . .but off the top of my head, the S8 weapons on the Perseus have a 5km range too. So Paladins and Perseus can dance at sniper range. Twin Perseus slugs hit for 9k, but they are very slow to target, 1km/s. That’s 5 seconds to max range where the Strife needs just 1 second. So with Strife it would be hard to miss. With the big S8 weapons it would be hard to hit. The Paladin strafes at 2.5 gees. Thats plenty to avoid getting hit despite the crappy rotation rates.

The Sledge III weapons are an even bigger deal. Although they have a speed of only 3,000, they have the same 5500 range as the Strife, but with an Alpha over 1,000. That means strikes through armor of almost 8,000 damage each, from a distance where they are mostly safe so long as they strafe hard.

I think the Paladin could become the Perseus killer. A pair of Paladin for sure.

The enduring problem with the Paladin is one turret automatically goes to anyone in a third seat, when ideally you want the pilot to keep both side turrets and the third seat to stay in missile mode. CIG hasn’t pulled that out of fubar yet. The temporary solution is shoot up all your missiles before you need engineering for damage control.

The Dominance laser scatterguns are all full of awesome on the Nox against unarmored targets. Against the Nova, Storm and Ballista I doubt they will do much. They are 62 damage/pellet and armor subtracts from that. I think he said the Perseus’ armor reduces 30 points, so to do any damage you need to do greater than that. About half will go through the Perseus and the Nova and Storm likely have even more, but probably 16 shots (twin guns on a Nox) would go through most armor and do significant damage to most targets. The problem with scatterguns is the terrible range, which doesn’t much matter in terrestrial combat.

Some of the deflection values seem unreasonable. In Erkul, the physical deflection value of the Perseus is 132. The Alpha of the Tarantulas is 137, so less than 4% would get through the armor. This means like it or not, to attack a big ship the Perseus, you need to use a sub 1km/s weapon like the Deadbolt.

The Terrapin has 97/52 armor, so fighter class weapons will only scratch it.

The Paladin has 92/49 armor so likewise, fast weapons only scratch it.

Looks like for fighters attacking cap ships, the Meta will be the Sledge III, and the Wolf and Alpha Wolf are completely useless.

Some of the deflection values seem unreasonable. In Erkul, the physical deflection value of the Perseus is 132. The Alpha of the Tarantulas is 137, so less than 4% would get through the armor. This means like it or not, to attack a big ship like the Perseus, you need to use a sub 1km/s weapon like the Deadbolt, or the 1km/s standard Attrition series lasers. It’s noteworthy the ballistic deflections are all much larger than energy.

The Terrapin has 97/52 armor, so fighter class weapons will only scratch it.

The Paladin has 92/49 armor so likewise, fast weapons only scratch it.

Looks like for fighters attacking cap ships, the Meta will be slow laser cannons like the M6A and the Sledge III, and the Wolves are essentially out of the game.

What’s a “Boom tube”? I have seen guys tractor Uber bombs out the back of what looked like an Avenger to one-shot the Idris. That what you mean?

The Sentinel seems to have picked up a big boost. Wearing 77/62 armor (77 ballistic, 62 energy) it is unusually resistant to energy weapons, and all repeaters. Furthermore, the meta for pip matching the S2 nose guns and the S5 chin gun has always been choose laser cannons. The Omni XV does less damage than the M7A but its pips align with the MVSAs. All of these weapons are effective against both fast flying fighters and heavily armored cap ships. There are weapons that are better at one or the other, but the Sentinel’s proprietary cannons came out better than most in this new stirring of the pot.

Finally, a lucky break for the Vanguard. The energy deflection is greater than I expected. Just when my heart was gravitating toward the Paladin. . .

And just to generalize in case people missed what I have been detailing: guns with greater damage per hit, which is the same as alpha damage in all but the scatterguns; guns with greater damage per hit shoot through deflection in the armor. Bigger ships have better armor so you need bigger bullets.

Since about 3.15? The Sledge and Strife weapons have been nerfed. They do too little dps because they fire so slowly. Now however, bigger bullets go through armor, and the ginormous S2 Strife slugs have come into their own. They have greater range and speed than any other weapon and hit with ferocity you might miss by reading the standard stats.

We certainly need an S3 Strife weapon, but the S2 is so good one can make an argument that it is worth trading down a full weapon level just to leverage Strife benefits.

I’ll say it again, a Paladin wearing 8 Strife may become the Uber-creation. That’s 4k damage per hit out to 5.5km, shooting at 5km/s, with bolts big enough to destroy internal components and generally wreck someone’s day. This is low DPS because they fire so slowly~1/4s. That’s with 8 guns all shooting a size below what they are capable of. That’s with two side turrets salvaged off a pair of Shivs. 8 new holes in your opponent every hit, that all penetrate deeply and kill components with a single strike.

And yeah, there are many other ships completely altered by the armor patch. The Tana is now the ultimate sniper, with enough strafe to avoid the big S8 guns on the Perseus, and range enough to kill outside the Perseus turret range. Tana gets goodies.

The Mirai Fury gets new position as an added turret for S3 and larger craft. Bear in mind, the Strife do 3 things: they hit through armor, they hit from greatest range and they hit at greatest speed, so can be used against any opponent. The Fury is about to become infuriating.

Notes too: the missile damages have all been nerfed again, lasers have been buffed and coolers are amid some sort of as-of-yet undefined stat change.

One of my own personal goals has long been to fly a Liberator as a group base of fighters for attacking cap ships, by adding beds for each wing of fighters through adding a Retaliator. CIG just killed the notion of Wolf as supreme deck fighter. So what’s to replace it? It has to be something that takes up less than half the space of a Hornet, that mounts guns that can kill a turret through its armor.

Until now, I have restricted the “deck fighter” options to those with Q drives, but now it seems I’m out of options. Maybe I need to fall back on the notion of bringing the Lib through any jump point and much closer to the battle, and carry Furies

Thanks for the correction. The guy in the vid was ambiguous and I took what he said wrongly.

You must be quite a shot shooting all Attritions.

I am always thinking how to kill components without killing the shields first. This new doubling of FR-86 power and humongous refresh is going to present real challenges for guys shooting down shields. They’re refreshing at 14,520. I’m guessing that’s about twice the damage the Hornet can do with all Attritions, so yeah. Gone may be the days of lone fighters killing gunboats.

I am a little pissed they nerfed missiles yet again. Almost no one uses them. They’re just a lot of money thrown away and now it is worse.