[UI] Missile rework - Concept idea

WARNING: All values given here are NOT final. Those are (so far) merely test values. Changes will be made, so don't go crazy over some values. Thank you in advance!

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After a bit of thinking, talking with people, doing surveys here and there, I've come to a conclusion: Missiles are not really as great as they used to be. This accounts for both hellstorm missiles and regular missiles. I thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that ships may even individually profit from missiles in general. As in, each of them profiting differently from missiles. So here is my so far work in progress idea.

FIRST OFF: Premium double missile speed will be removed. It will instead be added into the ships directly, due to otherwise quickly appearing pay to win issues.

Every ship will now have base missile damage values. For most of the ships, this base damage will sit at around 5.000 damage. That means any obligatory missile fired is based around that damage. Ships with higher/lower values will be listed, too, obviously. But that's not all! Rocket launchers will add another 1.500/3.000 damage respectively, upgrades on these rocket launchers will further amplify that.

Missiles will retain their standard firing speed, and their base range will now sit around 500, which is 100 lower than lasers, and have 80% base accuracy. That's about everything for the base damage explanation, now what do I mean with "missiles are based around that damage"? That means every missile now has a damage multiplication value, rather than fixed damage. That obviously doesn't apply for every missile, but it applies for standard missiles. Those being:

Missile type	Missile multiplication	Special
R-310 (standard)	100% damage	100% accuracy
PLT-2026 (armor piercing)	80% damage	+50% hull damage
PLT-2021 (long range)	75% damage	+25% range
PLT-3030 (heavy duty)	130% damage	-10% range, 60% accuracy
BDR-1211 (NPC type)	100% damage	175% damage vs NPC

Special missiles such as SR-5 retain their base value, as it will be hard to balance these powerful missiles properly (going for percent values would perhaps wreck havoc with the damage value, since it's already possible to deal 500k damage with a single SR-5 missile)

Now with this talked about, what ships will have different missile values? It's not a lot, really, but ships that I found could use better values will be listed here:

Ship Type	Ship missile damage
Tartarus	7.500 damage
Spearhead	6.000 damage
BigBoy	6.000 damage
Cyborg	6.000 damage
Citadel	5.500 damage
Leonov	5.000 damage, 8.000 damage on home maps
Mimesis	3.500 damage
Berserker	3.500 damage

Sounds solid, doesn't it? At least, I hope it does. Nonetheless, maxing out missile damage can bring values of up to 50k up, which would in this case however only apply for Citadel and Berserker. And that also only applies for utter maximization (accounting Chevron, full damage booster, Seprom)

The reason for Mimesis low damage is due to the fact it also has 2 rocket launcher slots, and an ability that immensely increases damage output. Keeping it on par with Citadel would cause huge balance issues.

This is for now all I can say about this. I will continue to work on this idea, but I require input from other players as well. So please leave plenty of feedback.

Kind regards ~ Zecora

 

So, perhaps laser damage should also be buffed/nerfed based on type of ship and/or type/number/level of laser on the ship? Might as well expand that to include shields and drone formations too, I guess, using the same thought process?

If you really want to make it "fair" let's make it all the same, regardless of ship, pilot bio points, seprom or prom on ship, the number of slots for lasers/shields on ship, whatever..., we can all just fly a pnut, regardless of what it looks like on screen. Sound good?

I don't think so, sorry.

anduril

 

I'm not entirely sure what conclusion I'm supposed to draw from this analogy. Since the mere concept and idea of this whole idea is to rework the missile balance that has been widely criticized already, and I even mentioned that I spoke with people here and there to confirm those thoughts.

We indirectly have that already though, it's called ship bonus. Some ships have extra damage, or more shields, which is an elevation from other ships with similar or same slot count. But even putting that aside, the initial idea of varying missile damage is because of diversity. That something like Tartarus has a higher missile damage in that idea is due to the fact it somewhat acts as a rocketeer ship. The reason why we don't have an actual missile-type ship might be because missiles are currently very inferior compared to lasers.

Of course, I'm free to equalize the missile damage across all the ships if more people agree to that. That would however still make the Citadel and Mimesis superior with missiles (and even more powerful than right now in the idea) due to the double rocket launcher.

I'm not entirely sure where you get this from. I noted nowhere that I want everything 100% the same, fair, equalized whatsoever. And even if, your proposal is everything but right. Diversity and a healthy imbalance imbued with counterplay is exactly that causes the perfect imbalance. Problem being, Darkorbit neither has the equalized balance, nor the perfect imbalance. Nor does it have counterplay. It has only meta so far. Point is, this idea was merely there to improve rockets after talking with a lot of people. I'm sorry if that idea has offended you, though.

 

lol, you guys do realise 90% of the players are cheats, running scripts, so whats the point of pvp?.

 

This looks so confusing and difficult to implement for the developers, so I'm going to give this idea a -1.

You should edit over your post and try again to make it simpler and easier to implement, rather than having a developer go over every ship to change it's base rocket damage.

 

Initially, you aren't wrong. Simple things serve better in terms of time investment into the coding. But you also see what missiles are like currently. And this is as simple as it can get.

The grand problem we have is that a lot of players think "Let's just triple the missile damage" - Basically, this is the most simple way of improving them. But instead of improving them, you would make them worse, too. Ships that already deal massive damage with missiles would be devastatingly powerful, low levels would mostly rely on missiles, enemies in the lower tiers would majorly become one-shots, you would break PvE even more and basically you will end up with just as many problems as we have them right now, if not more if looked at it in a grand perspective.

But of course, I can attempt to find a more simple way that equally affects scaling, but let me tell you making scaling simple is a task that many think to be easy. It is not.

On another note though, the next more simple step would be adding a missile launcher next to the rocket launcher that increases the missile damage as a bonus.

 

I dare you to stop whining and have your account removed