[UI] My personal ship and equipment balancing suggestions

To be honest, the past months have been bugging me. The balance of ships is slowly torn apart. Less useful ones became even more useless, and it's almost clear which ships are truly the meta ships. Meta is good, meta keeps games alive. But meta in Darkorbit rarely changes.

I wanted to take my time to write up a few of my personal thoughts on ships and equipment and think about what changes could be made to reflect their role better.

Ships

Spoiler: Ship balancing list

Disruptor
Disruptor is basically the crowd control based ship. It focuses heavily at keeping enemies at bay, rather than dishing out damage. While it's job is pretty useful, currently it does lack 2 significant upsides: Usability and sustain.

• "Redirect" will now bypass group and refraction. Currently, if you use the Disruptor in Refraction or if the opposing player is in a group with the other target, the fire will not be redirected. Only stopped.
  • Enemies can still stop firing when this ability is used, but their fire won't be stopped upon use.
• For every ability on cooldown, Disruptor should get 1.5% extra speed, up to a maximum of 4.5%. This would synergize well with it's lack of generator slots, but not make the ship straight up overpowered as abilities HAVE to be used in order to achieve this speed. The current max achievable speed without wheel on Disruptor is 544. With the 4,5% bonus, that would be 568.

Hecate
Hecate is a balanced ship. It provides decent survivability with damage output as well as a somewhat decent ability. There isn't much changes needed. The only problem is that it's heavily focused around PvP, and even there it doesn't really do the job as good.

• "Particle Beam" will now last for 7 seconds. The damage increase however is lowered from 6000 to 4000, creating a total damage of 176.400. (up from 138.300)
• Furthermore, Particle beam will now be able to be used on NPC for the convenience of being a multi-purpose ship.

Berserker
Being basically a bruiser at this point, Berserker is supposed to be a ship based around "The more you hurt me, the more I will hurt you" kind of theme. With this being said, this ship does have a singular, big issue. It's abilities can very easily be countered with the press of a singular button.

• Berserk should receive a protection against EMP. A singular EMP at the right moment can completely screw this ship up, quickly placing it on the very far bottom. As a compensation, HP link gear will be disabled for the duration of Berserk.
• Revenge should lock the target's fire to Berserker. To compensate massive damage outputs, Berserk's efficiency during this ability will lowered by 50%, and speed will be lowered by 15% instead.
• Furthermore, Berserker's shield link should disable automatically when HP fall below 20%, which would reflect one use of this ability. To protect your friend while enraging yourself safely.

Zephyr
Zephyr is... Well... a ship. I don't really even know what it's purpose is. Nonetheless, it was likely designed around PvE combat. So in order to give it just that, I have thought of adjustments for it's statistics.

• For every collected stack, Zephyr will now also gain a +0.5% increased NPC damage, which adds up to 10% on 20 stacks.
• Tripple barrage will now have a cooldown of 90 seconds (as opposed to 600 seconds), and be deployed on top of the enemy.

Diminisher
Diminisher is a shield destroyer. It however has been basically transformed into a shield battery thanks to it's 25% shield module. It's ability isn't useless, but I would like to add a singular thing to it.

• "Weaken shields" will decrease your own shield's efficiency by 30%, but decrease your enemy's shield efficiency by 50%. Furthermore, SAB-50 should receive 50% efficiency for the duration of this ability, creating a synergy.

Spearhead
The discoverer and spy among the group, spearhead heavily lacks that purpose exactly. Too long cooldowns, very little utility and overall extremely weak. It needs a change for that reason.

• New passive: If out of combat for at least 30 seconds, Spearhead will passively cloak (normal cloak).
• "Ultimate cloak" will have it's duration decreased from 30 to 10, but it's cooldown adjusted to 60 seconds. Furthermore, if ultimate cloak is used during passive stealth, duration is doubled (20 seconds)
• "JAMX" will have it's cooldown reduced to 120 seconds.
• "Target marker" will bypass EMP, leaving the target marked.
• "Recon" will now differentiate between player and NPC with a yellow border around the player on the minimap. Duration will be lowered to 10 seconds and cooldown remain unchanged. Same condition as ultimate cloak (double duration when used during passive stealth)
• +10% passive evasion
• Spearhead elite will retain it's bonuses

Cyborg
Cyborg is supposed to be a hard hitting ship. And it still is. But in my personal opinion, it's vastly outclassed by ships such as Sentinel, Solace, by now even Bastion, Saturn, Tartarus and Enforcer. For a ship of this immense cost, I find it only fair to fit the ship back into the balance.

• "Singularity II" will now apply a passive bonus on the ship, making the lasers deal 5% increased damage. Even if the target uses an EMP, the remaining duration of Singularity II will increase the laser damage by 5%.

Surgeon
Surgeon used to be a great ship. And admittedly it still is, but once again outclassed by most ships thanks to the modules. Even the Hecate has surpassed it in it's own way, making Surgeon a tad less useful.

• Surgeon will receive the ability "Injection", which will infect and cure the surgeon at will. This ability has a cooldown of 40 seconds, making it a less spamable ability.
• Furthermore, the Speed module that is currently exclusive to Solace, Sentinel, Goliath X and Hecate will be extended to Surgeon as well.

Equipment

Spectral Lancer III
Meant as the NPC equivalent of the LF3 laser, it was massively 'nerfed' when most lasers received their buffs, being only 5 damage over the LF3 laser for having a major disadvantage. I believe it should be adjusted to 200 damage in PvE, and 150 damage in PvP.

Scatter Laser III
It's a short-range laser type. It was made equally as useless as it's damage was way too low to make up it's disadvantage of reduced range. My personal suggestion is to adjust the damage of the Scatter laser to 170 damage, and 200 damage every 5 seconds, putting it's average DPS to 210, which would be 10 more damage than the LF4 laser for 25% reduced range.

MCB-25 ammo
By adding JOB-100 into the shop, the likelihood of people buying MCB-25 has been lowered to literally zero, as the yellow counterpart basically is the same but with added PvE bonus. MCB-25 should be made available for 1.000 credits per piece

Demon drone design
I know this drone design wasn't made to be useful. But 10% rocket damage and 10% rocket launch speed for a full set is really mediocre. My personal thought:

Per drone design:
+2% rocket damage (up to 20%)
+0.5% PvE damage (up to 5%)

Full set:
20% increased launch speed of missiles.

I really hope this does sound okay. If there are any improvement suggestions, feel free to let me know as long as they're reasoned.

Kind regards - Zecora

 

honestly i took the time to read all of this and was expecting to see alot of postive comments mod need to pass these ideas on even if some of the adjustment happen it will improve alot of shits or even made these idea into skins or something

 

First of all, thank you for pushing the thread up, and thank you for the positive comment.

Frankly, I expected the silence. To be honest, the more work you put into something, the more frustrating does it get if no one cares about it. I posted an idea here several months ago which I worked on and translated into English for 8 days straight, only to basically be greeted with very little attention.

I guess people just like the Solace meta?

 

Cyborg just needs a 2-3% speed ship upgrade module, and it's back in the game.. but you're absolutely right.. for how much it costs, and the fact that every single ship has pretty much been buffed to some degree except for Cyborg, is ridiculous. A lot of people have spent a lot of money on Cyborg designs too that can't even be used because flying a Cyborg against a Solace now, is pretty much lose/lose

 

Hello fren, this is a good thread. What is the topic on the other thread you were talking about? I'll read that too.

Premise: I know little to nothing about the new ships and ship modules. I would like to comment on the rest though.

I like the above.

EMP should always reset enemy's target. Also don't forget spearhead has JAMX (remind me: does it disable all mines or just ship abilities?)

I don't know about this. Either keep the double range or adjust to something like an enemy locator.

Cyborg - "Singularity II"
I think the added % damage is not necessary but I would remove the EMP interaction with the ability.
Instead adopt a similar approach used on Keres's spread ability:

• Inflicts damage overtime on a targeted ship, even more if the ship moves far away from you. (adjustment to the tot. DMG being made)

It the only ability interrupted by EMP to date if I'm not mistaken, aside from JAMX.

Code:

The EMP burst releases an electromagnetic pulse wave to temporarily short-circuit your enemies' onboard instruments and disable their targeting devices.

So we need to define which ability is considered a "targeting device" because we have other abilities that keep working after the pulse.

Spoiler: Keres - JAMX

(sauce: /wiki/Keres)
JAMX is the MVP of abilities, can even cure from plague. [Nerf]

^
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Surgeon
Well I proposed my own idea a few days ago, check that out if you want.

 

Apologies for not responding sooner. I'm not too often in the English forums.

My personal issue with EMP is that it counters effectively everything. It's straight up a blocker for literally everything you might encounter. I understand it's an expensive utility, which costs you 500 Uridium in total. On a different note though, an Insta shield does cost you at least 1.000 Uridium, and doesn't provide the same qualities, despite being effectively more expensive.

A lot of abilities suffer from EMP. Which honestly should change, since many ships are dependent on abilities. The reason why Solace is so strongly used is because it's ability cannot be countered by an EMP. It's more reliable, and an EMP doesn't reduce the ship's quality. A cyborg, Berserker, Disruptor, Diminisher and several others however are harmed by an EMP. A full list would also include Venom, Zephyr, Target mark, technically ultimate cloaking, drawfire and I believe a friendly EMP also disables healing and shield beam of Aegis.

So an EMP has a huge effect.