This week’s update is going to focus almost primarily on some more class rebalance updates. These updates mainly pertain to missiles.
Missiles in their current state are kind of a pain to use — this is why we’re changing quite a few things about them with the rebalance. As I’ve detailed in another post; when I made the initial changes to missiles I added a few new features. I’m going to mention these a lot without explaining them again, so If you get confused, reread that post!
First, missiles will be separated into two categories; damage and debuff. Debuff missiles will be any missile that does a detrimental effect to the target; for example, a Disintegrator Missile or a Vortex Torpedo. These will be single fire. Damage missiles will be a Gunner’s go to if they need extra firepower to take a target down; for example, Large Armor Piercing or Kinetic. These missiles will fire in salvos. We will also be adding two new types of damage missile that are the same difficulty to obtain as AP and Kinetic; these will be a new heat-damage Incendiary Missile and a surgical-damage Surgical Strike Missile. This should round out the arsenal of a Gunner very nicely.
The distinction is rather necessary since you won’t be able to spam missiles anymore. Missile Bays will have a 5 second delay between launch; that means Gunners will have to make a choice when they queue up. Do they debuff the target or do they load the launch tube with a devastating salvo? This leads into some big changes to missile launchers and fighter bays that took place this week.
Since we want a 5 second delay between missile launches due to salvos, we ran into a dilemma; Combination Launchers (or launchers that can launch both missiles and fighters). If we were to set a 5 second delay between launches on a combo launcher, it would be absolutely horrible for Fleet Commanders (imagine getting 12 fighters out at 5 seconds each). However, if we left the delay at around 1 second, Gunner missile damage output would be through the roof. To solve this issue we decided that we had to kill combination launchers entirely.
Combination Launchers can exist because Missile Launchers and Fighter Bays are the same item. They just have flags set to determine what they can launch. That meant to get rid of combination launchers we needed to separate Missile Launchers from Fighter Bays entirely. This is exactly what I’ve done. Missile Launchers and Fighter Bays can now be equipped independently (you can have one type of each equipped), and they each have their own fighter and missile slot pools.
Since we won’t have combination launchers anymore, any ship that had a combination launcher is being retrofitted to have two launchers, a missile launcher and a fighter bay. The size, weight, etc, on both launchers will add up to the size, weight, etc, of the previous combo launcher.
That’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update for you. Feel free to post comments, suggestions or questions in the forums!
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