EMDS
Got nerfed already, still busted. Busted aspects are:
- 80 coverage per slot (and standard integrity) for an item you can acquire multiple of or weapon shield
- 22 range penetrating EM with moderate accuracy boost (unique identity that's unlikely to change?)
- Notably more EM damage than other weapons you are likely to have access to
If you compare it to Linked Autogun, you can see that that weapon while still good has some awkwardness to it that makes it less obvious to farm for it or jam it in your inventory. Linkies are below-average integrity/slot and don't strongly synergize with firing one weapon at a time, protecting your offense with shieldings thus becomes harder and you have reason to prefer other alternatives, like stacking Helicals/Multirails for integrity. Range is another reason to do that.
Is the combat too launcher-focused?
In the sense of launchers being necessary, no. You have real alternatives, e.g. gunsling can just miss into swarmers until it enters siege mode and picks off whatever remains. Launchers do happen to be extremely efficient, their matter costs feel sort-of balanced around bad-RNG scenarios where you launch 3-5 times to kill the whole group rather than efficient 1-3 launches then cleaning up with other weapons. Their alert gain doesn't seem significant with the methods there are to manage that, and I think early walls don't even boost alert much --- and they're good for sterilization so this is less of an outright issue nowadays. You do have good reasons not to go launcher-mad in R branches, unless you're explicitly playing for sterilization and discarding the alert management option.
Mni. Smartbomb seems like it has a damage-roll capable of sterilizing w/ launcher-loader, it's a bit weird that that launcher does everything you'd ever want an EX-launcher to do, assuming you fulfill the general criteria of having some matter utils. Maybe the 2 waypoints, range or the ceiling on its damage roll should go down, currently it feels like you can guide it to point-blank explode on just about anything from anywhere, and it kills very fast.
Launchers are seemingly maximum efficiency for high-sec arcs, Executioners and Strikers have nerfed penetration strats somewhat with opening up walls and more aggressive ARC dispatches likely to get you surrounded a bit, that's more effective at counterbalancing penetration than Programmers and Archangels are at counterbalancing launcher abuse: you can still corrupt through the Progs and you might engine-explode them into the next world, with Archangels you just shoot at the right spot to avoid interception. It's also notable that ARCs popping gives you good matter for launcher-abuse.
Being able to trigger multiple investigation squads from the same alarm trap array via AOE seems dodgy
Only happens with AoE EM, which is kinda busted in general and it's a flavorful & unique interaction.
Cmb linears need to be prototype (and possibly other/all cmb hovers)
The absolute highest-end cmb. hover that's better than antigravs which were already very good and common... yeah, I could see it being prototype. With the other ones it comes down to whether you want to incentivize players to e.g. go imprint and fab cmb. hover because they got a cmb. airjet in Mines, that seems fine as far as branch interactions/incentives go. Having some reason to potentially value hackware or Hubs on imprint is good.
Something about siege mode giving a substantial flat accuracy buff seems off to me, like it's too easy to obtain the full benefit without a build dedicated to it. Might prefer if it upped the acc % buff per tread slot.
Yeah, players are carrying 1x. siege tread on flight/hover these days to fight things like Intercepts. Having at least the accuracy boost scale from the amount of treads sieged would be nice. At the moment it's very powerful to the point of de-emphasizing targeting computers (with some exceptions), so redoing the numbers to nerf 2-prop treads and even slightly nerf 4-prop treads would be fine.
Don't let us find 2+ of hyp EM gauss / tachyon in lab... it really sucks
There aren't that many possible rolls for the L weapon combo, and getting even one PC is very, very good. PCs are currently strangely common*, they really shouldn't be even more common.
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