I think this is less about shieldless ships (rotating facings does help a little) than it is about the completely OP missiles. Granted, ships should have *some* durability, at least to non-warhead weapons, when shields go down, but remove missiles and the game would feel a lot more balanced just from that. I'm certainly not suggesting that be done, but missiles need serious re-balancing, if not rethinking altogether.
Part of the problem is the reacquisition mechanism. You can dodge missiles all day long, but they
will swing back and hit if you don't CM successfully. That needs to be axed. Additionally, missiles could be made a little slower and/or more sensitive to player velocity at launch.
Another option might be to change the behavior of shield facings and interaction between shields and missiles. For instance, if a missile was typically merely strong enough to knock out a decently healthy shield facing with no hull damage, but after a short delay (maybe .5-1s?) the shields reconfigured to fill any hole that came about by sucking power from the other facings, that would make ships seem a lot more durable, but not make them invincible to concentrated fire on a single facing, because that delay would still mean a fair amount of damaging weapons fire could bleed through during that period if, say, they were being sprayed by a Mantis or an M4A, but it would be a more easily regulated game mechanic at that point. Consecutive missile strikes would at that point not be a god-weapon insta-kill, because shields would constantly shift power to cover the depleted facing, so each missle, alone, would only have the effect of draining the overall shield grid, unless two were fired in
very quick succession (say, from two players at once).
I'm not saying any particular fix should necessarily be implemented, but fundamental game mechanics need to be rethought some, I think, and that's probably what I'd do, were I them. Ships have lots of durability; it just gets poorly distributed
Edited by Catamount, 16 June 2014 - 04:50 AM.
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ShinVector, on 09 June 2014 - 07:59 PM, said:
