We’re clearly not.
You’re playing a game where you think there is no missed opportunity cost in firing all your missiles at a target they won’t hit instead of shooting them at someone they will.
Thrust me my missles hit. Or at least used to because now with improved flares and lock on times they got a chance again . Because the devs unlike you recognize the problem.
Considering I’ve shot down hundreds of missiles/torps and dodged hundreds more, yes we’re clearly playing a different game where yours always hit (bad players).
And I clearly never said there were no problems, just not the ones you described.
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That must be why devs are fixing the problem I described…
I want to say that I liked missiles before the patch a lot. Now, I cant hit small targets and dont do any damage to big targets :(.
Damage is the same.
But chaff buff+more chaff+more maneuverable INT = 20% hit chance from 40% that was before.
IMHO it should be only a number change on chaff and not a buff.
Maybe the damage is the same, but because 4 of 6 ships got a big health buff, missile damage was indirectly lowered a lot.
I don’t know the exact damage values but because you can not kill an interceptor with one or two missiles I would expect 100 damage per missile. So giving the destroyer 5000 extra health makes it 50 more missiles he can take. 100 for the cruiser.
For me this is a great change as well.
We didn’t buff the small ship’s hitpoints and you couldn’t do a lot of damage with missiles to capship before either, so there’s been no major change there.
Tt’s a weird weird to hear “you can not kill an interceptor with one or two missiles”. An inty definitely dies from a double missile hit, unless you meant from splash damage. Inties have 150 hitpoints and 125 shield points.
Missiles do 150 damage, torpedoes 3500 and mines 10000.
Missiles were never meant to be anti-capships. The health buff to capships allows them to tank one more torpedo or one more mine.
The main problem with missiles before is that they were easy to launch but required too much constant attention from the defender. This was okay in small dogfights, but made large battles extremely difficult and half the time you died from a random missile because your attention shifted for a second to something else. It was causing a lot of frustration.
In general, we want to stick to the formula: an easy-to-use ability should have an easy-to-use counter. Missiles / chaffs were a bit unbalanced previously.
4 Likes
Exactly this.
After some time with the new patch i came to realize that making somewhat easier to avoid missiles on 1vs1 is a necessary step, because in a battle you get multiple locks and Missiles from all over.
The changes give you some more seconds to think your strategy now.
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there’s also potential for a short range swarm mission version (instead of 12km, like 2km) that can be more directly dangerous in 1v1, because it doesnt have the mass-battlefield spam potential. Maybe a swarm missile launcher that has lower damage but better tracking, and is only “sees” chaff from a shorter range. Or can split the tracked targets, or only tracks chaff for a portion of the lifetime. lot of interesting options there, and potential for more annoying balance work 
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Yeah, the only problem with missile swarms is that they need to be individually tracked by the server, which means a lot of extra processing / bandwidth. But maybe if the cooldown was very high ( like a minute ) it’d be possible.
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I’ve had some time playing with the chaff buffs now so i can comment on how the balance changes feel more thoroughly.
Missiles often still come back around for a second pass especially when fired from close range. Chaffs are not lasting long enough to always kill the missiles with 100% reliability, but for missiles coming at you from afar you can fire the chaff much earlier and this leads to reliable missile defeats. If you don’t move far enough from the chaff the missile can still hit the chaff and kill you if you’re too close which is fine. If you move too far from the chaff during it’s lifetime it stops protecting you which is also fine. Chaffs do NOT act as a perfect shield, especially because of their limited spoof range if you fly like i do one chaff only really lasts the full 10s in the notes if you intentionally stay near it.
When i use missiles offensively the optimal-range dump strategy still works. This is very effective but also involved enough to pull off that it’s not just easy spam from 12km, and is fine, the reliance on absolute velocity for lining it up is weird but not a balance problem as long as missiles having such scaling is desired. I’ve gone full missle spam to see how many kills i can get, and im getting as many missile kills as gun kills though many are people i weakened with guns and who got caught by a missile while they ran. Im still getting hit by missiles too but if there’s a wall coming at me defeating it is wayyy more reliable to defeat and it feels like i actually need to make a mistake or run completely out of chaff to get smushed. Often, there was a third party i didnt notice or a missile came for a second run, or one instance of a missile detonating on a chaff i stayed too close to. People have started actually shooting me with guns instead of just every single one of my deaths being a missile.
I think the majority of complaints about missiles being “too weak” now are people who just made conclusions based on the patch notes like the guy who was saying he was now “immortal” thanks to chaff. There’s also going to be people who got used to basically getting free no-effort kills with missiles. There was someone on the steam forums insisting that missiles should be “the best weapon against fighters”. Idk, missiles still work fine.
Im not sure if this feedback format is more or less convenient than what we were doing before the EA, i can go back to posting per-patch feedback threads instead of splitting feedback into feature specific threads if it’s desired.
EDIT: also the thing where missiles drop behind people chasing you and tailpipe them is very true especially if a fight moves to near 2km/s, they are very effective at those high speeds against people chasing you.
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So far I think I can not remember to kill a full interceptor with just 2 missiles. I believe that when you hit a moving target, only a percentage of the full 150 damage is done to the target. It feels more like 100 or less damage and an interceptor has about 300 (including shield). At least thats what my experience is from shooting several hundred missiles so far.
Keep in mind… you have only 6!! missiles but a lot of chaffs to throw.
I find it more problematic that missiles are useless in 1v1, but overpowered otherwise.
In 1v2, you’re already at a disadvantage, but you become exponentially more disadvantaged with how much more effective missiles are when the target is focusing on multiple targets themself.
Missiles aren’t a force multiplier, they’re a force…exponent.
Missiles didn’t feel too strong in 1v1 to me at the beginning, not even close. I never died to them in a 1v1 before the nerf. But now they’re useless in 1v1, but still quite strong when they’re coming from multiple different angles.
I don’t know what a solution to this is, though. Perhaps making them stronger, but more limited? The reason they’re still strong in groups is because they get spammed and come from many different angles. So the problem is the quantity, not the quality.
Could also make missiles automatically act as chaff to other missiles, so their tracking is worse when there’s a lot of other missiles in the area.
They’re not hitting head on or something. Yes, I see that all the time.