Ethereal weapons go through to the target, no matter what is in between, like before. Healing weapons are ethereal, therefore not effected by this change. The charge up times are not effected. PVP Restrictions have been considered.

What do you mean, chargeup times will not be effected?

Here are a few random exploits I thought of, anyway:

Making a stealthy ship, following a zerker around that you are at war with and sitting on top of him while he uses torps/thoraxes, they will disappear as soon as they fire and the zerker will be useless.

Easily pwning seers/snipers, just start spamming excomms or another wep that covers a lot of area.

Pwning FCs even more easily, you can fire a few times and wipe out over a dozen fighters if they use cap ships, or simply kill multiple slaves at once if they do not.

Planting a resist-augged unforge and having an entire squad sit on the other side, you would be invincable to all non-heat bosses.

Radar 20, no radar required, just shoot randomly in The Dark. Eventually you will kill the AI.

Rendering high damage, high-RoF weps useless, just sit on top of a dread or something big, the sniper/seer will not be able to hit you.

Facing AI with missiles, you can shoot down an entire volley of them at once.

Getting around the one type of pest control rule by having one person take hits from a certian type, another person from another type.


And, of course, by combining a few, you get total invincability. Since your shots can only hit enemy targets, all you have to do is have your squad sit on top of a resist-augged unforge, or dread if you want. The people in the squad can fire without any problems, since the guy in the unforge/dread is a friend, but the AI can't do jack shit about it. Unforge/dread tanks whatever small amount of damage gets past it's resists, with a decent regen shield or a monkey healing him. Entire squad can concentrate on raw DPS, quickly annihilating whatever they are fighting.

Want more? I am sure there are far more than those, just ask and I will think of some others. Now can you PLEASE reconsider this idiotic change? Besides all the above exploits, you completely screw DMs and FCs over, since having aggro doesn't mean anything after this.

find the thread about this, read it, then post your concerns in there. Most of those things are answered in there.

Meh, gonna post some more out of boredom.

Making an armada of shield-augged helga+ slaves, giving them a high-bank shield and defensive combat bot, would be far worse than pest drones. They tank for a while, absorbing many of the shots headed towards you with sheer numbers. When they die, you heal them, or simply dock and un-dock them to restore full shields. You wouldn't need to buy a very good type of GG, so after making them costs would be minimal.

Hell, you could use pest drones again, they would absorb enough damage to be well worth the space needed.

Same as the first one, only make slaves regen-augged, with a biowall or something. They get shot once or twice, die, heal in a few seconds, you revive them and let them do it again.

Not sure about this one, but if bullets can hit STASISED ships, that opens a whole new realm of brokenness, you can use the abovementioned slaves and not even revive them, just let them die and soak up the damage. Same with the dreadnought I mentioned in the last post.

Panthers become much easier, they have such low shields that you can use a zerker spamming in princess level to pwn any spawns that appear, as well as hurting cess.

Corrupted Guardian becomes impossible, since his fast-spawning swarm of Clops will take most of the hits.

Most non-UZ bosses become much easier, since if you have a cap ship with you there is almost no chance of you dying while OBAing out, as long as you stay close to him.

Healing AI will be easy, just use a non-eth wep like a rhino restruct, mark the AI as an enemy and start shooting w/e you want while sitting on the AI.

The only way I can hit AI with missiles is if I time it correctly so that the AI flies over me as the missile launches.
If the missile has time to move out from under my protection it gets blown up by the enemies bullets. Congratulations for making missiles more useless than they already were.

If missiles are too hard to use now, then we can increase their shields and/or increase their damage so that even though they're hard to use, it would be worth it if you manage to use them correctly.

Why not just make missles immune to damage unless its splash damage or its directly targeted?

Have to agree with yugi.

PvB becomes a bit of a joke. Place a patsy dreadnought, suitably augged, or any high resist ship, in front of you killer squad, hide behind it and engage the base with impunity.

I hope you have made it so that ships in stasis dont get hit by random bullets...

i prefer the idea of making them invulnerable to this wild firing strategy. make it so shit cant hit them unless targeting them...i see no way to make them viable and not broken otherwise. the factorys do cost a bit to make and leaving them useless or improving stats that are meaningless if the missile cant survive to its target does nothing but waste your time and mine.

Do I really need to post MORE exploits? Obviously, this idiotic idea is going to be nothing but trouble, and will require another entire rebalance after people figure out all the different strategies to become OP using this. For everyone's sake, can't we just forget about it and move on? It serves no real purpose, is not needed, and totally changes one of the major features of gameplay.

The flip side to missiles now is that they completely block one shot, no matter how much damage it does or who it's aimed at... Jacks can be blocked by a cheap low tech missile... MF'ers can be partially or completely shutdown. Want to avoid those mag or pulse shots from a base? Spam missles at it. Cheaper than envelopers AND you don't ahve to use an ethereal weapon since your missiles won't block/be hit by your shots. And since base lasers are impossible to get to a base, they won't be used much, so the "ethereal solution" isn't viable.

And making them do more damage and/or giving them more shields does not fix the problem, but causes MORE problems. Now you have something that's only useful in certain situations, and will likely be OP in those situations, but still in general pointless and wasteful.

Fighters will have the same problems. And you can't possibly carry enough fighters to do even a _short_ dg. At least missiles are small... and you can cart crates of them around.

And yes, if you make missiles and fighters immune, then droners are going to want the same thing for their drones...

Mind you, I'm not against this new change... I think it's interesting, and will simply mean different tactics will evolve. But there are some extreme holes around the edges, and some serious "exploits" coming cause of this.

[quote="Jester_Motley"]The flip side to missiles now is that they completely block one shot, no matter how much damage it does or who it's aimed at... Jacks can be blocked by a cheap low tech missile... MF'ers can be partially or completely shutdown. Want to avoid those mag or pulse shots from a base? Spam missles at it. Cheaper than envelopers quote]

So, the bright side is that now a gunner's best source of dps and the thing that makes them unique is at least handy as an enelopement that is about 1/20th the size of a normal envelopement? C'mon. . .

might i add that tech 0 envelopments will stop shots too? and only cost 1,000 credits as opposed to my large missiles costing ~20k each?

tbh i see our weapons being pretty much ineffective or nullified as being a serious problem.. no other class can loose its dps due to this kind of thing, it still does damage just possibly not to the intended target...

I think the best solution is to make them have to be targetted, like before. Makes sense cause they are so small a random shot should not hit them. Jeff thinks otherwise, however.