PVP would be more enjoyable and interesting if critical hits damaged an opponent for 1-3% of your ship's total player attack.

Example: When Bob, who has 100k player attack, lands a critical hit on Jane, she takes an additional 1,000-3,000 damage regardless of her defense or damage cap. If Jane's ship scores a critical hit against Bob while he is attacking her, the same thing occurs.

Simple to implement, would make combat go slightly faster without being overpowered (high-arti SSBs and Strong Older Ships would be only marginally less indestructible while online), and place an increased combat value on both scan (attack) and cloak (defense).

legions such as eots would simply annihilate ssbs like this... -1

SSB is a plague, new formula is the cure!
+1

+ 1/2
critical hits should ignore damage cap

+1 there needs to be a solution to the unfair advantage of the SSB. This seems like a reasonable measure.

A low-rank SSB with high artifact production and 50k unbuffed hull would definitely go down a lot faster if offline to a ship with extremely high player attack.

But if you're actively spamming/repairing/caging, you'd have to suffer several unlucky crits to ships with 150k+ player attack to die. It could happen, of course (and with enough determined players, it will eventually), but you'd still be pretty tough.

Once you are defending with over 100k unbuffed hull and low cap, though, you're gonna have to be extremely unlucky or up against a lot of players to die. And at a certain point, cap won't matter that much if you're defending, so not a huge difference while online than it is now. And really, you should die if 10+ extremely strong players are hitting your ship at once, shouldn't you?

I agree with this concept

I agree that scan and cloak should be part of a critical hit formula that ignores damage cap.

The 1-3% of attack is also a nice twist, instead of being based upon the target's hull. I would almost go so far as to say it needs to be higher, but possibly I am getting eager for this change to be implemented.

I do disagree that "SSB's are a plague that needs to be balanced" etc, as all SSB's do is hit the invincible point earlier than a full sized ship (at the cost of a lot of other things), and thus it is a PVP error, not a SSB error. That is probably beside the point though.

I think it is a good, well-balanced suggestion.
1-3% sounds just about perfect to prevent it being OP

Thank you for the thoughtful response.

I also agree about SSBs. While I do think that ship-to-ship combat is unbalanced in favor of lower decks, due to non-scan/cloak and percentage modules becoming irrelevant over time, I don't blame them at all for using the system to their advantage. That's just smart play. Instead of punishing them, I have always thought that the best remedy would be a perk that provides an incentive (other than laziness) for people to be something other than SSB/MSB build.

Regarding 1-3%, I was using Thunderbolta's damage calculator, taking everything from 1-3% to 3-5% into account, and any time I went with a top number of 4% or higher, it started to seem a bit OP. Personally, I'd probably enjoy the challenge, but since my goal wasn't to make it impossible for non-superelite/SSB players to defend online against multiple determined players, I went with the more conservative 1-3%.

+1 Would add more interesting approach to combat and help alleviate the concrete ceilings in place. To never be able to exceed a certain # on damage is really a fantasy sports stat. Like saying in real life you could never karate chop that board for more than 1/100 of its strength no matter how perfectly you hit or how much force applied. I'm with Pongo and Diego that this seems neither OP, nor does it totally nerf people who have made choices (based on stat calcs) to play a certain way.

Personally i'd love to see higher cloak give some odds of greatly reducing or 'dodging' hits as well as greater scan increasing odds to CRIT someone. Scan always has the value to help with planet searches and with locating targets on BT, lets give cloak it's due. But thats an ancillary topic to the thread.

-1
doesnt solve the problem - it just moves the advantages from SSB ships to players with extreamly high artifact production and 200K+ TO's on ship

the 'real problem' with ssbs is that all ships are starting to become overpowered. if ssbs were able to be taken out in 30 hits rather than 10 then it would be less of a big deal to people than 300 hits rather than 100. with this said my sollution would be:]

Systems crack: (upon successfull hack) Forces enemy ship systems to reboot, during the 120 seconds for them to reboot damage cap will be increased 200% as compensators restart.
(2 minuets, damage cap +200%)
10% proc rate increased by hacking % boosts
Cannot be caged. Only able to proc when scan and cloak are more than 4x that of an opponenet


Both ssb's and lsbs would be made killable in much fewer hits if you proc this effect. it also gives the advantage slightly to the lsbs more because their scanners and cloak are higher and if I was say defending a planet constantly caging then getting the flares and clouders on would be more difficult than needing none.

Sorry Peticks, I disagree.

While I like that you have a unique idea - the thought of messing up their computers to stop them dodging is fantastic (Work with that!) - you literally have only doubled the damage cap against a very small portion of the galaxy.


Basically - it has a small chance of halving the invincible ship problem under specific circumstances. The problem with Halving the problem is that it only makes it a temporary solution, until those same ships double their stats. That is about... 1 year at our current rate of growth. And if I am brutally honest, halving both seems like incredible overkill (one move to half my effective health!) and not enough (A single mechanic to solve the entire pvp problem that only works if you debuff the heck out their scan and cloak, or if they literally have no scan OR cloak installed)

The reason I like the original idea better is because it scales from the attackers side (Your strong ship has a scaling advantage against weak ships, instead of the weak ship having a fixed immortality level. It requires scan/cloak to proc, and attack to be useful). Your idea scales from the defenders side (The enemy ship has the same fixed immortality level, just occasionally, temporarily halved, and requires scan/cloak only)

+1 for one step of many needed in the right direction regarding the broken damage cap system..

I don't agree or disagree with having SSBs, but what doesn't make sense is if a small ship goes up against a large "capital" ship, how is it going to take a "direct" hit and barely take damage while dealing massive damage to a much larger ship. It's like a X-Wing firing one shot at a Death Star, and unless by some wicked chance it hits a port exhaust, it blasts through the shields and a chunk of armor into space.
So at some point the system does need to be balanced, maybe take away deck based damage and make it simply attack vs defense no matter the build.

This suggestions is aimed directly at benefitting high attack power ships against all other ships. For the majority of ships in the galaxy this would cause a critical hit to do LESS damage than a standard hit.

Instead switch the critical hit to something like 2-3% of the targets total hull. Against an SSB the effect would likely play out to be just as useful, and against an LSB it would be similarly useful.

For anyone less than 100k attack the results of a 1-3% direct attack application would likely be fairly useless.

For example in mid rank PvP(rank 400-600 range let's say) if a player had 20k attack this would mean a critical would be between 200 and 600 damage. This is less than the average hit that ship is likely to inflict on a majority of ships on their battle tab.

Well.. it really makes sense that people with higher attack do more damage on critical hits. And more sense that people with high scan get more of them. You can focus on lots of critical hits with high scan, focus on big damage hits, or if you are a massively powerful ship, both.

I do not understand the issue here?

As to converting it to a % of the targets hull, please see my previous comment to Petricks. I have been forever converted - I too once thought like you, but having a critical system based on your strength instead of your enemies makes SO MUCH more sense.

I understand your comment about critical hits under this system possibly being weaker.. but keep in mind that right now they are so weak people literally thought they did not exist. Even in your example, 200-600 damage would be a visible 50% extra damage over a normal hit - a lot better than current ones.

+1 to golgotha comments...well thought out and explained clearly...

Not sure why people poo-poo this idea. It is not only reasonable in real life, but serves to provide a pretty decent start to balancing things in game. For those who don't like people with more power doing more damage, i'm not sure i follow your logic. Eventually any decent ship would be in that category, so you're only hurting yourself in the long run by not aligning behind that idea--unless your assume you will not be strong over time?

Not exactly, Serne.

I was careful in how I worded my original post:

No matter how low your attack, because the crit damage is "in addition" it's going to be higher than your regular attack, even if only by a tiny bit