So I wanted to float this idea out and see what people thought. Being a Zolazin your cloak goes up 40%, defending against a critical attack. Explorer gives you 20% scan, increasing your chance of gaining a critical hit. I would assume then you would gain the upper hand by scoring more crits and taking less crits. Being lazy and allergic to math, I was hoping someone could crunch the numbers for me and tell me if this build is worth its salt in a PvP match where you had your scan and cloak maxed out. What would be the difference between this build and something like a Konqul or Aerlen build.

Without crunching any numbers... being Kongul will do you more good for PvP.

In my experience, Zolazins of any form are notoriously soft when it comes to PvP. Relying on the mythical "crit hit factor" is a bad choice. With a similar build, Konqul will do more damage, more consistently, making for faster kills. Aerlen, similarly, will defend better. With over 2200 PvP kills, I have yet to see this supposed crit hit that goes over damage cap. With no one actually knowing the math that determines the critical strike mentioned in the scan and cloak tooltips, I'd recommend just going with sheer firepower. This is part of why Zolazin NotSaboteurs are doing it wrong.

I couldnt find anything about critical attacks, but I assure you that critical attacks go well above someones damage cap. I know this because my attack is nearing 10k at rank 340 and I cap alot of the lower ranked people on my battle tab and I have all my scanners on. I guess what Im looking for is if anyone has info on how much more damage crit attacks (100% more? 50% more?) do and if it in a hypothetical situation like 100 attacks how much more or less damage a Zolazin Explorer would do against a consistent 20% a Konqul would provide. I know there are alot of numbers that go into the actual battle result but I was hoping someone could isolate critical attacks for me.

And I dont think you can say that Zolazins are inherently soft at PvP. Maybe people that dont PvP because they have weak ships end up becoming Zolazin to try to hide better but I have found softies of all races.

Darth didn't say "inherently" he said "notoriously". He means that zolazins have a bad reputation for being weak at pvp because there are so many weak zolazin ships out there.

Hm.. I'll finish the zolazin chain soon, and I'll be a zolazin spy . Anything is better than a sillixx explorer right? My ship's better than most at my rank and I have a Savage battle rep, soon to reach Insane.

... Sigh ...

Z-Spy is good for hacking.

What? I'll be rank freezing soon! I'm pretty sure 1k+ cloak should help.

Brute force is the way to go in this game. Cloak/Scan are not all that useful in combat. I've tried ALOT of layouts when I PvPed reguarly, and I have to say... 2:1 attack:def works well, with min scan/cloak. Whilst these "myth-crits" do seem to exist, it could also be just the randomisation playing tricks on us.

I'm not doing it for the crits, I'm doing it because I'm rank freezing and working on my hacking. With cloak I won't be attacked often.

Heh... Yeah ok...

Nope, just the bigs boys will find ya.

Just hit 5 random people on my bt with 3k scan I got 4 confirmed crit hits a 5th maybe ( on the upper side of what was possible or just lucky random)

this was out of like 80 attacks. Pretty common for me...

Ever notice how it's almost always newbies and low levels that rank freeze? Ever notice how virtually none of the most powerful people in the game have *ever* done this? Why does *anyone* think this is a good idea??

(And yes, I know, it makes you sooooo powerful and when you get to level 700 in ten years, that extra 50 attack you have is going to make us all cower or whatever.)

People can play the game however they feel like, and if they're having fun, fine, it just seems like this particularly bad strategy is getting bandied about a lot.

i was ranking 'normally' when i first started, and then i found the forum. with all the moaning from high ranks about the lack of content available for them, i figured why rush things. sure, i'm not as 'powerful' as some other players, but what do i care about them ?

i have my own goals, one of which will be achieved sometime this weekend (raids leaderboard). after that, i'll probably go black hat hunting, and then maybe get the kills for the DomIIIs that i have my eye on. what's the point of having all the 'goodies' of being a high-ranker with nothing to do with them ? there will be lots of gameplay for me, so i won't get bored. it's only a 'bad' strategy if i have to go toe-to-toe with someone like Toaster, and that won't happen anytime soon.

Ah but you have no end-goal only an ever turning cycle of more production = better ship = more npcing = more production etc.
With slow rankers it's just awesome to be able to utterly own anyone your level and above.

A. Then they b!tch and moan because there's no competition at their own rank.
B. They don't utterly own higher ranks because it takes them a full energy bar to get one kill while the higher rank can kill them repeatedly on just one bar. The higher ranks are going to have the extra energy to toss a couple nerfs that they have in abundance because of generally higher APH and a simple KrioTorp and completely negate any seeming advantage that slow rankers think they have. Conversely, the slow ranker won't have the excess energy to spend tossing nerfs.

Eh, I'm rank freezing for fun . Already have null cannons at 134. 65k research/day and arti that caps in 12 hours helps.

.... Sigh ...