Lums are FUBAR (Very broken)

Was it a vanilla Illuminator or an upgraded one?

Does focus fire from multiple ships with Phase Missiles give a more favourable result for the Vas?

Ent 1.02

Its 1 unit vs 1 unit.

Lum was never upgraded in both test.

This has to be a bug. Frontal damage for lum should be around 8 only, with sides do 4 each. 50% frontal/ 25% each side.

Well, certainly not for TEC

There is something goofy going on.  Does the illum fire slower, but with more damage each shot?  I ask because the shield mitigation on the illum was always very high, usually 57% while the mitiation of the assail varied between 17%-26% the whole time.  That's why the assail lost.  I agree, an non-upgrade illum (weapons) should not beat a fully upgraded assail (weapons).

JJ, you should do a test with 3 LRMs and 2 illums.

I also suggest a test with 5 assails and 4 illums.  I say this because Vasari ships, while they might take up the same amout of fleet supply (they being assails and illums), take up for fleet supply than other races.  The assail would probably be a fleet supply of 5, but in the intrested of game balance, they are 6.  Just like how the Enforcer is 12 fleet but the Kodiak is 10.

Someone please verify my test first before I test other conditions

I am curious because I do not know exactly how shield mitigation works for this small a test.  Would one illum that does less damage frontally to one target raise shield mitigation all the way or does it take more than one illum focus firing to make shield mitigation max?  If it is because it does less damage and thus does not raise shield mitigation all the way then that may be the reason the illum won.  If one illum can't raise the mitigation to maximum in a meaningful time and 1 kanrak can then maybe this is why the illum won because it was more efficiently damaging.  If this is the case, it is the way shield mitigation functions and not the illuminator itself.  I don't know exactly the side beams firing arc but I would imagine it wouldnt be firing those with 1v1 head to head.  I haven't watched the replay myself.  I agree that a fully upgraded kanrak shouldnt be killed by an unupgraded illum 1v1.  I would try with maybe 3 or 4 of each at max range/minimizing side beams and to maximize shield mitigation on the kanrak as much as possible and see if that changes things.   How, if you watch a kanrak and an illum then you see the beams of illum go off every now and then but a steady stream of phase missles come from the kanrak. 

[_]-Greyfox

Someone verify the test first before I try other test

Grey, if the illuminator does more damage per shot, but has a slower rate of fire, this is a HUGE advantage because shield mitiagation works based on time being hit and time not being hit.  The more hits, the more mitigation.  So, it's not really a problem with mitigation, but rate of fire of certain ships.

Wow nice find JJ.

Now we can all say that Advent is definately not OPed.

Let'S be honest here. From day 1 of sins advent has been IC'S sweet heart.

well the illum is a pricey tech 3 ship vs. the assailant as a cheap tech 1 ship. also part of the problem was that the assailant's shield bypass upgrades had no real effect as there wasn't critical mass to destroy with shields.

I had 2 repair platforms with 2 missle bays and 20 assliants, I had a guy roll me by simply moving his illums constantly in a figure eight pattern around these guys, didnt even kill one illum since my assliants had to constantly turn around to fire while the Illums just blasted away with the sidebeams!

Fleets focus fire though so if it is a mitigation issue it is not that important in actual battles. Frigates don't go 1 on 1 even if you leave them to AI targeting. Interesting find though!

Looking into it for the next patch.

It is a huge advantage if you do every battle 1v1 ships.  With larger fleets it doesnt matter so much because they ARE going to hit mitigation cap pretty quickly no matter what ship you use.  It matters in this test because of the individual ship's firing scheme allows one ship to have low mitigation while the other one is higher.  Tell me how often you are going to fight 1 illum vs 1 kanrak or anything?  With a few other ships involved the firing scheme matters less because they hit the mitigation cap quickly enough for it not to matter.  If you want to jack up the fire rate and decrease the damage so that the dps stays the same, feel free because its only gonna matter with extremely small fleets.  And has been mentioned before, illums are a tier 3 research and kanraks a tier 1 research.  If its nerfed(again), it needs to be moved further down.

[_]-Greyfox

really if it was a real battle the assilents would also have upgraded armour.

As much as illums are better than all other lrfs i really think that they dont need a nerf. The problem is fighters dont counter them well enough anymore so the only counter is more lrfs  scouts, or going straight for HCs, which is expensive.

really what needs to be nerfed is repulsion. and carriers need to be buffed, then there wont be as much as a balance problem.

You cannot proove the illums overpowerness through a 1v1 test with Kanraks. Even though the kanrak and illum are both "LRF class" , they both serve their respected races in different ways.

You have to look at the big picture. Advent as a race isnt overpowered because Vasari have their own strengths to compensate for the kanrak.

Voice of reason.  A one on one scenario is hardly representative of a real battle.  In reality, the space egg is firing off another shot of nanos every 12 seconds, which is an assured kill of another illuminator.   If nanos takes a (much needed) nerf then we can talk about the assailant not stacking up to the illuminator, but as it is right now the Vasari have a considerable edge on Advent with that ability.

Honestly, one of the problems here may be that LRF are too important to everyone's overall strategy right now, so the faction with the strongest LRF has a decisive advantage in that sense.  How often do you see comparisons of each race's light frigate?

thanks blair

keep us posted with your results

Did anyone else duplicate the test yet?

Interestig test.  I always assumed the superiority was because some of the sidebeams were managing to fire forward by having the target barely be in their arc.  I've played enouch Illuminator vs Assailant fights to know how much more devastating the Illuminator is, but didn't know the exact mechanic.   Slower shot cycling would make sense, because the Illuminators and those sidebeams would, ON AVERAGE, be shooting lower mitigation targets more often, while Assailants using focus firing would be at high mitigation more often.  Over time, it could account for the disparity we see between the effectiveness of Illuminators and the effectiveness of the other races LRM's.

Since everyone is making replays and Blair is looking into it, someone shoot demonstrate the Illuminator figure 8 tactic against equal cost and cap supply of Assailants or LRM.  I have been telling people forever that Illums had a huge advantage with their "fire on the move" tactics.

It is an interesting comparison of utility.  I will say, each race has its own strengths.

The strongest Illuminator in the world was in 1.05, an it didn't bother me that it was so tough because Vasari had other methods to deal with them, namely Subverters.  (TEC was screwed, sorry)

In 1.1, people had stronger carriers with fighters to deal with any kind of LRM spam, and TEC got Marza to help even the score in some fights.  So Subverters were weak now, but the game seemed reasonably fair with any race having a chance to deal with Long Range frig spam.  Illums were nerfed 10% for damage output, but it didn't hurt them in their role.

Now in Entrenchment 1.02+ it is very easy to counter fighters.  Scouts can be used early game to counter Illuminators, but late game it is a pain and a half as the Advent starts getting their synergies added.

Just something to think about.

I'm throwing in my two cents.

There's something key here. The Assailant naturally kills quicker than an Illum one on one. What you're seeing imo is the effects of shield mitigation. The Assailant is undoutably doing more damage because ALL of it's damage is in the phase missile. The Illuminator is doing less damage because only roughly 60% of the damage is in the front beam, so the shield mitigation won't go up as fast, meaning less of the beam's damage is negated.

The phase missile's damage is negated because it does more damage than the beam which makes the mitigation climb like crazy. Since the higher rate of damage doesn't stop, the mitigation actually goes up to 57% negated.

So an unupgraded Assailant does 13 dps - 57% = 5.6 dps.

An Illum does roughly 10 dps with the front beam and only goes through 15-25% shield mitigation as mentioned by Howthe. That makes the Illum do on average 8 dps-ish.

If I recall the Illum has more health and shields than an Assailant?

I'm not surprised that the Illum won in both cases. 

Ok, for fully upped phase missiles, I think you're seeing the same thing. It makes sense that it would be closer, but the fact is Assailants are Tier One. The tradeoff with them is that you get them earlier in exchange for the worst STARTING long range frigate. I believe Assailants are the best LRF fully upgraded. If you don't, ask the Vasari player who can knock out ur level 10 cap and fully upped in health and armor Starbase with ease.

Also, it's worth noting that the Assailant is going to be the most frail LRF of the three b/c of the Tier one accessibility. The tradeoff is you get them early and can upgrade them as much as you like. Vasari Armor absolutely rocks (Get up to Tier 4 and you up by 4 armor, VERY POWERFUL)

The Illum still needs to be toned down a little BUT ONLY A LITTLE. I'd like to see them get a reduction to 1 Armor and say ballpark -50 points in health and shields. Make them frail so they can't stand alone. They do their job. They're fleet destroyers. They just need to be less beefy so the damn counters don't have as hard a time as they do now.

Scouts fend off Illums easily early. In late game, HC's do it well enough. Repulse can make things extremely unfair, but that's a different problem in it's own. (For the love of pete make Repulse cost more antimatter, like 15-25 aps. That's fair. 8 Guardians would still be able to abuse it, but not forever like people do now)

This is all reasonable and stuff that I could see working.  Guardians are a large part of the problem here, as was the Subverter nerf (not that Subverters didn't need some nerfing, they were godlike).  It is ok for a race to be unfairly strong in one area as long as there is some counter in another area which brings it all in line.

I have to agree with Amish. his suggestion about the slight reduction to HP and balancing for repulse should work.

really the devs should look at this, there are some great suggestions that could even out the late game gap between races.

remember people that the illum does have 3 beam cannons, the math works out if you do it.  this is not a broken feature,  it's just that the illum is a better LRM than the assailant