Mr. Mister wrote:Oohhhh... so chaff is an actual English word... yeah, that makes sense now. Me like.
Also, Sleepy, I was suggesting this in the sMPK thread, but let's hear your opinion: what would you think about reducing the Fire and Breach missile launchers' damage to 3? They would gain in two ways: They would have a shorter cooldown, and their signature characteristic would not get eclipsed by their damage (this goes specially for the Fire missile, which will have more opportunities to inflict 4 hull damage anyway with fire). Consider also reducing the burst cloak-missile launcher to 3 missiles per shot so it's in the same league as the other two, and the single-shot cloak-missile launcher to 2 damage (with a lower cooldown like everything else) so the cloak-mine has an edge in raw hull damage.
This will also have the secondary effect of reducing the amount of missiles with 4 hull damage to the normal one (should have about same cooldown as the special 3-damage collection), the Poseidon, the 4-shot one and the Titan, each one having their own advantages and disadvantages.. You'll have more freedom to play with cooldown times among only those 4.
Part of CEs philosophy is not to fiddle with vanilla stuff unless really necessary. A lot of CEs stuff is adjusted towards certain vanilla stuff being there (reload times of defence drones for example). If you want a rebalance of vanilla gear, than the rebalance mods are probably the right address for you. I'm currently considering doing Mark one versions of the breach and fire missiles, but CE got kind of swamped with missile launchers so I don't know if that’s really necessary.
IMO the amount of four damage missiles is cool. Long cooldowns paired with high damage is what characterizes the high tier missiles. Looking at vanilla, I think that is what they are supposed to be. Big, slow, scary missiles that make holes in your ship.
The Ifrit is kind of designed to be the pinnacle of missile tech, featuring reliable, hard to stop flat damage with a decent cooldown compared to other high tier launchers. The Oni already does two damage, leaving the Baal cloak mine launcher with a slight edge (three damage).
Related: I did work on some more defence drones lately. The Heavy MK I will provide a fairly low tier way to deal with swarms. Feels like most players fear these missiles more then they deserve, but never the less, another drone that can handle them might come in handy.
Apart from that the enemies have access to similar amounts of missile weapons of each damage tier like they would had with their vanilla list. Enemies that would have access to, lets say a breach missile, get access to new four damage missiles as well. But not all of them. Some factions get the high tier swarms, some the raw damage ones and so on...