I have serious doubts about damages by rockets. That they don't beat that one type of damages and have very big radius of explosion. At present rockets have one +, they shoot through obstacles, but very nearby and very poorly.
Thus the test is desirable for spending with t1-t4 the weapon separately. With completely developed abilities. And with approximately identical modules.
This test should lead to balancing of damages. Simply and effectively.

As question: how much it is necessary to put amplifiers of radar effectively to use ballistic missiles received for missions. At me they fly further than I can see the opponent.

Right now everyone who has used EWAR or has had it used against them knows a few simple universal things.

ECM isn't overly strong. Infact, I think that it is probably the most balanced EWAR atm, but I think it could do with a little boost to its success rate. It has high accumulator cost and a high cycle time, but right now it has way too low of odds of actually jamming another player.

Sensor  Suppressors aren't overly useful anymore either. Now that only 2 EWAR seems to effect a target you can't really reduce their locking range by enough to make it useful.

Both Sensor Suppressors and ECM can be effectivly countered with Sensor Amps. While I would guess almost every player in PvP who isn't trying some new experimental fitting has at least 1, if not 2 Sensor Amps soley because they're so damn useful. 10 sec lock time becomes 3 seconds? Yes please.

And then we have Energy Warfare. Which is rediculously over-powered. There is no effective counter to energy warfare besides using accumulator injectors, which requires low slots and limits your tanking ability and resists/speed, etc. You can counter Sensor Suppressors, and ECM with head slots using fittings you'd almost always be using anyways.

Even with 10 energy management, and 10 accumulator expansion, on a seth with over 5500 accumulator, an ictus was able to completly drain me in under 30 seconds, while doing so behind a god damn shield, and hiding behind terrain.

Drainers and Neuts have very good range, they shoot through anything, they have no effective counters, they can drain a seth in while under 30 seconds, while behind a shield, and the only partial chance you have at surviving against heavy energy warfare is sitting there waiting until hopefully a friend can show up and save you.

I have a few suggestions to solve these problems.

The first is simple. No EWAR with shields. If you can't shoot through them, you shouldn't be able to absorb energy through them either.

The second would be specific to Energy Warfare. Make them miss when they hit terrain. They don't have to break lock, or turn off, just do the same thing as turrents and make them miss for a single cycle. How the hell does a mech absorb energy from the dirt anyways?

I also suggest making a head slot fitting to help protect against energy warfare. Hell, even a better more specific leg slot to protect against it. Say like a Hardener style fitting that reduces energy drained by 30%. Just something to help lessen the blow a bit.

So to sum it up:

ECMs should jam targets about 15% more often.

Sensor Suppressors should reduce lock range  by about 10% more.

Energy Warfare should miss when it hits terrain, and fittings to protect against it should be introduced.

to sum this up, Missle slot can be Missle/Misc slot for more "Flexibilty" or something like that instead of it being a lonely missle slot

So as you know, Pelistal bots get a bonus to shields as their tanking bonus.  Despite the fact shields knock out offensive weapons, the cycle time on the shield is lower than the cycle time on the missiles.  This means in theory you can fire your missiles with spacebar and then immediately run the shield - when the shield deactivates, fire again and put the shield up.  Everything needs to be off autofire but thats not a huge deal TBH.

I would love to test this idea and the feasibility but the issue I'm running into is the fitting requirement.  I'll stick with the castel for this post cause its the one I've tried it for.

The castel has base 170 cpu and 125 reactor.  In order to fit 4 missiles, shield, armor, and a missile tuner you need 225 cpu and 175 reactor base (IIRC).  The main issue that makes this not work is the 45 TF 50 RP standard shield module.

You need extensive fitting skills (5-7 in both the base skill and the module skill) and use an autocannon to make it work, or you can drop the armor repair to reduce the EP requirement spent on fitting skills.  You can also drop the tuner and leave the head slot empty, but TBH if you do this than *nothing* can easily fit in the head.

Heres the thing though ...

1) There is a one to two second window where the shield is down, and you likely won't put the shield up *every* cycle in reality.  This means that you will take some armor damage.

2) Being unable to repair armor damage, especially for pve, really lowers the endurance of the robot and discourages not equipping a repair module.  It also increases downtime by requiring future repairs or paying a repair bill.

3) In order to make use of the shield bonus on the castel, a new player has to recognize the need for decent levels of fitting skills.  Now I realize that fitting skills are always a good choice, but a new player is *typically* going to shoot for minimum fitting requirements and try to ease into it rather than rush to focus on one skill.

4) By ignoring the shield, you ignore the race's tanking bonus where as Numquol and Thelodica bots easily make use of their armor related bonuses, requiring no additional EP to make use of.

5) In a pvp situation, your adversary will realize what you are doing and wait to shoot you when the shield is down for 1-2 seconds.  Thus the net result of your shield bonus will be to slow his dps down since the refire on turrets is shorter than the shield - in other words the shield bonus will do nothing.

It almost feels like the shield bonus is a house of cards - it precariously fits under a perfect situation and can be done, but one mistake either in preparation (skills) or technique (combat tactics) and it all comes tumbling down.

No other race has to jump through this many hoops to make use of their tanking bonus.

And before people say "don't fit armor then", 1 & 2 require it.  If people say "but in pvp ..." thelodica make use of their resist bonus by simply existing and leveraging a repair bonus is as easy as fitting a repair.  #5 illustrates a loophole that makes the actual bonus not worthwhile unless people insist on blasting through the shield.

Cost(for 1000 missiles):

Markedprises is assumed values based on current beta values

Ti: 240 x 38    = 9120
Iso: 864 x 50 = 42300
Phl: 144 x 300 = 43200
+ 4263

= 98883

With NPC price of 114000 it means you earn about 15k pr thousand missile.

Hardly seem worth the effort IMO.

Terrain Negotiation
The current system is just bad.  With the magically appearing and vanishing "cannot traverse this terrain" lines... it's extremely frustrating having to fight this especially since the delineation isn't nice smooth lines but seemingly random, jaggy, easy to get stuck on, et cetera.

Scrap the whole system and introduce a nice terrain negotiation model which could be tied to mech strength or future extensions something. The basic premise is that the stronger a mech is, or the more trained the pilot is, the faster they can move up and down slopes.

Allow the mechs to traverse all terrain but let the slopes influence the speed of travel.  You can even work this into mech balance by giving some mechs a lower top end speed but more torque (to ascend slopes with) while other mechs can speedy but are slowed down by slopes more noticeably.

Visual Scaling
I feel like I'm in a toy.  A very small toy, at that.  This is because the terrain detail needs a lot of work, both in more detailed poly counts and much higher resolution ground textures.  Also, there's a huge lack of "obviously scaled" objects.

What I mean by that is there is nothing laying around the game world that I can walk up to and easily assess the size of like a car or people sized building or something.

I also haven't seen any urban areas in-game yet but I've only really been at testing Perpetuum for the past couple of days.

Those are my two major "first impression" gripes though.

http://www.abload.de/img/perpetuum_0003n483.png

How hard is it to find another patch of HDT w/o using the assignments?

So... I decoded a Yagel. The components are worth about 120-130k based on components tab in its info, but now I put the CT into the factory and find out it requires about double that amount (probably due to skills and factory inefficiency). Also, the factory charges you over 100k per run, which comes up to about 360k in cost for a robot that sells for 400k which becomes pretty much zero profit after considering tax and the initial cost of the template and the fact that the template degrades, not to mention the time it takes. I understand that profit margins should get better with better factories and skills, but this seems a little harsh.

I would like to ask if this is meant to be balanced this way or not. If it is, how do others feel about this balance?

Thank you for your time.

In the last few days I've been on 7-8 mech kills and none of them dropped more than 3 mods, most of them only dropped 1-2. That averages out to about a 20% drop rate, which Zoom more or less confirmed as the current rate. I think that there should be a 30-40% for each mod to drop from a player kill. This will make pvp both more profitable for the winners and reduce some of the sense of loss for newer players since you can split up more loot for reimbursements. Besides that, players are generally harder to kill than npc's and they should drop a higher percentage of their fittings than npc's do.

Although people like myself/Jester/Gambit from Ecorp and I assume most of the guys from M2S/BKK/Myrm don't really need any loot to enjoy our pvp, it is still a nice bonus to get a decent amount of loot from your kills.

By contrast, the top tier HCL, Phisker 30PW HCL, has an optimum of 350 and falloff of 100 for a total of 450m.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems wrong to me that firearms should have greater range. 

But then, you might say, well, what about all my extensions and gear?  Let's do some math:

Assuming:

• advanced robotics 10 (50% falloff bonus for nuimqol)

• Improved Falloff 10 (30% falloff bonus)

• sharpshooting 10 (30% optimum range bonus)

• using max amount top tier optimum range boosters (60% optimum range bonus for mesmer, 75% bonus for seth)

Mesmer: (firearms)

• Optimum range: 260 + 30% + 60% = 494m

• Falloff = 210 + 50% + 30% = 378m

• Total: 872m

Seth: (HCL lasers)

• Optimum: 350 + 75% + 30% = 717.5m

• Falloff: 100m + 30% = 130m

• Total: 847.5m

Even with maxed extensions and all sorts of crazy gear, firearms still win out in total engagement range.  But here's the kicker: the thing that benefits the lasers most is range extenders, which reduce accumulator recharge time.  This is very bad for the HCL, which takes 35AP per shot for a total of 210AP per volley, but the ACs take just 1AP per shot, for a paltry 6AP per volley.  Lasers also fire every 6 seconds compared to firearms 8, meaning they use 4/3rds as much accu over time.  Take out the optimum range boosters, and the difference becomes even more exaggerated (716m vs 585m)

So, firearms have longer range and use less energy.  The damage is also comparable, but I'm too lazy to post all the math for that.

Point of discussion: does it really make sense that firearms should have better range, ridiculously low AP consumption, and do comparable damage to the longest range lasers?

Barring that however, a resource that is worthless in every way used as an example for training is a step backwards. This would be like the drones you can fight right out the gate dropping absolutely nothing. Sure you can do that, and in the end you may decide that is best, but at the same time, it sounds like it's not a good idea.

My point is this... make Soldigt or what ever it's called worth very little, like 1 NIC a piece (same with those damn data core things that you get outside of a mission). Why? Because other wise it's a waste of space. 1 NIc is also barely worth it, but atleast you can do something other than simply destroying it. Same with those data core dealies. Those things /can/ be turned in for the assignment, but since you seem to have to get 15 more any way, there's no true point in doing that other than to save you a trip.

If not this.. then just give new players one of two things. A harvester tool instead (With something useful as a charge for harvesting) or limited titan ore charges/scanners. Everything else you get for free has a purpose but the mining stuff and it's /all/ for the purpose of learning the game... thus i am not at all sure why mining was made useless and combat was made lucrative by comparison.