Ok, I think everyone needs to calm down a bit here.

I posted a series of ideas on balance in another thread a few days ago, so i wont reiterate them here.
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/9582
AND i will agree that the prom is a bit too agile for its armor, but i looked at that in my post.

However, The main reason most pilots i know fly the AGT/FLARE prom is because it is the ONLY ship that has a real chance to take down an IBG or Orion Rev C centurion. If you reduce the prom, everyone will go back to flying those ships. And the valk is far less nerfed than it used to be, so some pilots would fly it.

Additionally since the AGT is really the only weapon that can be effectively mounted on the prom other than the rockets, thats what you get.
And even the AGT isn't uber effective against the centurions or valks, they can dodge faster than it can track. However it IS far MORE effective than the rest of the L-port weapons, none of which are worth even mounting other than swarms, and swarms are too easily evaded if the target knows you have them. (so after the first volley forget about them.)

I suggest that everyone take a deep breath and give the devs a chance to continue thier rebalance at thier own pace.. We PAYED for the game when the valk was the ubership from november through late-january. thats 2.75 months to the 1.75 that the prom has been "uber".

If you are truly that upset about paying for a product you consider broken, stop paying.. take a few months off and come back after some of the balance has been worked out. Vendetta is not a finished product, no matter how much we want it to be. I pay because i feel that the game has enough potential to justify dealing with its growing pains. :)

I think we should have a L port rail gun. Some thing like this could be mounted on a hog and poise a nice threat to the prom.

Heavy Rail Gun
Level: 7/0/9/0/0
Mass: 1200kg
Damage: 2500
25 Shots.

Add ing some think like this would mean a prom would need to have a light fighter cover him in a PvP situation which would add a nice new team work element.

I think that the problem is not the prom, I think the prom right now is just the way it should be. I think the problem is that there are no viable counters to the prom. The prom should have some thing that can beat it. true balance is achieved when every thing can come full circle. Like in rock paper scissors. One will beat the other that another can beat another which can beat the first one. As it is I can hop in a prom and beat almost any thing I want to. (but then I am not the best combat pilot) But what is there to use if I want to stop a prom? Other then another prom nothing. We should not all be forced to fly proms. In addition to our Heavy rail we should also make the valk un-nerfed. Make the valk some thing that can fight a prom and win every now and then. To counter this valk we should make the flaches good. These guns are mofos if you get them on a rev c and fight other fighters. They could vary well become uber fighter killers if they were done right. I think the flaches should be like this:

Flechette Cannon MkI
Damage: 250
Velocity: 190
Energy: 7/blast
Mass: 300kg
Level: -/5/-/-/-
Targeting: Good

Mk2
Damage: 280
Velocity: 200
Energy: 6/blast
Mass: 300kg
Level: 4/5/-/-/-
Targeting: Good

This would again mean that a prom would need a light fighter to keep it's back clean from the valks. (and to use the flaches) And then that the valk would either need to get a buddy in a valk or a prom to keep the little fighter busy. Again this would promote more team tactics.

Nerfs are great and all but if we nerf every thing we end up all flying busses. Lets not nerf lets counter.

Just my thoughts.

Spellcast, I disagree with the assertion that the only weps that can be run on a prom are AGT+flares.

It just so happens to be ABLE to run AGT+flares, which is what makes it deadly.

The thing flies beautifully with N3's, gausses, really anything that you could put on a light fighter. It just does require a bit of aiming.

I've heard people complain about the Spacing of the blasters, but frankly I haven't had a problem with it.

Matriarch is my secondary char, and I tend to fly N3's and jacks.

However, if you go from AGT to any one of these weapons, they feel terrible, because you don't have the same freedom to dodge and keep firing. Furthermore, I've found that overuse of AGT makes your aim with other weps very weak, it takes several fights to shake the rust off.

I also just got the Megaposi, what's wrong with that on a prom?

admittedly more Lport weapons are necessary, but lets refrain from creating a combo that plays itself.

Ah, okay. I do see your proposal, and do find your results interesting. Of course, now that both sides of the debate have trotted out their evidence, we could argue for hours without solving anything. I suggest instead that we look to other possible sources of problems.

I quote:
it also just occurred to me, that Incarnate mentioned that the balance testing for the new flares was in no small degree based on his battles with a1k0n.

While I greatly respect their opinions, I am a little disturbed that based on these battles the weapons were considered balanced.

Not insulting your ability guys, just wondering how much you've gotten to PvP against the player population recently..

This is a valid point. I think Player vs. Dev combat is far more important in determining balance than Dev vs. Dev combat.

well shape, there is nothing "wrong" with the megaposi, except when fighting a centurion.

My personal favorite prom layout is megaposi/rails with a heavy battery, and i do quite well against most ships in it. Unfortunately the cents are so agile and so small that you really cant hit them using that setup. I will reiterate what i said above.

""However, The main reason most pilots i know fly the AGT/FLARE prom is because it is the ONLY ship that has a real chance to take down an IBG or Orion Rev C centurion. If you reduce the prom, everyone will go back to flying those ships.""

Im gonna also highly reccomend that everyone read Spellcast's post in suggestions. I agree with almost all of it. A simple slight thrust reduction to the prom and increase in mass and thrust in the valk as well as decreasing the armor of the cent seems like it would make everything pretty close to balanced taking into account the other changes to hornet/rag/etc. Take a look at it!

I'll probably be laughed at for suggesting this...

Has anyone tried taking on a Prom in Rag Mk. III? It's not as nimble as the Prom, sure, but it can be outfitted with 2 AGTs. If you use something LIGHT, and only one of that something, in one of the 3 small slots, you do save some weight and pick up a bit more nimbleness.

why couldn't you use a centaur then?

I have killed SkyCommands with a Rag III.

Dual AGTs sucks up a lot of power in a short time. Whatever you use in your small ports had better be not only light, but energy efficient.

Flares?

I have killed proms in an all-rocket rag

EDIT: Lonestar has been using a triple-posi prom Spell, ask him.

I have killed spiders Sky Command in an Axia Wraith. :D

But you Axia Wraith is another thread entirely ;)

Hi. Ok, umm.. just read this all for the first time.

First of all, I'm trying to redo the weapons to make things more interesting. A lot of people have requested this. I imagine this will be a somewhat annoying balancing prospect just like the ships, but I hope you'll agree that it's a good idea.

Secondly, as far as me and Andy balancing things.. it's rather difficult for us to test this sort of stuff with players, so I just try to get a "ballpark" idea from testing with him. To give you an idea.. about 80% of the time *I* can't even get on our development server, I have to ask someone to build me a client or commit their stuff to CVS or whatever.. our development server is just torn apart constantly, which is a natural adjunct of.. well.. development! So it's pretty infeasable to get anyone else on there, and it's problematic for us to put new weapons on the production server (we can change existing weapons easily, adding new ones is more involved). So.. I try and get a ballpark idea of how things are, and then see how it works with you guys.

Yes, I have played and PvP'd recently, with players (incognito).. actually I've been playing a lot more lately. No, I have no intention of revealing my characters. Yes, I have rocket combat experience.

As far as the Prom goes, I've been continually tweaking the thing ever since we "de-nerfed" it. I think some people get frustrated because I'm unwilling to made sudden, massive sweeping changes (which then seems like I'm doing "nothing). I don't think those sorts of changes are in the best interest of finding game balance. So I fiddle with a little at a time, not too much, and see how it changes things. I expected this rocket change to be a pretty major one, but I guess I didn't expect this amount of umm.. frustration and angst.

The thing to add a distance-safety to rockets has been on Andy's list for a few weeks (and he has a lot of other stuff going on). Once this is in place, we'll be able to define behaviour per-weapon. Then I can experiment with using this on the sunflares, and maybe not using it on some lesser rockets like the iceflares or some such.. or even having variants that behave differently (an "illegal" black market rocket that has both high explosive power and the double-damage trigger, but has a 1 in 20 chance of just "blowing up in your face" on launch.. because it's poorly manufactured). Anyway.. a distance safety on rockets would probably end the Prom rocket-ramming issue, but would also remove the ability to suicide while taking out someone else.. something that used to be a viable and useful tactic in CTF (and could still be in a number of the nation-based conflicts that we're looking to add soon).

I'm leaning towards making the Prom more of a "heavy tank" type thing.. ie, reducing maneuverability even further, but compensating with increased armor. But I'm not sure about this, and, again, I dislike doing major drastic changes. I like to do things like.. drop in the distance-safety, and see how much that changes things. That way I don't completely screw up the dynamics of everything, because I've nerfed one thing to account for something else, while some other change has vastly altered the original basis for nerfing in the first place.

So, the best I can say is.. umm, try and relax a little? :). We're working on this, but I'm trying to do what I think is best for the game as a whole, and not for Just The Prom People, or Just The People Who Hate Proms, or whatever other group. I want to balance the game, and I agree it's unbalanced, but it's a little reactionary to just nerf the prom, when the problem really is "why is rocket ramming even possible, and what's the best way to get rid of it without removing valuable and real-world tactics (like suiciding on someone)".

Also note, I reduced the ammo of the top two rail guns in anticipation of making them more powerful per-shot. I'm approaching this cautiously, because rails can be pretty scary (as those of us who were in the alpha will remember). This is the same reason why I'm being cautious about the Hornet.. it needs work, but the quad-small thing can be utterly devestating (yes, it can't maneuver like a fighter, but as long as you can sneak up and kill them in one shot, who cares?), and I'm a little reluctant to fiddle with it until I know where the small weapons are really going to stand.

So anyway, that's where I'm coming from.. I get where you guys are coming from, and I'm trying to do something about it. I'm also trying to do all the Real Big And Important stuff, like where the game is actually *going*. We're all juggling the best we can, and all I can ask for is continued patience.

/me Gives Inc a medal of bravery for major balancing post production. Honestly it's quite an art to work towards balance with so many people getting personally attached to the process.

Everyone else: to make Inc's work easier (and faster which means you get balance faster) try to keep your comments/suggestions/etc as constructive as possible.

Comments about rockets and where they're headed:
The scary thing about rockets at the moment is not "ramming" per se but rather how effective they are at close range. If they are changed such that there is a safety which prevents them from doing damage to the shooter yet, still does any damage to a target 10-40m in front of the shooter flares will become drastically more powerful weapons, not weaker ones. To some degree this has already happened since the increased speed tends to insure the shooter is likely to be within the range from the rockets where the damage drops off very quickly, making the x2 effect very minimal. Just for the record I'm not suggesting or rejecting any changes just stating my observations of the game as it is, and the effects some changes could have.

Eldrad: See my comments about that in the "I've got new toys..." thread.

Incarnate: Thanks. I've honestly had troubles judging which impacted me the most, the lowering of the thrust of the prom, or the increase in the flares. Its hard to adapt to both a changed behaviour in your favourite ship, as well as a changed behaviour in your weapons, when the weapons are so drastically depending on the ships thrust as rockets are.

Must add, I wonder about the usefulness of starflares... changing 1 tube of sunflare to 2 tubes of starflare and you gain what... 400kg of mass? And lose 10m/s on each side. ... *scratches his head*

incarnate, just as an inquiry would it be feasible in stead of just making this tank have higher armor to make it resistant to a certain weapontype/porttype. Example small portweapons like the sunflare will scratch its paint, while a jackhammer will in effect give the complete damage. At the same time you can then keep the damage on par with any of the same agility smaller ships. But just make it impossible or at least very hard for one type of ship to be effective against another. Like I once stated the resistance against blunt, piercing and magic from an rpg? And the rock, paper scissor thing in a rts... Although this will probably be way harder to accomplish then anything else. It would however add somewhat the dimension of an RPG.

or at least I think so.

thank you for the response incarnate. hearing words from a dev on a subject so widely debated is always a good thing.

my question for everyone is are the flares really so devestating if not for the way your ship spins out of control? personally i find that being unable to move away from the second volly of flares is the real problem.

that was just about the best thing I could hear from a dev. it's honest, it's frank and there is admission of there being problems.

thank you, it's comments like this that make me belive in a solution. :-)