Well, if there are, they should be heavy and very expensive. They are deterrants for traders to use against pirates, and otherwise not really effective in PvP.

Swarms do take skill, I'll grant that. However, they last so long that after you fire and the other person barely dodges, it does become a fire and forget.
I can dodge swarms in an Orion cent, but after theres 3 salvo's chasing me, I have to turbo and back off, as then I see it is extremely difficult to dodge 3 salvo's and N2 fire. Heavy ships just don't stand a chance.

Explosion weapons should damage big ships more than lighter ships. It doesn't fix much I suppose, but thats how things are IRL.

Yah, :) plus you ARE talking about an orion cent... the bloody best ship in the game right now :P.

try dodgin em in a Vult mk III with gausses. You hit the turbo, then 3 seconds later you get hit with swarms.

Just trickin em doesn't work at all. :) which is sad, cuz one of my favorite things to do before the engine rebalance was pulling strafing runs on heavy swarm ships. SOOO satisfying to dodge 3 swarms on your way in while firing.

question for you, Shape:

if you're not ok with swarms being a somewhat effective deterrent against a player of your skill level, what would you suggest as an alternative? what would you recommend to a player who wants a defensive weapon that stands a reasonably good chance of protecting him against a skilled pirate, or just keeping said pirate busy enough for the player to make his escape?

not trying to flame - just don't want to make assumptions about your opinions, so i figured i'd ask.

Well that's what mines are for... DEFENSIVE weps. As in, "I'm gonna let you deal with this and get the hell out of here weps". Swarms do work like that, but they also happen to be startingly effective
"I'm gonna stay here and watch you go BOOM weps"

The main thing is that people will fire swarms without paying attention to where exactly their target is. This is true fire-and-forget. They don't need to do anything other than pull the trigger and let the missiles do their jobs. Besides, they're not that great when boosting. Mines are great when you're running away from someone.

i can dodge swarms. not everytime.

the swarms has now 2500 mass.
increased +500 since the patch.

happy?

Nope, since increasing the mass of swarms has little effect on the type of ships they are equipped on. How they actually function needs to be changed, not just how much they weigh.

It does have a large effect on how well the ships with swarms can dodge whatever it is you shoot at them.

Your whole point of 'I can't dodge swarms so they must be bugged' is so unbelievably flawed it's not even funny. No bug can be based entirely on the opinion of one or more persons.

the +500 mass affect a lot the ship.
swarmer wont able to run away easly.
their speed req more time.

i have dueled my friend Space hunter. he is the best swarmer i known atm.
i dodged his swarms successfully.

swarms is dodgable.

Ayn, what ship were you flying?

Genka, There's not a lot to dodging swarms while firing, you check the angle they're coming in at and then move roughly perpendicular, then you spin with them, keeping your movement perpendicular... this really doesn't work so hot in ships that weigh more than about 5200 kg.

As far as the mass increase. Tram is right, consider the platform, it was never particularly great for dodging in the first place. The problem is not always in a 1v1 fight, where I actually feel quite comfortable. But in a multifight, a swarmer can choose several targets, while they're concentrating on the battle. The concentration required to dodge em, even in a fast ship, ends the battle.

As I said, after 3 are out in the open, I have to step back. It's quite impossible to dodge correctly from 4 different directions (blaster + 3 swarms)

As we say, the main problem is that they're too easy to use. People just toss them over their shoulders while not paying particular attention to where their enemy is. Sure, the damage is high, but it is a high-level missile. Swarms should be slightly easier to use than low-level missiles, but they should require more skill than they do currently.

Maybe low-level missiles have a 2-3 second lock on time, and the pilot must visually track them to the target (ie, their crosshairs must be on the auto-aim pipper until impact.

Perhaps higher-level missiles have a lock-on time, but are able to track themselves to the target without the pilot's constant attention. This makes them fire-and-forget, but the pilot needs to put in the work to keep the crosshairs pointed at the target.

Both of these extend the range of a missile battle, because at closer range, it's harder to maintain the lock. This is what will either force pilots to become dedicated support ships, hanging back from battle, lobbing missiles in, or force players to use a mix of weapons - instead of a quad gem hornet, they fly a dual gem, dual neut hornet.

I think the tracking idea is excelent. keep the swarms stats as they are, but make it so you have to keep your nose pointed at the target for 3 seconds or so. I'd say use the autoaim crosshair, but that would be way too hard to lock onto, so just a direct point at the ship would be great.

i say we should fix the radar before we do anything about radar guided missiles, i mean if we could spoof sensors by, say, launching an emp grenade or chaff or hiding behind an asteroid. THEN, radar guided missiles could be dodged very easily via these electronic warfare componenets.

I like that, Destroyer2012. It seems like a good way out from between the rock & a hard place. Either swarms are too easy to dodge, and therefore worthless, or else too hard to dodge, and therefore too uber. Countermeasures I think would be the best way to balance them.

Yeah, they definatly need a counter, the only counter to them now is to run away, which imo is lame. Or if you are going to leave them as basically undodgeable as they are, thier damage needs to be severly lowered. I think thier tracking capabilities are what really needs to be toned down a fair bit though, since you might be able to dodge a swarm once, but if you try to fight the person firing them, they get some many in the air its just impossible.

Good solution Beolach. Those advocating locking or lasing a target for guideds to stay locked do not seem to understand how hard it is to lock a target with a large ship even at 3000m.

A couple of us used to duel with swarms to practice dodging. I could dodge a full load of swarms (40) in a Rag. If you can't run circles around swarms with the Centurian II or better, you need practice.

Swarms is alright atm.
Nerf it more and it will be total useless.

Shape : a vulture + 2 Gauss canon = Mass 5800-6400

it's correct if it is hard to dodge all swarms.
depends who is the swarmer.

Stop thinking only for your own interest.

then shape's interest is my interest, and alot of other's interests.

quite frankly we're a'bit tired of uber swarms. they're so redictulas that i often laugh pretty hard when i dodge one for 20 seconds, move in for the kill to only have that lame volly come back and hit me. if they time out then the swarmer will launch another which you need to again, turbo in cricles. if that one times out he'll fire another. repeat steps A through B, then their ammo is gone they'll turbo away.

when a single volly of swarms took out my prom that's when i typed /logoff and stayed logged for 6 hours. it's pretty damn irritating.. mines are there for a reason, their task is to annoy pirates.

even if they gave the swarm missiles a mass of 6000kg that won't matter. what they need to do is cut the lifetime down to 10 seconds, and *slighty* tone down the tracking so they can't fire the swarms in a 5second period to create 50 seconds of swarm action. this would be a good counter for their tracking abilites. also this insaine damage needs to be fixed.

VO is currently: super vultures (IBG/orion rev C) and swarm nation.