IMO the two things that need to be changed the most are the rail gun and the gravitron blaster. The Grav just needs to be flat out changed so it either takes up less energy and goes faster, or does more damage and goes faster. Either way it need to go faster. The rail gun, at this point, is completely useless. Before it's last update, it did 2200 damage for 200 points of energy. Now it does 1100 damage and 110 energy. It does half the damage with not even half the energy. Thats even less effecient than before. In my mind this is a step backwards. If I wanted a weapon that did massive damage, i couldg get quad gause or charged cannons that have a similar effect. Sure, the rail gun is faster. But when it comes down to speed vs. damage, damage is more important. The Damage needs to be upped and the energy requirement needs to be dropped. Agreeing with blaster, 75 energy/shot would be about right, and the damage needs to be greatly incresed. Originally I wanted a weapon that hit instantly or almost instantly. A true sniper weapon. Maybe this in unrealistic but i think it could be fairly added into the game without it being a one hit kill. Maybe even 500 damage/50 energy per shot. That wouldn't kill the person and would give them time to start moving. These are just a few ideas. But something needs to be done before the next update. We keep hearing baout the frigate and cap ships, and thats all great and everything, but things need to be balanced before more environmental stuff is added.

wombatula: I don't think those are the worst problems with the balance, but I do think that they are the most noticable ones simply because those are the sort of weapons that people really want to use and want to be 'good'. Finding out that they actually suck comes as a big blow to most people. Which isn't to say that they should 'rule' either, because it would be very easy to turn the graviton into a weapon that just 'rules', but clearly changes need to be made.

I think sunflares need to go 65m/s. Then u could fire them at a far enough distance to no kill urself in the process...

I think the Sunflares need to go 65m/s so you can have a bit more long range battles. Right now u have to be right up close to hit any fast ships like a Valk or a Vulture..

Unless their damage is decreased or they find some way of giving triple Sunflare loadouts a disadvantage, I'd much rather they hold off on increasing the Sunflare's speed. The last thing we need is more special ship jockeys to fly around with nothing but Sunflares.

Sunflares are already very dangerous. There is no sense in focusing only on changing the things that work. It is more important to fix the things that don't - plasma cannons, phased blasters, gauss cannons, rail guns, etc., etc.

There is a known speed bug in rockets. Let's fix that first and see if changes anything.

Secondly, Arolte is absolutely right. If the speed of the Sunflare goes up, then the proximity radius needs to go down (or some other balancing factor needs to take place like decreased damage.) If you make the already accurate (because they are so forgiving of bad aim) and already hard hitting (3000 damage per second) and already highly efficient (takes no energy to fire) sunflare even better and more accurate, what's the point in carrying anything else?

I can and have hit people _during dogfights_ at >500m with a sunflare. The technique I used was this: fly around a 'roid to break los, switch to physics mode, rotate around and fire a sunflare at the underside of the roid outside of the attackers line of sight causing the attacker to interect the sunflares position as he came around the 'roid. Granted, that took alot of luck, but I'd like to think it also took a modicom of skill as well. Once 'roids break radar contact as well as los, tricky tactics like that are going to get even more fun. And its certainly possible to hit people with a rocket without getting splashed, and I dare say most of my fights have taken on that 3.0 & 3.1 quality of the winner being determined by the pilot who gets the most 'clean' rocket hits.

man - stop dissing the phased blaster - it rox
(of course if you make it better i wont mind - its my centurion weapon of choice)