Suggestions for Wraith, Corvette, and BC Guns

Wraith:

Add a ~2 second cooldown to the side thrusters. Boost their acceleration. Possibly boost the energy cost. I had always thought the intention of the side thrusters was to dodge lasers, but the slow accel and the lack of cooldown makes them used as a sideways warp engine. It's unintuitive and looks silly-- I would rather have a turbo button that goes straight if you're gonna do this, and have the side thrusters be solely for dodging.

Add a researchable 'afterburner' ability. Have it function like the side thrusters do now, except forward (maybe with some cool graphics when used?). Separating this ability out lets you balance it out with the side thrusters. The reason I say researchable is because the side thrusters have given the wraith a lot of mobility, which early game makes them much less risky to use. The wraith wasn't particularly speedy, and being in a corner when everyone was in the middle pretty much kept you out of action for at least a minute before side thrusters were added. Making it researchable gives a team the option of sacrificing some eco for more aggressive offense.

Have the engine disabling pulse disable movement abilities (turbo boost, side thrusters, etc). Any good miner's gonna escape a wraith 100% of the time with the turbo boost, the engine pulse is rarely a threat. Making it stop turbo boost gives it some teeth. As it is, the wraith only kills miners who get unusually greedy, or are AFK or new. With the pulse, they need to be defended.

Make the laser a 3 shot, adjust the cost and the cooldown of the weapon accordingly. This is strictly a UI thing, I prefer to not have to mash the f key repeatedly when killing miners, I'm sure most people would agree.

Increase ramming damage taken by the wraith. Buff the lasers a bit to compensate. Ramming is pretty powerful for the wraith, it does a lot of damage on its own and interferes with the receiving ship's acceleration. ATM the wraith is too effective as a kamikaze ship. I think it would be better served if its lasers were buffed and it were discouraged from ramming at all. This is gonna make it more vulnerable to asteroids, but it has side thrusters to deal with that.

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Corvette:

Add a starting corvette to the BC. I feel like the game would be more exciting if a corvette were the counterpoint to the wraith, rather than the BC. It has a defensive ability and a wide angle attack, but it's unfortunately too expensive to use early and mid game, and by late game you don't care about wraiths at all.

Reduce the energy cost of the main weapon. Seriously, its ridiculous, you're not going to hit with more than one laser per volley, and it uses up like 700 energy to kill a wraith, assuming the wraith doesn't move.

Do one of the two: Add a researchable omnidirectional laser ability, uses like 125 energy to shoot a 50 damage laser with an 8 second cooldown, castable like the ghost's snipe except the corvette doesn't stop moving. Alternatively, give the corvette some ability to shoot missiles. It's current anti-ship armament is laughable. The omnidirectional laser lets it do damage while maneuevering, and lets it swat down speedier ships. Missiles would do so as well, and also add some value to the counter-missiles along with having to buy missiles for it. Just give the corvette some firepower.

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BC:

Make the 3 and 5 shot need research. The BC's lasers are massive early game threats. Basically, the BC shuts down any wraith aggression within a large radius, because the weapon is super powerful. They don't get used that often I've found until the wraith is ramming the BC, but they have some insane range-- I can swat wraiths that are 2 screen widths away from the BC no sweat, easily protecting miners. It's a bit ridiculous. I think the game would be more exciting if a corvette was in charge of miner defense.

Add a 'unlock camera' button. It's hard to instruct newer players to shoot the BC's gun at range when they have to struggle with the camera. It's a bit silly having to struggle with the UI IMO, and the BC's range really gives it a lot of tactical value, I'd like to see that used more often in games.

I am going to implement at least a lot of these suggestions. You'll see it in the next patch.

I was amazed to learn today that the wraith's engine pulse doesn't actually disable engines at all, all it does is reset the throttle. Prior to discovering this I thought it disabled engines: I've only seen miners escape wraiths with turbo jump, when they get hit with the pulse they stop moving otherwise. In a game today when moving at full speed while getting pulsed I was able to push the throttle back to full before I lost half of my speed--- the result is I didn't even need a turbo jump to escape the harassing wraith, I could simply dodge and outrun it. (I ended up using a turbo jump anyway because the enemy BC was right behind the wraith, heh)

I want to experiment with this a lot more before committing to any suggestion but my gut says the engine pulse should have more bite than that.

well it means your a good player if you are able to do that and you got rewarded for being awesome, though i think the pulse thing should drop it to 0 speed and disable the turbo for 5 seconds but also make the missle slower so the miner has some chance of dodging it.

It's not hard to pull off, all you have to do is spam the w button, I don't consider this 'being a good player'. You have to spam the w button anyway to start moving in the first place.

The reason I bring this up is that I had thought miner defense was a team thing early game: miners need pings to tell them when something is coming so they can leave before getting caught, and they need the BC/corvette to shoot an attacker down if they get stuck.

It's hard to test this now because everyone seems to think the corvette is a good miner killing craft (nope) but as it is I think nobody should ever be losing a miner to a wraith, you can simply outrun the wraith 100% of the time, engine pulse or not. I wish I could test it more.

And you can block the engine pulse with asteroids

Wraith plasma cannon should stay as is, not be a 3-shot. I think it is good enough as is. The other modifications seem ok.

Lady-Natalya wrote:Wraith plasma cannon should stay as is, not be a 3-shot.

What's the difference?