To get it out of the way, I know this isn’t a photon UI topic, but I don’t see any better place to put this thread, as it relates to upcoming features and there isn’t an official thread on the topic.
I have several thoughts on the upcoming Navy Destroyers, and since the update is coming in less than three weeks I want to get my feedback out there before things get too far along.
I was looking forward to this batch of Navy destroyers a lot, but when we got the full stats I was slightly disappointed that they didn’t have as much uniqueness compared to their base hull as some navy ships.
By this I mean that, for a lot of navy ships, even in the cases where both they and their base hull are similar combat ships, many of them have some notable difference that renders them significantly distinct in practice. (E.g. the Vexor Navy’s rep bonus, the Caracal navy’s bonuses favoring HAMs, the Ferox Navy’s bonuses favoring brawling, etc.) Not all navy ships do this, but many do, and they’re often the more interesting ones.
Particularly, all four of the previous navy destroyers did this. The Catalyst Navy having the tank bonuses and room for full tackle makes it very different compared to the base hull. The Coercer Navy has huge tank and neut bonuses. The Cormorant Navy tries to become an active tank brawler. And the Thrasher Fleet gets a new MWD bloom bonus for kity shenanigans.
In comparison, this new batch of navy destroyers doesn’t have nearly as much distinctiveness. The Dragoon Navy in particular is almost identical to the base version, and the Corax Navy doesn’t seem like it’s going to play particularly different in practice either. The Talwar Fleet and Algos Navy do at least have some aspects that seem intended to make them unique, but both are going to need some help in this aspect I think.
I’m not sure if there’s anything to be done about this at this point, that would be a significant redesign of these ships. And not all navy ships have to be unique, it’s just kinda not as exciting after the last set is all. So it’s not the end of the world if the Dragoon and Corax Navy aren’t designed to be unique, but in that case the two ships in this batch that do look like they’re intended to have some unique flair to them need to actually work well in that regard, and right now I have doubts about that.
The Talwar Fleet seems like it’s intended to shift towards a brawly role, with how it swaps the (kite-favored) MWD bloom bonus for an active tank bonus, gains a utility high, and gains a midslot and thus the ability to fit full tackle along with prop and tank. The explosion velocity bonus will also help it apply to AB frigates, though this would also function for light missiles as well so it’s a bit less clear cut. The problem here is that the ship feels kinda undertuned IMO, particularly when compared to the Cormorant Navy.
For starters, it would be the only Navy destroyer that actually loses damage relative to its base model, which just feels wrong. It’s going to have less damage than the regular Talwar or Corax, less damage than the Corax Navy with kin, and only fractionally more damage than the Corax Navy with non-kin. And destroyers are fragile. There’s a reason the Cormorant Navy gets a full 10% boost bonus, and it’s still apparently considered weak enough that it needs a buff with this patch. The Talwar Fleet only getting a 7.5% boost bonus in comparison feels bad, particularly since shield boosting is supposed to be more of a Minmatar ‘thing’ than Caldari. It gets the application bonus and somewhat more speed than most destroyers, but that doesn’t feel like enough compensation to me.
The Talwar Fleet comes off particularly badly in the direct comparison with the Cormorant Navy. Thanks to its range bonuses and the high damage of blasters, the Corm Navy will have more damage at scram range with null than the Talwar Fleet gets with rage, even before the damage buff the Corm Navy is getting this update, let alone at point blank range with void/antimatter. Adding insult to injury, the Corm Navy also gets superior tank thanks to the larger boost bonus. The Talwar Fleet gets the extra low, but can’t really do much with it thanks to weak CPU.
I like the idea of this ship, but I feel it needs a bit of a tune-up. Giving it the full 10% shield boost bonus would be a good start, and making the fire rate bonus 8.5% instead of 7.5% would bring the damage back up to at least equal the base Talwar. A bit more CPU wouldn’t be amiss, either, IMO. This one’s close, it just needs a bit more.
The Algos Navy’s in a bit of a tougher spot. The gimmick is supposed to be the web drones, but to be quite frank it seems that insufficient consideration has been given to how much those drones suck. In practice, it’s almost never going to be worth using them, leaving the Algos Navy functionally about as ‘generic’ as the Dragoon and Corax Navy.
The first problem is that packing along web drones is a huge sacrifice in terms of the combat drones you’re not bringing, much too large of a sacrifice to be worth it. The Algos Navy has the same 35 mbit of bandwidth and 60 m3 of drone bay as the regular Algos - meant to carry one mixed 35 m3 DPS flight and one 25 m3 light flight. Which of those are you supposed to sacrifice for web drones? Your DPS flight, on a droneboat with room for only one of those? The light flight, and leave yourself with no weapon against kiters? (No, the web drones won’t help there, see below.) It doesn’t compute.
But the bigger problem is how bad web drones are, particularly light web drones. The Myrm Navy has had enough trouble getting brought to a state where one might actually consider using the web drones, but the Algos Navy is going to be in a much worse spot, comparatively speaking. The problem is that web drones get absolutely murdered by stacking penalties. The Myrm Navy partially gets around this by using (less than a full flight of) heavy web drones, applying far more web per drone and not going so deep into stacking penalties. It can slow a target down by a full 61% with a flight of four heavies, or 48% with a half-flight of two heavies while applying some DPS at the same time. (Note that 2 heavies handily beats 5 mediums thanks to stacking penalties.)
The Algos Navy has nowhere near as much luck. The best it can do without sacrificing DPS is a flight of two mediums and one light, slowing a target by a whole 29%. As with the Myrm Navy, this is more efficient than using a full flight of the next size down - thanks to the stacking penalties and their absolutely pathetic 5% base slowdown, a flight of lights gets a whopping 20%. Even if one defeats the entire purpose of a droneboat and replaces the DPS flight with a flight of three mediums and a light, that still only gets you 34%, a whole 5% more than the 25 m3 setup.
Note that the increase in web drone speed coming with this patch, while it’s quite helpful for the Myrm Navy to help its slow heavy web drones catch up to stuff, is meaningless for the Algos Navy. The problem here isn’t the drones catching things, the problem is that once they do, they don’t slow it down enough for the Algos to actually catch up to it. A 29% slowdown is only enough to let the Algos Navy catch up to something if the faster ship was moving at ~2500 m/s or less. Even before this buff medium web drones could already catch up with something that slow, let alone the lights. Even the 34% setup could only allow the Algos Navy to catch up to things moving at about 2700 m/s.
Relatively little that the Algos Navy actually wants to catch is this slow. Certainly nothing frigate and kity is going to be caught this way - even if the drones catch up, any frigate kiter is still going to be moving along faster than the Algos pursuing it. A fair few cruisers fall into this speed bracket, but in most cases an Algos Navy chasing one of those is going to be in the position of a dog chasing a car - what are you going to do with it if you catch it? You’ll be half dead already against any notable kity cruiser by the time you do, and they’ve almost certainly got quite a bit more tank than you and probably at least as much dps. The only viable class of target I can think of is other t1/navy destroyers, which seems like a very narrow window of usefulness.
And, of course, that’s assuming the drones actually survive and do anything once they get there. Even after the hull bonus, role bonus, and buffs in this patch, a light web drone on the Algos Navy is going to have barely 700 EHP, and a medium web drone under 1k EHP (and with a 50% fatter sig than now for some bizarre reason - why on earth are they being nerfed there?). They’re trivially easy to potshot out of the sky, especially for peer targets whose small guns will have no trouble hitting them. And to add insult to injury, they haven’t changed the behavior where the web drones’ orbit velocity is incredibly low, resulting in even a webbed target very quickly zooming right back out of the drones’ range as soon as their MWDs turn off and further compromising the already mediocre slowing performance.
Effectively, the performance of web drones on the Algos Navy is going to be so bad that I see almost no circumstances where I would ever actually use any on it. The loss of the regular drones they’d displace is basically always going to be a bigger decrease in performance than any boost from the web drones. And that’s sad, both because the web drone thing could be a cool unique thing if it were viable, and also because without it the Algos Navy is just as generic as the Dragoon and Corax Navy, just being an ‘Algos 2.0’ with better stats. Which is still fine, but not anywhere near as interesting as it could be, and a real shame given it’s clearly supposed to be more interesting.
At an absolute minimum the Algos Navy needs another 25 m3 of drone bay, so that it actually has room to carry some web drones without unacceptable sacrifices. Note that this is the same consideration that was already realized for the Myrm Navy, which got a 50 m3 drone bay increase in Legion specifically for that reason. So since we already know and have had demonstrated in practice that this is necessary, let’s skip the part where this ship has a gimped drone bay for an annoyingly long period and just give it a big enough drone bay to function from the start. IMO this is an absolute no-brainer, and I don’t see any justification for not doing it even if one wants to leave web drone strength alone.
But even aside from that, the performance of the web drones on this hull is still just going to be too weak. Note that a Myrm Navy with a flight of 4 heavies could theoretically slow a target down enough to be caught up to a target speed of roughly 3250 m/s, over 500 m/s faster than the Algos Navy despite the Myrm Navy being 30% slower. In practical terms the heavy web drones can’t catch up to a target moving that fast, but after the buff in this patch they’ll still go a bit over 2800 m/s. If you recall from above, the fastest target the Algos Navy can catch up with even with sacrificing its DPS flight is only 2700 m/s - in other words, the Myrm Navy will be better at catching kiters than the Algos Navy! If that doesn’t tell you how sad web drones will be on this hull, I don’t know what could.
As such, I strongly believe that the web drone bonus on the Algos Navy should also be increased to 15% or 20%. At 15%, the 25 m3 setup on the Algos will slow targets by about the 34% that previously required the 35 m3 setup, allowing it to at least come close to matching the far heavier and slower Myrm Navy at catching kiters without sacrificing its dps. At a 20% bonus it would slow targets by 38%, getting close to 2900 m/s in catching capability, still nothing to write home about. Note that even with this stronger bonus, it still would have weaker and more fragile web drones than the Myrm Navy by quite a significant margin, since it can’t use as heavy or as many as the Myrm can. It’s already only a destroyer, with massively less tank and dps, it doesn’t need to also have weaker web drones by quite that pathetically large of a factor.
Alternatively one could tune up web drones’ base stats some more, particularly the slowdown factor and orbit velocity. This would be more complex because it would affect ships besides just the Algos Navy, but could still be an option.
On a more minor note, if the Algos Navy is going to try to be a mini Myrm Navy with a double bonused gun-drone setup, then it wouldn’t be unjustified to give it both role bonuses like the Myrm Navy gets. Even just the dual 25% optimal/falloff bonus that the Myrm gets rather than the dual 50% bonus of the Catalyst Navy would make a notable difference. This would be more peripheral since it doesn’t address the real problem of the drone setup, but I still wouldn’t complain.
I was very excited when this set of Navy destroyers was first announced, and in particular I’ve been wishing for an Algos Navy Issue for ages. Unfortunately when the details were given out that excitement found itself significantly tempered. I’ll still use them even in their current state, but I really would like these to properly fulfill their potential out of the gate rather than having to wait an annoyingly long period of time to get fixed. Can we make a few tweaks before launch?