Hello spacefriends and a special happy national sourdough bread day to our American capsuleers! Today we are happy to be sharing the proposed details of twelve new sets of advanced pirate implants planned for release this summer. These new implant sets include the highly anticipated “shield slaves”. They will also come alongside some related module balance changes and module tiericide.
To be clear: these implants won’t be arriving in the April or May releases, but are aimed at the summer timeframe. We’ll have more details of their exact release date when we get a bit closer.
The new sets come in four different varieties, with each variety having a full set in each of the low, mid, and high grades for a total of twelve sets and 72 individual implants.
These flavours are:
Savior (Angel implant set that improves the cycle speed of subcapital remote shield and armor modules)
Hydra (Guristas implant set that improves drone and fighter hitpoints)
Rapture (Sansha implant set that improves total capacitor capacity)
Nirvana (Sansha implant set that improves shield hitpoints)
A quick note on the Slave implants:
The existing Slave implants that improve armor hitpoints will be renamed to Amulet implants and new copies of Amulet implants will come from Blood Raiders content rather than Sanshas. If you have an implant that increases armor hitpoints before this patch, it will continue to provide exactly the same bonuses after the patch. It will just be renamed to “Amulet” and have a different text description.
The current proposed stats for these new implant sets are as follows:
Summer 2019 Pirate Implant Sets
Set Name
Attributes
Secondary Effect
Set Bonus Slots 1-5
Set Slot 6 (Omega)
Slot 1 Bonus
Slot 2 Bonus
Slot 3 Bonus
Slot 4 Bonus
Slot 5 Bonus
Total Effect
High-grade Savior
+4
Reduced Subcap Remote Armor and Shield Rep Cycle Time
15%
50%
-1%
-1.25%
-1.5%
-1.75%
-2%
-20.7%
Mid-grade Savior
+3
Reduced Subcap Remote Armor and Shield Rep Cycle Time
10%
25%
-1%
-1.25%
-1.5%
-1.75%
-2%
-14.3%
Low-grade Savior
+2
Reduced Subcap Remote Armor and Shield Rep Cycle Time
2.5%
10%
-1%
-1.25%
-1.5%
-1.75%
-2%
-8.99%
High-grade Hydra
+4
Increased Drone and Fighter Armor/Shield/Hull HP
15%
50%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
53.63%
Mid-grade Hydra
+3
Increased Drone and Fighter Armor/Shield/Hull HP
10%
25%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
33.83%
Low-grade Hydra
+2
Increased Drone and Fighter Armor/Shield/Hull HP
2.5%
10%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
20.03%
High-grade Rapture
+4
Increased Capacitor Capacity
15%
50%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
53.63%
Mid-grade Rapture
+3
Increased Capacitor Capacity
10%
25%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
33.83%
Low-grade Rapture
+2
Increased Capacitor Capacity
2.5%
10%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
20.03%
High-grade Nirvana
+4
Increased Shield Hitpoints
15%
50%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
53.63%
Mid-grade Nirvana
+3
Increased Shield Hitpoints
10%
25%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
33.83%
Low-grade Nirvana
+2
Increased Shield Hitpoints
2.5%
10%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
20.03%
These stats are preliminary, and we are interested in hearing what you think about them.
Please feel free to post your feedback in this thread and we’ll be keeping you up to date as any adjustments are made. We’ll also be making separate threads to discuss the contemporaneous module balance and module tiericide changes as we get a bit closer to the summer.
Thanks and I hope you all have a wonderful national sourdough bread day!
In the past, it was either said explicitly or implied (not sure which at this point) that +shield HP implants would necessarily require a reduction in shield recharge rate. Is this actually the case?
I’m on the toilet so really cant check, but how much impact are the RR cycle reductions going to have as far as dropping down to the next server tick? Most cycles are pretty short and probably not affected? Any tables on what they really do?
Shield slaves look good. Rapture might be alright depending on cap regen changes.
Savior - does it affect caps? Currently, HG gives you +26% RR (better reaction time and more cap use too). If it works for subcap RRs only, would make sense to have it at +33% at least?
Hydra is garbage. It has to provide insanely strong drone HP bonus to justify its use over other sets, like +300% for hg, or just give it secondary bonus like drone speed / range / application.
Also, while you’re at it, please look at underutilized sets:
halo: not much better than snakes at sigtanking, would be cool if it also was buffed to -25…-33% instead of present -20
edge: more flavor could be given if it did all three things for boosters: improve primary effect (maybe only for boosters which have side-effects, maybe for all of them), reduce chance of side-effects, reduce strength of side-effects
centurion: can’t make ewar stronger to not break -100% threshold for TDs/damps, so could also improve falloff range, or partially ignore target’s ewar resistance instead of boosting range
ore: meh… I don’t even know
eccm sets: maybe improve ewar resistance too? To tds, damps, TPs, like electronic hardening gang link
What about current shield EHP on shield capitals - will it be adjusted?
Will missions offered by Sansha agents will be looked at? Low initial number of missions makes you flooded with burner missions .
Out of curiosity - will the LVL agent situation will be looked for Blood Raider.
It is like 50 lvl 4 agents for Sansha and like 3 lvl 4 agents for Blood Raider.
Saviors are cool, will be interesting how they interact with the remote rep stacking, and whether that means small gang bling comps can afford to run fewer logistics pilots. I presume they will not work with capital repair modules as per Asklepian/Crystal?
Hydra I have no useful input on, but want to take the opportunity to note as a balance aside that fighter inertia modifier/base speed might need revisiting (which could allow a raise of direct power in compensation for loss of speed). I’d cite Navyfields as potential inspiration, being a game that managed to have significantly slower fighters and more travel time while remaining engaging.
Rapture might be a bit niche in value, perhaps replacing capacitor capacity with neut resistance, or combining them e.g. 50:50 capacitor capacity bonus:neut resistance bonus would make them more valuable. This also arguably makes them a more thematic counterpart to Talismans.
New Slaves are cool too, hopefully will enable more buffer shield smallgang comps. I’d expect a half-to-equal increase in shield recharge time to accompany the HP bonus, possibly not directly commensurate across each implant/grade, allowing some mixing to maximise peak passive tank vs max EHP.
Sure, but not every ship in the game is going to be running shield slaves. I’d hope that natural, unaided-by-module shield regen isn’t getting kneecapped for everyone on the off chance that any given ship is using shield slaves.
The ‘slots 1-5 bonus’ column (15% for HG etc) is not the sum of the base bonuses (although that is the same value) but the per attribute implant set bonus. So HG is actually 33.75% reduction, same as Talismans are for capacitor emissions, resulting in about 1.5x EHP/s
e: I was incorrect, didn’t register the different base bonuses per attribute implant for Saviours, see Kadesh Priestess’ reply for correct values.
so … instead of reducing natural shield regen “too much” on ships - reduce max regen from the new Slaves? 53% boost for high grade sounds huge. (Remote rep cycle time reduction seems “mild” in comparison, plus for logi cruiser, it comes with the price of requiring fitting tweaks to maintain cap stability.)
What if Slave was 35 - 40% max, and scaled down from there? Perhaps it’s useless to debate a percent boost without knowing the planned percent nerf. Players want to debate the full balance picture.
Talismans have 1%/2%/3%/4%/5% base strength, and 15% on 1-5 + 50% 6 slot multiplier effect. Savior has different numbers - they are similar to halo for a total of -20.7% cycle time, or +26.1% rep amount.
