Gunner is good. Would be an actual incentive to drag one along in Hermes.

I don't like the idea of locking them to Gunner. It just makes no sense. Gunner is going to get a complete revamp as well.

Thijs makes a valid point in here: Spotty Beams are also important in many PvAI situations. If you remove them just because they make most Snipers able to kill most Seers, then you would have to change a lot of things in this game.

Yes the Spotty Beam is very useful against Seers, but I don't find it a big enough reason to remove them completely.

All valid.

Low vis sd, other low vis sniper, and seer are valid reasons for nerf.

I'd say nerf it and remake new item mission only similar to absentis. Ie spottied beam etc.

The only thing that seems somewhat fair here, is to lower the effect time noticeably. We can make a discussion based around that, instead of discussing whether it should be removed or not. Then it will solve a lot of the PvP issues with it.

The issue here, is that a sniper can shoot a Spotty Beam (X) and then shoot other weapons (Y) too many times before having to shoot X again. So we need to work out how many times he should be able to shoot Y pr X in PvP to balance it. PvAI normally means only shooting X while others shoot Y, or no Y at all.

I did some testing with my sniper. I have 0.4 recoil with a Spotty Beam, and 0.42 recoil with a Primal Zebra Hooves Torpedoe. Which means, that I can shoot 1X and 22Y. This is where the core to the problem lies for me. The Snipers Spotty Beam should be balanced towards having the same visibility effect as if the Seer fired off a weapon himself.

Something like 1X and 10Y would still be too broken. This means about 5 seconds of visibility effect from the Spotty Beam. My suggestion will be 1X and 6Y. This is about 3 seconds of visibility effect from the weapon. Which I think is about the same as if the Seer fired off a shot himself.

What do you guys think, if the effect time was to be lowered?

3 seconds?
4 seconds?
5 seconds?
6 seconds?
More?
Less?

I disagree with removing them or nerfing them. Any decent seer can kill a sniper without too much problem, if you do get shot by a spotty beam as a seer your doing something wrong.

3 should be enough I'd think right?

Still usable then for sure.

I find Thermals idea excellent lowering the visibility time would solve it for me, and I doubt any other chances are necessary. 3 seconds seems allright to me.

I rather want em still ingame due to every class sould have a way of fending of a specific class Spotty beams is just a Anti seer wep that can easly be beaten

Leave Sol to find happiness!


I think Thermal makes a good point, if anything is going to happen make it 5 seconds. But then can we look at Engineer in pvp?!?! Why is a SUPPORT class so OP.

Make a new topic about it and I will show you a support engineer that really makes a good example of what the class is capable of.

If you aug your Engineer for drone strength mainly, then you deserve to have strong drones. But your main ship is most likely going to be terrible.

Meh, I liked my beem.

4 Heph Gen Mode Engineer is epic. Sniper takes shots at Thermal, his shields don't budge. Sniper takes shots at the drones, his drones lose 1/3 of their shields.

That. Is. So. EPIC!


As for Thermal's argument. It is epic too.

That sounds lame, I was thinking AoE, 2 Heph Gen mode and a Zeus/Pos (i cant remeber and i cba to look it up) Def mode would be beast.

If you want the strongest drones, and the biggest machine of a tank, you go with 4 Hephaestus General Mode Augmenters.

If you want to be able to perform up to 75% of the HPS and sustainable HPS that a shield monkey can put out, along with being able to energize with the T20 energy transference beams at the same time, you go with a different setup.