I've suspected for a day or two that the Storm Missiles are ignoring shields.

I had several games the other day where I just thought it was weird and was noticing they were hitting me extremely hard. I typically throw shields up (like ya do) when missiles come in, and was getting blasted every time. Sometimes I may have put the shields up late, so I was thinking it may have just been bad reflexes on my part.

However, just now I was killed two times in a row by the same player using Storm Missiles. One time I was at ~19k hp and the second time I was at full health (25k), in both instances I most definitely had shields up and was over 50% energy and sitting in a space being healed by at least two repair pods. Against a normal salvo of missiles it may have reduced my energy to zero and scratched me, but in both instances the Storm Missiles completely ignored the shields.

Another issue I noticed was that, unlike a normal cloud of missiles which is spread over an area and deals the damage over several seconds, the Storm Missiles dealt all of their damage almost instantly (despite some of the further-out missiles being >800m away).

Thought Devs might be interested in giving that a look.

Details: Off the top of my head the firing ships were Dreads and Destroyers. One of the Destroyers was most definitely a Vindicta.

The ships I was piloting were initially on my own Vindicta, and then later when I started looking into it more, almost all exclusively on my Aion. All games were in Veteran servers, maps and game modes varied.

Let me know if there's anything else that exists to help you guys track this down, because it's literally been killing me.

hmm, I use storms and I've never seen them bypass shields. Does this happen every time they're used against you, or only occasionally?

Are you sure you're not being hit by an energy drain pulse the moment before they hit you? If a Vindicta's swooping in close enough to fire storms, they'd easily get in range to drain you. Storms will kill both the ships you were piloting in one salvo if that was the case.

As someone who uses storms a lot, you are probably getting hit by a drain just as they hit, I know I try to save my drain pulse till just before they hit to take out an emeny ship, also Stroms can do alot of damage, if your ship is already damaged they can wipe you out, I also fire flashet missiles at the same time, so i can almost instant kill every ship bar dreadnoughts if they don't have the health or damage reduction to with stand it.

Nashwan#3703 posted (#post-223356) said:

hmm, I use storms and I've never seen them bypass shields. Does this happen every time they're used against you, or only occasionally?

Are you sure you're not being hit by an energy drain pulse the moment before they hit you? If a Vindicta's swooping in close enough to fire storms, they'd easily get in range to drain you. Storms will kill both the ships you were piloting in one salvo if that was the case.

You make a valid point. When an energy drain hits you the moment before the storm missiles hit you, it will remove your shields giving you no protection and no energy to use other means of escape or damage reduction. If you have a video of this issue it would be better to determine what is going on here.

I'll have to double-check. Unfortunately, if they're firing a drain missile that's ending up in the cloud of the Storm Missiles, then it'll be almost impossible to detect outside of a very controlled environment (or debug logs). I don't know what the relative speeds of the weapons are (that'd actually be something nice to see is missile/torpedo speed in the weapon stats), but are module trigger cooldowns short enough for Storm Missiles to fire and then a slightly faster Drain Missile be able to sneak into the pack if fired in the correct order?

The other thing I need to check (but didn't run into anyone with Storms last night in a situation where I could reasonably counter) is that I also run with Armored Lockdown on the Aion - at this point I haven't had a sure-fire situation where I was able to trigger it, but if I know someone is on the field with Drain Missiles, I usually just burn all my energy anyway with damage to weapons and then pop Armored Lockdown.

When an energy drain hits you the moment before the storm missiles hit you, it will remove your shields giving you no protection and no energy to use other means of escape or damage reduction

The other issue I noticed, however, was that the kills were nearly instant. If I have 19k hp and get hit by a drain missile, from my understanding, in my kill log it should show 1) a drain missile log (assuming it isn't drowned out by third-party damage, which I'm cognizant of, or does it deal damage at all?), and 2) damage totalling up to my full hp value. In one of the examples that I mentally red-flagged, there was still clearly half of the cloud of missiles incoming, and if I'm maneuvering away from the cloud of missiles that should draw out the damage over a longer period, enough that I'd have time for Desperate Measures to trigger and refil my energy, which wasn't happening.

I'll see if can get some means of logging to video outside of Twitch and try and capture something.

When you die, the log shows the 3 sources of highest damage. Also storms do over 27K of damage if I remember correctly. So in some cases that's enough to deplete what ever shields you have left and take you out. If the ship is using module amp then that number increases.

Destroyers don't have drain missiles, they'll be hitting you with a drain pulse, which is instantaneous as long as you're in range (1400m?).

Not entirely correct. Destroyers have Drain Torpedo which acts like a missile. I use it all the time to drain a target's shields before my missiles/nuke hits.

Nashwan#3703 posted (#post-223380) said:

Destroyers don't have drain missiles, they'll be hitting you with a drain pulse, which is instantaneous as long as you're in range (1400m?).

Destroyers do have drain torpidoes, but yeah if your in range of storms, you'll be in drain pules raing too.