Maintenance was a major issue for people who weren't in the top three. More importantly though, maintenance costs for Legendary were so high that it wasn't worth it to play Legendary for 2/3 of the players there, and as a result, no one did play.

While maintenance was a thing, I'm pretty sure that fewer than fifty Legendary matches occurred (over what? six months? a year?). The costs were so prohibitive that most of these matches were exclusively done by streamers and players who were overflowing with surplus credits after having unlocked all of the T5 ships. They were essentially exhibition matches. Once maintenance was replaced with battle bonus, people started actually playing Legendary.

Most people don't think that corvettes are perfectly balanced, but it's a combination of factors. Corvettes in Legendary wouldn't be as strong if they didn't get access to an extremely powerful secondary at T5 in Bolt Guns. This lets them kite and fight at range without always needing to commit in close.

As for the rest of it, it's not like we can just make changes. We're only players too. What are we supposed to tell people? "Oh well, just go and get ganked nonstop until you hate the game and quit"? The best we can do is offer advice for how to fight slicers (and they can be fought).

You also seem to have a misconception of "the devs." "The devs" at this point are one person, RayDogCarrotCake. There are other people, but RayDog is the only person we know of who makes the balance changes, and being one person, there is only so much he can do. A few things show up in each patch, and we're trying to help give good feedback, but in the end changes have to be incremental. We've brought up the issues we can see, and we're fairly confident they'll be worked on. We just have to be patient.

In the meantime, by all means do get good. It'll help fighting corvettes now and it'll make you more dangerous when/if they get nerfed in the future (and fight whatever comes next, because corvettes are far from the only thing that can go 12/0 in leg).

On PC at least, Plasma and Purge Rams were both highly viable in Legendary, with Plasma being used mostly to take down healers and Purge being used to break open formations.

CONTRIBUTORS (BY DISCORD USERNAME):

[UNYU]SOMETHINGUSERNAME - [OSS]POLARIS - DRAGGOMMER - FLYINGCOW64 - DRAGONYCHUS - [BIX]SOLDIERHOBBES

Rupture and Armor.pdf
This is a PDF document we compiled based on our discussion of the two modules in question, what the issues are, why, specifically, they're having such an impact on the meta, and what could be done to fix this.

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One thing I haven't seen anyone bring up here is that Oberon ships generally get higher power to weapons boosts than other manufacturers. It's less sustain but more damage. A lot of ships do 30-60% more damage with power to weapons, but pretty much every Oberon ship doubles their damage or more when you drop the hammer. THIS APPLIES ESPECIALLY TO THE TAC CRUISER. The T2 tac triples its heal output with power to weapons, and even though that goes down across tiers the T4 still goes from 100% base to 240% base (+140%) when you hit PtW (for comparison, the Koschei gets a 55% power to weapons bonus at the same tier). They're not necessarily sustain ships, but they typically have quite good burst performance. Add that to their typically higher maneuverability and you have ships that are good at flanks and hit-and-run scenarios.

Maybe make an engineering briefing that does something like +5% shield effectiveness? That's all that's coming to mind right now

The short version is it always did that, but when they went to tiers they decided self debuffs were too complicated for new players.

The movement debuff is far less the issue than the drain debuff, since the lack of drain on RF3 lets you chain rapidfire shots with power to weapons.

I still vote that Adrenaline Shot be changed to a fixed amount of energy gained instead of scaling with the amount of healing. That will let you make it a fun and useful amount without allowing the ridiculous levels of stacking that show up in certain loadouts and comps.