Turns out that is intentional. Community manager EmptyTuxedo confirmed in yesterday's live stream that players are not meant to earn enough credits to compensate the purchase. As to why this is he made two remarkable statements:

The battle bonus is meant to act as a currency sink.
The high amount is supposed to incentivise players to queue up for different fleet queues until the cooldown has expired.

That would be great and all, if T3 was fun to play. It's always been the devs' and/or suits' objective to get players to play multiple fleets. I don't agree with that, but it was okay under the previous tier separations. Now? Veteran (T3) is "below my pay grade", in terms of the level I play at. 3/5 ships that were in my Vet fleet (Vindicta, Koschei, Jutland) aren't available at T3, so why would I want to play T3? It baffles me that I'm being forced away from the part of the game I want to play. Additionally: Why are high-level players being incentivized to descend to lower ranks? That's a recipe for seal-clubbing.

I don't want to be told that I should stop playing my fleet of good ships and go do something less fun. Anyone else remember the maintenance fee?

DN_EmptyTuxedo#3505 posted (#post-235318) said:

We are releasing a hotfix tomorrow that addresses much of the critical player feedback we have seen regarding our most recent update including: reducing Legendary Battle Bonus costs, Rupture Ram damage, restoring the loadout tooltip from Orbit and Respawn screens, and giving Tartarus Missile its pre-patch effects (accidentally applied Rupture).

The team is still investigating 'Vettes Armor Amp and other gameplay inconsistencies based on player feedback and will be making further updates to address these areas. We thought it best to put out what we can in a timely fashion and continue to make improvements as they are available, rather than delay to fix everything at once.

Glad to see that the team is on top of things. This is an excellent response time to some of the top issues; please pass along my appreciation!

In addition to all of that, this update has somehow decreased game performance on my PC. I play on a laptop, but I've never had any framerate or performance issues aside from a little bit of mouse lag in the hangar. I played a single vet match and I had to turn the resolution down from 100% to about 80% to make the framerate bearable, and the mouse lag is also up dramatically in the hangar. The hangar, by the way, sucks up 95% of my GPU doing nothing. I can deal with so-so graphics if the performance is good, but Dreadnought is dangerously tetering on the edge for me right now.

Besides that, agreed on all your points. I'm going to give the update a couple weeks to settle in but I don't anticipate my attitude changing. Quote from my other post on vettes:

Whatever debates were had prior to this update, I think we can all agree that right now this update has most definitely made Corvettes OP. I've said over the past couple years that I didn't think vettes should have the health regen ability because it gives them a staying power I don't belive they should have, but that's debatable. Armor amp on a vette? Why? With all due respect to the devs, why was this considered a good idea? I'm genuinely curious to hear that answer.

I didn't think Corvettes were OP, but I also didn't think they were underdogs either. Powerful in the right hands for sure, but then so is any ship. I haven't played since the update yet, but I'm definitely going to load up Armor Amp on my Medusa and have a look for myself. If it doesn't actually improve my performance, then I'll take it all back. But if it does? Then you can expect some gameplay videos of it.

Oh, and let's not forget that Desperate Measures still exists (assuming it hasn't been changed, someone correct me if I'm wrong). 15 seconds of near immunity => Health brought down to pop DM => 15 secons of near immunity. And then there's still the vette's 0% bleedthrough shields, which with judicious use could give you even more immunity.

Whatever debates were had prior to this update, I think we can all agree that right now this update has most definitely made Corvettes OP. I've said over the past couple years that I didn't think vettes should have the health regen ability because it gives them a staying power I don't belive they should have, but that's debatable. Armor amp on a vette? Why? With all due respect to the devs, why was this considered a good idea? I'm genuinely curious to hear that answer.

I didn't think Corvettes were OP, but I also didn't think they were underdogs either. Powerful in the right hands for sure, but then so is any ship. I haven't played since the update yet, but I'm definitely going to load up Armor Amp on my Medusa and have a look for myself. If it doesn't actually improve my performance, then I'll take it all back. But if it does? Then you can expect some gameplay videos of it.

Oh, and let's not forget that Desperate Measures still exists (assuming it hasn't been changed, someone correct me if I'm wrong). 15 seconds of near immunity => Health brought down to pop DM => 15 secons of near immunity. And then there's still the vette's 0% bleedthrough shields, which with judicious use could give you even more immunity.

Brother Belial#4215 posted (#post-234908) said:

DN_Sean [developer] 23 hours ago
Update for our plans regarding the next update:

Corvette changes are gonna spend a bit more time in the oven before we release it into the wild. Probably not coming in the update planned for next week, but in an update shortly after (more details as we have them).

We are also keeping Heavy Cloak in the Primary Slot while the rest of the cloak modules are moving to Internal. Heavy Cloak in combination with other Primary modules creates some unintended gameplay results.

Thanks!

I'm relieved that Heavy Cloak's staying put. Assuming none of my other modules get moved around, it means I can keep my favorite Medusa build. Although, Heavy Cloak + ABW would be a beastly combo... that's probably what he's referring to.

Let me preface this by saying I just got back to playing after several months, and I'm aware of the changes that have been made. In the interest of fairness, I tried out the game myself first before making this post.

I'm not going to beat around the bush, battles are quiet and lifeless.

1. These enormous vessels make almost no noise as they move compared to what I remember, which is more than a little ridiculous. We're flying giant ships in atmosphere for the most part, I should be able to feel the roaring engines and the lateral thrusters.


2. Weapons are... subdued? The sounds aren't bad, but they have no place on the ships in Dreadnought. Where's the cataclysmic booming of massive guns?


3. Restating this: I haven't analyzed every little thing to paint a whole picture, but battles feel lifeless and there's very little weight to any of the new sound effects.

• First ship I played was the Muro, and boy does it suck. I went in expecting the crude crackling of a ship-killing bolt of what I assume to be electricity, instead I'm met with a light whiff. It's a freaking lighting bolt - where's the thunder?


• Next up was my Medusa, which has retained the same jackhammer-ish noise. I'm glad this wasn't touched.


• The Vindicta was neutered hard. It just kind of slips through the air and the main gun vastly underwhelms. The old noise was a herald of demise to any corvette in sight, I don't know what they were going for with this new one. It does not convey the Vindicta's message, which is "Hey buddy, wanna die?"


• Jutland. Why... I'll be the first to say I rarely used its primary weapon because it's trash at any range, but at least it has it for keeping pressure at a distance. Plus it had this incredible booming that you'd expect from the huge deck guns of a true dreadnought. Instead, the main guns now make a whooshy noise that just doesn't convey any sense of grandeur.

I can't speak for every sound effect and from what I've read some ships were improved, but overall it seems to me that changes were made for the sake of making changes. These behemoths should be loud, raw, and visceral. My unsolicited advice: Revert all sound effects to their previous state. Then look carefully for feedback on which particular new noises people liked and which ones they miss after the reversion.

Patrazor#2302 posted (#post-225205) said:

they don't want it taken away because it's so strong and they don't want others to say that they only do so well because they have the ABW.

I don't use ABW and I do great but... keep telling yourself that.

The Fulgora is pretty meh for a T3 ship, but it's not bad if you know how to play it. The Medusa is really a much better ship. Take Lando's advice on this: If you're having trouble making it work, play a support role. Also pretty much everything Konril said is applicable. Fulgora starts out with a subpar loadout IMO, and your best option is to rush to Medusa if you want to do well. Neither ship plays like the other two types of Corvettes, and it takes some time to learn how to play them.

There is one thing I want to point out:

Light Cloak will allow you to sneak up to point blank almost anybody without being noticed. I occasionally encounter someone who seems to be able to see me just fine but in most cases out of sight is apparently out of mind.

This is true for people who don't pay attention to their surroundings (which is like >50% of players if we're being honest) but if you were to stop and look around, you can fairly easily see a ship using the Light Cloak. Even Heavy Cloak isn't truly invisible and experienced players can see right through it. But it does still help for sneaking up behind T3's and getting the jump on them.

For the Oberon Corvettes my preferred secondary/perimeter combo is Drain Torpedo and Disruptor Pulse. They temporarily cripple your target's modules and shields, which is a big advtange to have. I believe in a tactical approach over a pure damage build for the Fulgora/Medusa because they're built very differently from other Corvettes, namely that they lack speed for hit-and-runs. See the guide in my sig for more info.

layinout#5947 posted (#post-179370) said:

I just noticed that my avatar has changed. How did that happen?

They just upgraded the forums and it reset everyone's avatars. You can go into your forum settings and change it to whatever you had before.

Reading over the analysis posts does make me think this is going to be the Age of the Arty. Quite honestly nothing in this patch will hurt my playstyles, I'm actually getting a buff here because I play Muro, cloak Medusa, and warp/broadside Jutland.

I want to reiterate what someone else said that at some point, the nerfing needs to stop. You will never reach a balance point by nerfing everything, you'll just enter an endless cycle of trying to nerf things that were fine until their counters got nerfed. When you have a problem with something that's imbalanced, you can either nerf it or introduce/buff its counter. A nerf takes care of the problem passively, at the cost of reducing build diversity and skill. A counter takes care of the problem actively, at the cost of getting complaints.

When you leave a problem to be solved actively, it takes engagement and some amount of skill on the part of the player. There will be the people, of course, who for whatever reason won't or can't use the counters effectively but for those who can (most players) the game becomes more alive instead of a bland wasteland of nerfed modules. You don't have to never balance anything but consider making counters instead.

Perhaps buff nukes instead? High burst damage (nukes) can defeat a heal ball. So then if you give it a buff, people who can pick out the healer can explode the heal ball. Does the nuke become OP then? Give anti-nuke lasers a serious buff then. And so on... people will feel powerful, not powerless.

So you might have a heal ball, but it gets taken out by the player running nuke. Then you might have the nuke guy running amok, but a watchful player who knows how and when to use the laser takes them out. So then you're back to the heal ball because the nukes can't touch it? Corvette with disruptor pulse sneaks in and freezes his modules, allowing nuke guy to drop one. But wait, somebody had stasis pulse to counter him, so he's dead in the water.

If you just nerf, you've solved the problem but you eliminated all those tactics that make a game skill-based.