Because everyone knows Advent aren't the masters at shield buffs and mitigation, and so nobody in their right mind would want to bypass their #1 defense entirely, right?

I have seen and done this on several occasions. I always max phase missiles.

You are correct in that not all of the damage hits the hull, but the more research you do the more damage is done to the hull vs mitigation against the shields. I have always started with the missile cap ship as it annihilates the militia frigates guarding planets, especially the cobalts as they have shields.

Phase missiles are extremely important playing against the Advent. Advent are the shield masters. I would like to know that the majority of my damage is going to the part of their ship that can't regenerate as fast (nor can it be restored by abilities) and is quite a bit less substantial then their shields. This works just as good against TEC opponents.

With the Vasari, the Assailant (LRM) frigate is formidable opponent along with bombers.

If you would like to play sometime, my ICO screen name is Caboaddict.

What he means:

Lets say an enemy ship has 100 hull and 100 shields. That is unlikely since most ships have in fact more hull then shields but lets just assume its 100 / 100.
If you have a 40% chance to bypass shields and do 1 damage per hit then after 100 hits the enemy will have 60 hull and 40 shields left.
After a few more hits the hull and the shields both will go down until the shields are depleted and then, later, the hull gives up.

The point is: Since the enemy ship will lose all its shields before dying anyway the shield penetration simply makes no sense. It would die just as fast with no shield penetration at all.
It is only useful in 100% missile fleets and with enemies that have a lot more shields then hull.

you got to take other factors into account, as in shields can be restored by specific abilities (advent mothership), things like massive shield projection from the guardian and a minor thing how shields regen much faster than hull for caps, so if your doing 70% shield and 30% hull, the amount of regen is like 2.55 instead of 3 however this point is minor.

The thing about phase missiles is that they can bypass mitigation. Thats what their strenght is.

Lets say you have a ship that does 100 damage a shot and you have a sheild phase chance of 25% and are attacking a ship wich due to other attacks on it has got shield mitigation at 50%.

Your ship will have 3 out of every 4 attacks hit the shield and do 50 damage (100 -50% mitigation) and have 1 out of every 4 attacks do 100 damage.

This means that it will do 250 damage in 4 shots as opposed to 200 damage done by the same ship with 0% phase chance.

So when attacking a ship with 50% mitigation x% phase chance = x% damage increese.

Focused fire on shields is inefficient.

Thanks to mitigation, you're wasting a huge amount of damage when you take down those shields through massive damage. With maxed out phase missiles, you don't have to force fire on single units to kill them.

Since no one has mentioned it yet, try killing a high level capship group with two dunovs in it. You can do it with phase missiles just fine, but those dunovs can negate a few hundred fleet points in damage without even trying.

Phase missiles make focus fire worth it.

A ship allready has a base shield mitigation of 15% and just 2 ships fireing at it will easily increase it to 25-30%. So it doesent take a huge amount of ships to get mitigation to high levels.

So unless u can make sure that no enemy ship is targeted by more then 1-2 of your units then focus fire is not such a bad ideea when you have phase missiles.

And against the advent, the shield recharge ability is a LOT more powerfull when it restores 10 frigates being attacked by 10 dps then 1 frigate being attacked by 100dps.

According to the manual mitigation also works when the shields are down! damage to the hulls is STILL mitigated by shield mitigation.

This means there is absolutely no mitigation benefit unless it specifically bypasses mitigation and doesn't say so.

The only instance where I can think will be useful is when fighting an enemy capital ship with superior forces and it keeps on escaping.

It takes the exact same time to kill the opponent regardless of shield bypass, but if the enemy escapes halfway through the battle then he is more severely damaged if you had shield penetration, and will take much longer to heal.
Shields also regenerate during battle faster then armor, but I am not sure how that impacts things. (I can see it doing both bad and good things...)

Lets say a 3000/3000 capital ship escapes after taking 2000 damage. If you had no penetration it escaped with 3000/1000 left and will heal in 30 or so seconds to full power.
If you have 30% penetration then it is at 2400/1600. It's shields will recover in 30 seconds. But the armor will take several minutes to heal...

So lets say it intercepted again... and takes another 2000 damage before escaping. With no penetration it is simply again at 3000/1000... and will very quickly recover.
With shield penetration it had a little time to heal and is now at 2600/3000 (assuming just enough time to heal about 200 hull, it could be less or more). It will escape with 2000/1600...

Thus slowly over time it whittle away more health off of escaping capital ships... This can be useful... whittle away at the enemy capital strength, and then attack his homeworld... He will most likely recall his capital ships and you will have a much easier time to pop them and escape/finish him off due to them being already damaged...
I am not sure if this benefit is realistic marginal or significant... I haven't play tested enough.

Ofcourse, the enemy's research also matters... if the enemy maxed out their hull bonuses but didnt research shields it matters little, but if the enemy maxed out shields but didn't touch hull then it will be more effective.

Yes the second ship do 200 damage pher 4 missles ... untill it depletes the shields and then it will hit the hull and do full damage pher missle or 400 pher 4 missles. The first ship will still have to deal with shields and will still do 250 damage pher 4 missles...

Phase missles bypassing shields can be usefull but i dont think the investement is worth it

would you rather have the ability to do some damage to the hull before you destroy the shields, or would you just rather have 20% more damage and kill that target 20% faster.

and focusing targets is always much more effective especcially if you have slow regeneration like shields do.

The point of it is, When the shields are taken out by your other ships, the hull is already damaged so the other ships can take it out faster.

I apparently don't understand the idea of shield mitigation. I *do* understand that it mitigates a certain amount of damage coming in. What I don't understand what this has to do with focus firing, how the shield mitigation ramps up to high levels, etc. Can someone explain this in more detail?

Thanks.

Wrong. Sorry, but that's flat out wrong. Perhaps it's a math error, missiles do more damage to hull unless I'm mistaken, but with maxed phasing missiles my fleets drop enemy ships long before their shields drop, Advent in particular but also TEC. My fleets were built from phase gates so they're far from 100% missile. Math < Actual gameplay, and in actual gameplay phase missiles are awesome.

Shield mitigation is an anti-focus firing measure. As ships take damage, their mitigation % increases until it hits a cap. This percentage is reduced from all incoming damage, regardless of the status of shields (a ship with collapsed shields still benefit from mitigation - in this sense the name is a bit misleading.)



Yeah, phase missiles bypass mitigation.



You're right in a sense - when phase missiles bypass shields they also bypass damage mitigation, doing relatively more hull damage. This can probably result in ships dropping before their shields fail, especially against units with strong shields when compared to the hull.