Malice + Brilliance technical details

First of all Brilliance does 250 damage per second and has an 8 second duration, not 250 damage total. Secondly it has a narrow AOE along the beam which may or may not propagate with malice, I have no idea, easy to test though.

Think of it like this, most ships have a total shield and hull HP less than 1000, when 25% of 2000 total damage comes their way (500 damage) it hurts a whole lot, when another round of 500 damage comes their way, plus the normal damage your other ships in the fleet have already propagated, their fleet is mincemeat.

Cleansing brilliance does indeed propogate with malice (at least it did in 1.02)

For example, fire of malice to surround a cap ship and a load of frigates. Fire off brilliance at the capital ship, and the result is:

Ships within the sphere/cone of brilliances damage will take brilliance damage
Ships afflicted with mallice will take a % damage of brilliance (% depends on malice level)
Ships within the sphere of brilliance and afflicted with malice will take brilliance damage + malice % propogation damage (% depends on malice level)

This is one of, if not the main reason for this win; WWW Link

Such a powerful combo, if not the most powerful. The ability to take out a whole fleet in seconds with the only catch being a level 6 Radiance or two, but so rarely mentioned compared to the inferior vengeance/malice setup. This is probably why it seems like it has a secondary effect, when in fact, it's just generally quite devastating when combo'd.

I tested this in game quite a long time ago (1.02) by casting malice on a moving fleet and then cleasing brilliance on a ship under malice effect, and the capital which was also under the effect of malice took no damage at all. (Yes, I only took my progenitor and radiance and charged into 30 ships to test this)

A friend of mine tested this on his own (post 1.03) and reconfirmed my findings.

I am surprised the amount of decent players declaring how CB and malice works wonder toegether. Each of them is very powerful on its own, but there is no synergy between these two abilities... Unless you are referring to the fact that half of the opposing fleet got obliterated by malice while the other half got wiped out by CB, and you are left with nothing to fight against.

On a side note, Matyrdom does not work with malice neither, dont bother ~.~

I wonder about the circumstances of Erress1108's findings. I've had wonderful, sometimes absurd results with this combination, it's one of the reasons I often pick a Radiance instead of a Progenitor as my opening Capital, since the quicker that Radiance builds up to Level 6, the better. Level 3 Malice can come at level 5 for the ship, but you need that Level 6 for Cleansing Brilliance, after all.

The tactic I use, which has worked since 1.01 and worked as of two days ago, is this. Engage an enemy fleet, and wait until they are in a fairly small total area. Cast Malice on a central unit and immediately follow with casting Cleansing Brilliance on the ship with the highest hitpoints in the fleet, preferably a Capital (before casting make sure the Radiance is facing the target, otherwise by the time it turns Malice may run out).

The Cleansing Brilliance will deal about 2,000 damage to the enemy capital ship, and all of the surrounding ships will have about 160 damage for Level 1 Malice, 320 damage for Level 2 Malice, or the big prize, 500 damage for Level 3 Malice. With level three and the normal damage of your ships you can often kill off the majority of Frigate class ships in one hit.

I can say, without any doubt in my mind, that these abilities work in concert. It can be an almost overpowered combination if an enemy lacks ships to steal antimatter or disable your ships, because of the obscene amount of damage it can inflict (especially with more than one Radiance).

I wonder if Erres1108 encounter some kind of bug, or mistimed the combination, which I do fairly often because I miscalculate how long it will take the Radiance to fire, or the Mothership is too far behind and Malice expires before I'm ready. Done right it can be overwhelming pain, poorly timed and it can lead to your precious ships getting focus fired on and wiped out.

It does seem like those 2 abilities could be overpowered. I won my 1v9 hard AI pretty much by this combination alone. I'd be outnumbered literally like 10 to 1 and I'd take out over half the enemy fleet by malice and brilliance. I had about 3 groups of Radiances and Motherships that could do this too.

I know people are gonna say, well thats vs. computer, but I don't see how that could be that avoidable in a big fight online either. But I haven't seen it used properly online yet so I can't really say, nor have I got the chance to myself.

I don't think it's overpowered mostly because it relies on two ships (sometimes three) and if one of them is either destroyed (focus fire kills capitals fast by the time you have Level 6 ships, often) or simply disabled (which a human will do) the entire party comes to a halt.

Such reliance on so few ships can be a major disadvantage, an enemy with a ton of LRMs or Heavy Cruisers and a capital won't cry a river if you kill some of them or even their capital, but your loss of just of these ships can be a crippling blow (Resurrection could work here, but most players seem to target the Mothership first because of the Shield Restoring and Malice abilities). Ships can be replaced quickly and easily, experienced capitals can't be. I love the combination, and against the AI it can be crazy, but against a person who knows the game and knows what to target, they can often stop it cold.

Without a doubt one of the strongest combinations, but also can be countered with a variety of abilities before the two can let loose their pain.

I am inclined to believe that I was not experiencing a bug as my friend reproduced the same results.

I am not claiming that CB and malice do not work together "from the look of it" from experience, I specifically did a comp stomp (and reloaded multiple times/ check replay to validate) for this purpose.

Also, please be aware that CB has an area effect. To properly check the effect of malice on CB, it might make more sense to
1) malice on enemy fleet;
2) time CB so that it hits the closest maliced ship (preferrably from max range to minimize direct fire damage) immediately after malice lands, and
3) Check the HP of the furthest malice'd ship

Thanks, that helps a lot. One more question - is malice and CB damage affected my mitigation?

It's hard to tell if Brilliance propagates through Malice. I've found what works best, if I only have 1 Radiance with Brilliance, is to use Malice on the enemy fleet and then launch a conventional attack against enemy ships. Let damage propagation soften them up a bit. Then after a round of Malice, I use another round of Malice and then use Brilliance. If my shot is well placed, the result is usually the near total destruction of the opposing fleet.

I know for a fact Malice and CB work together. I took out 3/4s of a pirate base in one blow. There's no other explanation for seeing that many explosions in unison.

as an equally cool, though totally unrelated side note: similarly spectacular results can be achieved with the Volatile Nanites ability of the Vasari's Kortul Devastator battle ship. When used on a particularly large cluster of ships it will often generate a critical mass of chain reaction explosions. Once you take out ship (or sometimes you need to take out 2 or 3 ships to get it rolling) the entire cluster of ships will spontaneously explode regardless of how many of them there were. I've taken out up to 80 ships at a pirate base like this in under 10 seconds.

it definately works. I've tested in single player.

I saved right before I fired off my malice and brilliance. The first test was without malice. The second was reloaded and tested again with malice. There was a very very noticable difference. So noticable in fact, that I managed to kill a computer on unfair mode using just 2 motherships and 3 radiances (and no other units at all, except to defend against annoying siege frigate spam)

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/304319
Flat wrong. One only has to look at the screens in https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/304319 to see why, specifically the 10th and 11th.

I had the AI send a massive fleet against me last night, 8 cap ships and probably two hundred frigates. I only had my Progenitor, Radiance and a Rapture, along with a few dozen frigates and cruisers. I had never tried the cleansing brilliance/malice combo before, and most of his frigates were all in one big group. I tossed malice on them and targeted the cruiser all the way to the rear of the formation with cleansing brilliance. 8 seconds later most of his fleet was gone.    I thought it might be an effective tactic, but damn.

CB alone does something along the line of 2k damage, it's too easy to destroy an entire fleet with CB alone if you cast it right and the enemy fleet is in a tight formation.

The fact that it is far easier to get a false positive result in the test (any direct fire damage will be propagated to an absurd amount, CB effectiveness largely dependent on fleet positioning, etc. ) compared to a negative result (zero damage done to a malice'd ship) makes me a bit inclined towards non-propagation. And that most of the tests you conducted involve something like "very noticeable", "XXX screenshot". To be honest, in the first test I did, I did go like "oh sh*t, this combo is imbalanced!" after CB killed half of the enemy fleet. But after a few more tries and careful positioning, it was apparent (to me at least) that CB damage was not propagated by malice, at least on the enemy capital ship.

Here is what I did:
1) phase into enemy planet with progenitor and radiance
2) Kite enemy fleet with progenitor (it was level 9 so it takes a long time to kill ~.~
3) cast CB on closest enemy ship (radiance starts to turn and aim)
4) 1-2 seconds before CB is casted, use malice on enemy fleet (most of enemy fleet now shines with malice effect, including capital and that frontal ship CB is being casted upon)
5) Check HP of enemy capital after CB is over

I repeated my test several times and I can tell you how Exactly (not approximately, not noticeably) how many HP the enemy capital lost every single time. It lost 0. Zero. Nada. Either Malice effect is not propagated to capital ships, or it does not propagate CB. I am inclined towards the later, as it does not propagate matyrdom neither. My personal belief is that malice only propagates direct fire damage, not ability damage.


You can clear a pirate base with ~25 illums and a level 5 progenitor in less than half a minute. In the time it takes the radiance to cast and finish casting CB, the pirate base should have well been wiped out regardless of the presence of your radiance.



You can easily reproduce that particular screenshot to that effect with malice alone.

Obviously my test was done in 1.02, so I can't post the replay I did my test with... it was deleted long ago anyhow ~.~ If any of you have a replay of the test you conducted, I would really appreciate it if you can share it here.

My friend who tested the same thing independent of me was Ganandorf Maybe he could show up and tell us what he did with his tests?

Ares

no no, cast malice BEFORE you cast brilliance. Malice button first. Cleansing button second. From my tests, one case some ships got damaged, in the other case they were not. They also had the exact same formation and all variables were constant (both situations were loaded form a save file).

I should also add that I've also tested it's propagation onto structures and that also works.

edit: I just saw your false positive comment. I'll have to test more to see how much damage got carried over. I neglected the fact that radiance may be shooting while brilliance is in effect. I don't remember exactly how much damage was propagated however. Probably easier to just test versus human opponents in a test game.

I've been reading this quite a few times but feel really stupid and still don't quite understand how this works.

As far as I gathered, malice propagates damage? What does that mean? It spreads damage? what damage? The damage done by the target of malice or the damage done from the fleet? Or is it some sort of chain effect sort of thing...

And brilliance is an AOE sort of damage thing? Is it a beam or just an AOE thing? Is it cast on other people?

I'm a relatively new TEC player so haven't really had the chance to test it out though I've had it used against me so was thinking about how it worked.

Hope to avoid a flame, quite new with this game and the manual didn't quite explain it clearly.

I've done a ton of testing on this to satisfy my own curiosity, and to try to figure out how to best use these ships and abilities. Glad this thread has come back. Look out, this post isn't a short one, but hoping some of the other Advent players can benefit from it (already have a rough time against TEC's super economy and Vasari's Dark Armada, whatever helps the fight).

To answer, reubenyap though, Malice causes all of the units hit by it to share a portion of the damage they take with all of the other units effected by it. It can be cast on any unit in an enemy fleet, and it has a nice little area of effect and it can cover a good portion of a clustered fleet. Units afflicted by Malice will appear to glow white, if you zoom in there is an effect with hands moving towards the ships, just in case you're in doubt.

The percent of the damage shared depends on the level of the Malice (Level 1 causes 8%, Level 2 causes 16%, Level 3 causes 25%). So at Level 3, if a fleet is hit by Malice, and Ship A takes 100 damage, Ships B, C, D (and so on) all will take 25 damage (however this 25 appears to also be affected by mitigation, so the damage is further reduced). The damage that the other ships take as a result of Malice sharing damage (the 25 damage in this case) isn't further shared and propagated among the fleet into infinity, but damage from other attacks for the duration of Malice will be shared similarly.

The effective result of Malice is a massive increase in the overall dps your fleet is capable of for the duration of the Malice (20 seconds). It's during this window that Cleansing Brilliance shows it's mettle.

Cleansing Brilliance is an attack that causes 250 damage a second, for 8 seconds, for a total of 2,000 damage to any given target (in a very notable, very bright beam fired from the Radiance). Ideally this attack should be timed inside the 20 second window of Malice, because it I'm very sure now it does propagate some of the damage. Cleansing Brilliance however is effected by Shield Mitigation, so doing 2,000 damage is usually only in an ideal world, and because it does not occur instantly, but instead over 8 seconds the enemy ship may start at little mitigation but end up maxing it out by the end of the attack. And since Capitals are generally the often targets (as they will not die from a Brilliance hit), they may be able to mitigate half or more of the damage they take from the attack.

So effectively the damage shared is often quite less than 25% of 2,000 (when I was testing the capital I was testing on maxed out at 68% mitigation, so a lot was lost). Messing around with this, it seems that Heavy Cruisers may often be better targets for the attack, since they have lower mitigation caps than a leveled capital ship, last I checked. Combined with the mitigation that each of the unit under the Malice may retain, it can be the case that far less than ideal 500 damage is shared.

But something I only realized because of this thread and honestly never noticed because of my targeting priorities and the chaos of battles. Cleansing Brilliance, despite being a focused beam, will damage all of the ships that get in it's way and it also has what seems to be a nice little area outside the visible beam in which ships also take damage. These ships all take the 250 damage a second of the beam as long as they stay there, and the damage these ships take count as a separate attack to Malice, resulting in 25% of thee damage they take as well being shared. Cleansing Brilliance has a rather impressive range, and aimed properly you can hit more than one ship with the beam, and each will spread the damage to the beam, and even after all the mitigation, you can be looking at sharing hundreds and hundreds of damage (a well placed beam in my test did over 1,000 damage to ships that were not even in the beam).

From all this I wish I could edit my previous post.

In practice, it seems most efficient to not aim it at a Capital Ship, but if possible a ship towards the back of a fleet (ideally a cruiser though with more than 1,500 hit points, otherwise you still risk killing it and cutting short the damage given). A Capital Ship towards the front of a fleet is the juiciest target, but it will mitigate more of the damage and the beam will pass through fewer units and inflict far less damage to the ships who are under the spell of the Malice.

This is more risky though, both Malice and Cleansing Brilliance have impressive ranges, but bringing them closer to the enemy fleet in order to hit a further back ship puts them at risk to focus fire from the entire enemy fleet, or more alarmingly, abilities that may disable one of them or their antimatter abilities, either of which done at a bad time on either of your ships will destroy the combo.

If anyone's done further testing that can elaborate on this, I would be interested in it. I never realized all of this, and really was under the impression that it was just either Cleansing Brilliance, Malice, or both not being effected by Shield Mitigation that could cause such massive hurt to an enemy fleet. Turns out I was quite wrong on that, but properly aiming and timing this ability is really is crucial, a lot more work than just focus firing a blob of Heavy Cruisers, but also great payoff.

*Note. All my testing was done in 1.03 against a Vasari AI. My fleet was present (loaded up a save for them) but my ships, including the Progenitor and the Radiance had Auto-Attack turned off and Guardians using Repulsion in order to avoid dealing damage that could taint my results. If anyone tests anything and comes up with contradictory results I would be interested to hear about them and the circumstances they occurred under. I have a bunch of saves from right before my various tests so I can retest easily (or provide pictures, which I resisted doing here) in case there is something that doesn't seem to fit.

I'm not 100% sure on the Malice damage being effected by Shield Mitigation, the numbers get so fumbled during a Cleansing Brilliance attack (the mitigation on the target goes through the roof). But all of the units under Malice seem to take less than the 25% of the damage ultimately taken by the ship subjected to Brilliance, and all of them have their mitigation levels raised higher than they were before the attack, so I assume that means that mitigation is occuring on thier end as well.

@RedMaw

Thanks for your testing. You've confirmed how I thought brilliance works, but Erres' post made me second guess myself and I haven't really had time to test it. My experience with brilliance has been that the larger your fleet, the more damage it does. This can only happen if the damage is propagated not just from the main target, but from all targets in the AOE as well. I remember one battle against the computer on unfair where 1 radiance and 1 mothership completely took out an entire fleet consisting of something like 30 hcs and a whole whack of light frigates and lrms. They didn't have a cap with them so I aimed at thei hcs. As you said, it may have resulted in more damage due to less shield mitigation.

One question I have though, is if you use malice and then use repel, the ships that you hit with malice will still be glowing with the malice effect, but may be out of range of the initial malice cast. I wonder if malice still works after a repel; ie. I wonder if malice always works when the effect is glowing. I think I've done this before and it does work, if I can recall correctly

Seeing how this save of mine will be useless in a few days and I have Guardians, I gave the Repulsion a test. Having Vasari though as the enemy turned into a massive pain, the Subverters caught my Guardians several times in their paralyzing ability.

From what I can tell, the effect remains regardless of the distance (I hit Repulsion during one of the tests and caught some carriers who were moving parallel to my Guardians and it sent them way out there, was kinda pretty) and along with the effect it says "Damage Propagation 25%" in the info card. However, they only appear to actually share damage with those units who remain in the immediate vicinity. This Transporter eluded nearly all the damage, but this Overseer and his companion just barely survived the encounter. A nearby missile turret took similar damage while the vast majority of transports took little or none (particularly the ones that wound up far).

The Transporters that were far off remained glowing, but were taking no damage from the Cleansing Brilliance beyond what some of them caught at the start. I wasn't sure if the effect was just for show for the units who were flung far off, so I dispatched some fighters to the area where the Carriers kept ending up, and attacked one with all of them. A nearby Transporter took some minor damage (I was using Fighters, my Bombers were killed almost to the last, presumably while sitting around with auto-attack off and in hold position) despite not being under any direct attack from the fighters (just a nearby one) so I believe it was receiving Malice propagation from it.

This was a pain to coordinate so (ships often flew off not in clusters but far apart) and my fighters were being annoying getting into position due to the Z Axis. I didn't get any pictures of it, but I did it twice with similar results. Unless the fighters were inexplicably attacking nearby targets instead of the one I ordered them to, that's the only way to explain the small amounts of damage it took.

Long story short: The Malice appears to stay in place regardless of distance, however the ships effected by it seem to only share damage with ships under the Malice who also are close to one another (perhaps in a radius the same as the original Malice effect, I don't know). So don't spread a fleet to the wind if you're going to be using Malice and doing high damage to individual targets.

TheRedMaw: Thanks a lot for that! It was very helpful.

I believe I understand it now

See if I got this right!
In a nutshell:
Brilliance: Beam that damages anything in its path and deals damage over time. It also has a slight AOE around the beam's path that cause the same amount of damage.
Malice: AoE effect castable on enemy ships that causes damage done to a target of malice to spread a portion of it to ships around the target ship.

Brilliance + malice: Beam if it catches a few ships in its path and AOE will spread some of this massive damage in an AOE around it causing serious damage.

Your second post made me a bit confused though.

Quote:
Long story short: The Malice appears to stay in place regardless of distance, however the ships effected by it seem to only share damage with ships under the Malice who also are close to one another (perhaps in a radius the same as the original Malice effect, I don't know). So don't spread a fleet to the wind if you're going to be using Malice and doing high damage to individual targets.
End quote

I didn't quite understand this. Are you saying that those that are not the direct target of Malice but instead caught in its beam also have a Malice effect around these ships as well?

Malice effects all ships struck by it equally, so even though you designate a target (preferably in the center of an enemy fleet) all of those afflicted by Malice are affected in the same way. There doesn't seem to be any core or any single important ship, all of those caught by it will be sharing and taking damage the same with nearby ships also under the spell, regardless of if they were the direct target or where where they may end up after the ability is cast (so long as they're caught in the initial casting).

I guess it could be imagined like this. Ships A, B, C and D are all hit by Malice, and then flung away by a Guardian using Repulsion. But ships A and B stay together and end up on one side of the gravity well, while C and D get thrown to the other side of the well. Now, if you attack Ship A while the Malice is still in effect, ship B will share the damage, but ships C and D on the other side of the well (although still under Malice) should not take damage from this. If you attack ship C, ship D will take some damage so long as it is still close, but A and B on the other side of the well will be fine.

Any ships not caught under the Malice spell won't take or share damage, though. So if a a random is passing by A and B as they're being attacked and still under Malice's spell, it shouldn't be afflicted with any damage that A and B may be sharing between them, nor should it share any of the damage it may take.

So from all I can tell, you can think of each ship under Malice as having an invisible circle around it in which other ships also under Malice will be sharing damage with it (ships not stuck by the original Malice attack won't be affected in any way). If these ships leave each other's sphere of influence, the Malice effect will remain, but will only be sharing with those ships that have remained in the immediate vicinity of one another.

Bottom line, if you're struck by Malice, spreading out may be worth a try if you're expecting Cleansing Brilliance or a lot of focus fire.. All of the ships hit by Malice will still be sharing damage with other nearby ships hit by it, but the less in a tight area, the less ships that will be in one another's spheres of influence and sharing damage with each other.

If you're using Malice, try to keep the damage heavy attacks towards the center of the enemy group hit by it. Aiming for ones on the flanks may result in ships on the other end of an enemy formation under Malice not being affected because they strayed too far from the ship you're attacking. This may also explain Erres1108's tests results of some of his target ships in a moving fleet receiving no damage, despite being visibly under the Malice spell.

I think that made more sense.

Yes I've got it

I did think about spreading out but 8 secs? It takes...like most of that time to even turn lol.

Maybe in this case, prevention better than cure.

Well, Malice lasts a full 20 seconds, so there is some time to try to disperse during it, or even during a Cleansing Brilliance strike. Although with it's short cool down time it's possible to take multiple hits in fairly rapid succession, but between Shield Restore and Malice, a Mothership can burn through it's Antimatter fairly quickly.

A better solution though would be avoid bunching up too heavily to begin with (most people just blob their fleet and move it to attack, Heavy Cruisers in particular tend to end up in tight balls), or trying to break your fleet up into two or three groups to attack with when against an Advent that you expect heavy use of Malice from (it's safe to assume multiple Motherships will be using a lot of Malice, a single one though can be disabled with the right abilities for significant periods of time). TEC and Vasari in particular can afford to spread their fleets out a bit, since they're less dependent on various passive abilities and support ships for their hitting and staying power.

Advent fleets though have a tendency to be very clustered, and they really need to be together supporting one another to fight at their fullest. Their support ships and auras allow for them to have very strong, survivable fleets, but also require the fleet to stay fairly tight. Which ultimately would make them very susceptible to Malice, as well as other area of effect attacks such as Subverters and Volatile Nanites from Vasari or Missile Barrages and EMP Bombs from TEC.

There are a lot of interesting abilities and facets to the game. It's a shame that so many games are decided so early with just LRMs and basic frigates.