Tec's way to counter MB:

practically none,  hoshiko's might repair alot of  ship but you need ALOT of hoshiko's (about haf of yor fleet should be hoshiko) and a bunch of cielo cruisers, (if your economy allows that)to get out of MB alive,  TEC has no effective way to counter MB...  in turn.. it's hard to cripple all hoshiko's,  so thats a + side for mass-repair...

Advent way to counter MB:

guardians,  Progenitor mothership's shield restore lvl 3,  continuously cast during MB (about 3 casts)  this only works if un-interrupted,  and an akkan ion bolt makes short work of your strategy and you're gonna lose alot of HP from all (but guardian + cap-ships)

Vasari way to counter MB:

Antorak Marauder's phase out hull,  to interrupt the marza's MB (becuase the antorak = a capship rarely picked, you wont see it alot)  another way for vasari = to use enforcers with the reintegration ability + overssers to aid them

all these solutions take alot of effort to use (advent being the most effective counter (2 progenitors))

the single-click MB of the marza = so much easier to use, and if you catch the enemy 10 seconds off-guard youre gonna own his fleet.. guaranteed

not long ago i was in a match with me as an advent, and the enemy fortified on his homeworld with a starbase and defenses, i managed to effectivly counter 2 missle barrage abilties with my progenitor and 10 guardians in the battle but zoomed-out for a second or 15 to build some new frigate factories on a nearby world + diverting ships around a pirate base

zoomed back in,  all illuminators heatlh down to 10%, fleet taken heavy damage from a missle barrage,  all that in the time it took me to build frigates and frigate factories and diverting a fleet past a pirate base

lost the battle afterwards    15 seconds   turned from an overwhelmingly winnig situation to overwhleming defeat becuase of 1 ability

yes it IS counterable,  if you keep paying attention (wich you cant if you have an empire to run)

an ability shouldnt change the tide in 15 seconds,  yes abilties DO change the tide  either by negative buffs on the enemy or positive buffs on your own   but not damaging whole fleets to the point they have to retreat and prevent losing everything at once

and i cannot imagine anyone not seeing the overwhelmingly obvious imbalanceness here, so i will stick to my originial conclusion:  everone that still states this to be part of the game  i have to live with it,  pay more attention to my fights  spend more work, cash everyting on countering the MB...  is plainly trying to defend his strategy not being nerfed. wich is think is pretty selfish,  given that YOU KNOW the ability isnt right??

just 2 options availbe imho

#1 nerf marza's MB

#2 buff 1 cap ship of vasari + advent (#1 plz.. we want super-cruisers not speedy-death-stars)

(if u want deathstars get the real capital ships mod.... but atleast leave sins vanilla balanced!!)

Don't throw TEC players or marza defenders any bones.  No other level 6 ability is "devastating," fleet support or no fleet support.  Nerf the marza MB to be exactly in line with other faction's abilities in terms of "devastation."  Nothing more.

1: All friendly missile weapons in range of the marza have their fire rate dramatically increased for 30sec. Increases the Marza's fire rate even more. Combine with an LRM fleet, and cluster warheads to do massive damage.

2: Greatly increases the number of missile banks on the Marza for a short time. It fires as normal, but with vastly increased damage.

3: Missiles do explosive damage, striking multiple ships in the area with every shot.

4: recharges cluster warheads on all nearby ships.

There's only so much you should do to boost nearby ships. The Marza really is the one with the missiles, not the surrounding fleet.

Don't think Missile Barrage should affect ships other than the Marza, but I like 2 and 3.

My thoughts.

Remove target cap(or put very high, like 50-100) for the Marza's missile bank.  This would let it attack almost every ship in front of it with its NORMAL attack.  Combine that with a rate of fire increase or explosive missiles and you have an ability that can severly damage fleets but is much easier to avoid(as it only affects ships infront of the Marza rather than 360 degrees) and does less damage.

I don't really mind the missile barrage the way it is now that much, the two problems I see are: how hard it it to notice and how quick it is to deal damage.  I think one of the modders should experiment with giving it a delay and making the Marza light up like a christmas tree the entire time it is using Missile Barrage(including the delay time).

Also, giving each ship that is in range of a missile barrage a big flashing icon over them would help.

Feed the Marza with XP, that's what.

Yes it is strange, yes it is sophisticated and yes it is f*cked up. I admit .

It was 4AM in the morning and I just threw whatever came to my mind first.

Whatever the change is, I still think Missile Barrage shouldn't be outright massive AOE damage dealer. Nothing does that. Cleansing brilliance affects a tight cone of targets. Volatile Nanites require a lot of dps ( = fleet) to work.
It shouldn't be nerfed to boot, I don't mind a good ability on Marza.
But it should require some more work from the owner to make it a battle-turning ability.

How about:

Missile Barrage - Supercharging the missile batteries allows them to fire several massive waves of missiles at a medium sized area. So great is the number of impacts that enemy shield generators will work erratically for a short duration.
(or shorter: Barrages an area with massive waves of missiles, dealing damage and overloading enemy shield generators)
Duration: 12 seconds
AM cost: 150
Cooldown: 100
Affects an area in 2500-4000? radius from a selected point up to 7000 away.
Effects:
* 150 Damage (every 2 secs)
* 6 Waves
* -2% max shield mitigation for 40 (30?) seconds after each salvo hits. Stacks up to 12% (up to 10%?).

reasoning: self explanatory. The damage is nerfed and is done over a decently sized area and not against a whole gravwell of units. However, it leaves a powerful debuff for your fleet to use. If the enemy reacts quickly and moves his fleet, he will only get -4% or -6%. If he oversleeps, he'll get -12%. This equals +30% damage against frigates, ~35% against a lvl1 cap and about ~50% against a lvl 10 cap. (hmm.. that's a bit too much so probably the number should be lower, but I don't feel like tinkering with it now).
Ok, simething like that. A missile barrage that is still a missile barrage, still useful but ain't an outright killah.

As always, this is just an idea that took me 5 minutes to put down. There may be and probably are better solutions, but all I really want to say is
YES to scalability, fleet-compatibility and
NO to any sort of direct, outright AOE damage that doesn't take anything on the Marza's side into account (because the line between such an ability being 'IMBA' or 'useless' is extremely thin, in my opinion)

MB is imo overpowered but the fix seems pretty simple and obvious to me...

The range is ridiculous... cut the range in half...

Now you've made it so that it takes a good amount of work and risk to take out an entire enemy fleet and certain ships like LRM will outrange the MB... The biggest problem with MB is its 'I win button' nature with its range cut in half you can block a Marza with your tougher ships, disable it much easier and otherwise stop it rather than desperately trying to get your disabler cap in range or desperately trying to run away... And if you ignore the Marza and it gets into the middle of your fleet? Well... it's your own fault

a range change would be a fix of a separate kind. you can only fit so many ships inside a certain radius. i mean, they could concievably ball up around the marza spherically but thats not what happens in practice. the ships nearly always stay close to the ecliptic plane. changing the range gives it a smaller area which would pretty strictly limit how many ships could be affected. its a workable fix.

it may however be too much of a nerf. if limiting the maximum targets is the desired outcome then just limit the maximum targets. there's no need to affect its functionality in some other way. 

then you and i have differing opinions on whats wrong with the Marza. 

i really don't have an issue with MB being a gigantic threat that your opponent should try very hard to avoid. its ok for it to be alot more powerful than other abilities, not everything has to be approximately the same worth. 

the problem i have with it is simply that it has no real limiting factors. scaling to infinity causes the ability to invalidate good strategy on the other side. if your opponent's economy is so good that he brings twice as many ships then he should beat your ass no problem. the marza can just as easily destroy 60 ships as it can 30. thats problem i have with it. 

so i figure, you just set a limit as to what constitutes the upper boundary of how many ships you can kill at a time with it. personally i'm gonna say its in the 20-30 range, i've proposed 24 as a number to start testing with. that way you don't run into a problem where your opponent is upping the power level of Marza by beating you even more. it won't kill 60 ships as easily as it kills 30. it will just kill 24, period. that would completely solve the issue i have with it. 

so my position is that its not about the destructive, battle turning potential of Marza as much as it is about an ability that has no reasonable limiting factor on it. the reasonable limit is what i expect. any other nerf would have bad side effects that i would like to avoid. harsh nerfs are severely alienating to players and can disrupt balances in the game that you didn't even realize were in trouble. i say do the least that is necessary to fix the problem. 

Wait. WHY should missile barrage be killing ships outright, again? There's this strange idea going around that MB can be easily imbalanced if it butchers too many or too few ships. Why is it killing them to begin with? And is it REALLY an issue that MB would become "inconsequential" in large battles because it can't SINGLE HANDEDLY kill the exact right number of frigates needed at that point in the game? How many frigates can other caps solo?

The Marza has three damage over time abilities that allow it to turn ships into slag (2 parts of radiation bomb, 1 from incendiary rounds). What if missile barrage was changed to a DoT ability along those lines? 

For example, it may inflict a massive fire, dealing DoT damage to many nearby ships (or maybe all nearby ships, friend or foe). Or, perhaps it ignites a moderate area of space that'll really butcher ships unless they break formation. Part of the blaze can hinder enemy ships, lowering their fire rate/accuracy/damage/ability output while they're cooking. A combination of these can keep the Marza's lvl 6 as an ultimate ability, but without making it an automatic kill switch.

i don't think a damage cap is beyond the engine. not part of it, yes, but i don't think it would be too hard to add in.

I agree with this, and disagree with transitive.  I think transitive's (and other peoples') ideas about nerfing the marza would still leave it OP.  It's like they are scared to piss off the spoiled marza-loving TEC players with too much of a nerf, so they just want a slight adjustment.  But that won't solve the problem.  MB is massively OP.  It therefore needs a massive nerf.

I believe transitive said that its power level doesn't need to be EXACTLY in line with other capships out there, because in my own words in a post a while back, "there's a difference between balance and symmetry."  Yes, we all agree that there is.  Games don't necessarily need to be balanced "unit to unit," rather they can be balanced "race to race."  However, this doesn't mean that MB isn't massively OP, and it doesn't mean that its power level can't be brought in line with other destructive capship abilities.  If someone says that leaving MB in a massively OP state (even after a nerf) is somehow "balancing by race, not by unit" then I want to know what the rationale is for that statement.  I want to know where the cooresponding balance would be on the vasari side and advent side.  You can't say vasari's balance would be returning armada, especially when TEC gets all their economic super-abilities late game.  Your best shot would be to claim that phase gates are vasari's balancing component.  But do you know how often I see a phase gate ever built online multiplayer?  Never.  I can count the number of times on one hand, and in most of those instances it was I myself building the phase gates.  Besides, don't TEC also get exclusive late game techs?  Now tell me what the balancing component would be for Advent?

Giving marza the ability to evaporate "20-something" frigs is still OP.  But sure, I'll agree that it's better than the ability to evaporate a whole fleet.

you honestly think there's no difference between destroy 60 ships and destroy 24 ships?

seems to me like the difference is 36 ships. quite tangible. 

look, i know that wasn't your point. i dont wanna make a game out of just attacking your semantics. what you're saying is that you dislike the very model of the Missile Barrage style ability. thats fine. there have been some good suggestions about how to make the ability a bit like a big Radiation Bomb or a Cleansing Brilliance with a longer channeling time. those might be good solutions as well. 

personally i think the target cap is the best solution for a few reasons. its the smallest change that might get the job done. accuse me of appeasement if you want, but taking into account the fact that this really is a point of controversy is a wise thing to do. i also think the target cap would be extremely easy to implement and thus is likely to be doable in an upcoming patch. they could just lift code from abilities that are already target capped (Phase Missile Swarm, for example). finally, i dislike the premise of making massive changes all at once. incremental adjustment is how game balancing is done. no matter how well intentioned your idea is, it WILL have consequences that you don't foresee. the smaller change is inherently the better change because it has fewer unforeseen consequences.