Do the math, Shield Disruption has NONE of the effeciency of Designate Target.
NONSENSE. The Shield Disruption ability is awesome.
- For all normal weapons (non phase missiles) and against standard targets (with shield mitigation going up to 65%) reducing the max shield mitigation by 10% means that you're doing 45/35 = 1.28 -> 28% more damage.
- Against a level 10 cap (it works on caps, checked) that has max shield mitigation at 75%, it does 35/25 = 1.4 -> 40% more damage.
For phase missiles it is a bit sophisticated.
Let's say we have phase missiles with 30% chance to bypass shields.
Normally, 70% of the missiles do 35% damage (mitigated) and the rest (30%) do full damage (evaded shields).
So, in general your missiles do 54,5% of their full DPS.
With shield disruption it is 55% missiles doing full damage and 45% doing 45% damage.
This means your missiles do 75,25% of their full DPS.
75,25/54.4 = ~1.38
- So, triggering shield disruption translates to a relative increase of 38% in total damage dealt by phase missiles with 30% shield bypass done.
In any other circumstances (advent massive shield restoration abilities and mitigation culture bump anyone??), the bonus is even higher (if you don't upgrade PMs, for example, the 25% bypass has an even greater relative effect).
Let's say we have non-upgraded Phase Missiles (we're idiots, but maybe we went HCs?). Normally they do 35% damage (65% mitigated). With Shield Disruption active, 25% will pass untroubled and 75% will suffer from 10% less mitigation. This means that unupgraded phase missiles will do an average of 58,75% of its total damage.
- This is an over 67% relative increase in DPS in this case.
Second - Designate target has 45 sec cooldown, a big AM cost, it is tier 5/6 (ship/tech) while Subverter is tier 5 and comes out of the box with shield disruption, which costs half the AM and has a 4 or 6(?) sec cooldown.
Conclusion: Shield disruption is a very good tool. It may not be as awesome as a flat 40% in many cases, but it doesn't stray far. This argument is just wrong, sorry. Do the maths yourself, you'll see the effectiveness of shield disruption is very close to designate target, particularly if you count in the research tier difference. Much more fluid (not a 40% always), but sometimes less, sometimes more, most of the time - comparable and much more spammable.
People don't get subverters nowadays (and tend to think they are shit) because they always used them for the Distortion Field (stun) that had been nerfed a bit too badly. I don't like how that particular ability works - it is powerful in that it can turn off godzillions of HCs, but it is the closest thing to a Kamikaze attack one can find in this game. Once the stun is over (or if the enemy has illums, or basically in any situation where your stun doesn't affect ALL the enemy ships), the subverter is in the deepest shit you can throw your ship into, beside having it roundhouse kicked by Chuck Norris. I personally believe that it should jump back to where it cast the Distortion Field.
I usually get a handful of subverters in late game, and mainly for the shield disruption - you must have never seen how much faster a Kol goes down when a subverter infects him with this thing. It is very spammable, a great weapon against those tough caps and HCs. A few subverters will keep dozens of HCs debuffed over a long fight. A perfect weapon against Advent, where a cap ship can have up to 85% shield mitigation and reducing that by 10% means increasing the damage by 66%!!!
A perfect synergy with all phase missile weapons.
I have zero idea how anyone with a little imagination (or experience as Vasari) could not perceive the POWAH® of this ability.
Oh and this:
Subverters CANNOT close range SAFELY with a Starbase. Cielos can sit and repeatedly use their ability on the SB.
along this line, LFs, scouts and HCs shouldn't be able to shoot the starbase, cause they can't close range safely.
Where else in the game a ship cannot use an ability on another ship because it would be too dangerous for it due to weapon range difference. This is just nonsense.
I never raised this issue because I thought offensive support cruisers might have been purposefully unable to target starbases, cause it would be OP (that a single support cruiser can effectively take away 30% of a starbase's health for 60 seconds with one use of an ability). I noticed Subverters can't, but it made some sense, so I didn't call a thread about it. LFs don't target caps with their abilities and it does make sense - I think cobalts disabling capital ships would be total bullshit.
If cielo can, however, it is clearly a bug and needs to be fixed.
Subverters WOULD help a LOT against starbases, and if Cielo can designate SBs, so should subverters be able to disrupt their shields.
