Last week when the false release of .75 happened I posted up my initial thoughts on the Advent titans here: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/420898
Since then my thoughts have evolved a bit as I've played more advent games since the *offical* release of .76. This time around, rather then going over every ability I'm going to focus on the overall issues with these titans and possible solutions. So without more ado:
The Eradica(Advent Rebel Titan):
Problems:
problem 1: The Eradica's biggest problem(as most people know) is it's level 6 ablity. It requires the loss of a titan to do anything, and has zero synergy with Purification(no point healing a ship that's going to die regardless and is invulnerable until death).
problem 2: The Aura range on Strength of the Fallen is impractically short. This greatly limits fleet mobility and the potential for effective micro of forces.
problem 3: One other seldom discussed issue is that once it loses it's retinue of supporting frigates the Eradica essentially loses 2 of it's abilities, and yet the Eradica has no means of protecting it's fleet. This last issue though I think I'll reserve judgement on until they actually get the "return of the fallen" & "Reanimation" technologies working.
Solutions:
problem 1: This Issue could be fixed by simply having it be activatable with a 150-180 second cooldown, perhaps reducing duration to 30-45 seconds. A ton of people have suggested this change, so hopefully it will happen. Also it would be nice if this ability increased the Eradica's weapon cooldowns as well(30-50% increase rate of fire would be plenty), being that a decent part of it's threat comes from basic weapon attacks.
Alternative solution: In addition to the current effect, allied frigates destroyed near Eradica have a 15/30% chance of reviving at eradica's location
This would add a great deal of usefulness to the current ability(it would basically be a passive version of the discord's level 6 ability with better control over the damage & some utility due to 15 seconds of capitalship preservation). IF this were too strong capitalships could easily be removed from the effects(only extends life of nearby frigates or eradica that die).
problem 2: pretty straightforward, extend the radius of Strength of the Fallen to maybe 3000-4000. Also units sacrificed with purification should always proc Strength of the Fallen, regardless of range
problem 3: The alternate solution to problem 1 would certainly help with this as destroying Eradica's supporting fleet without first destroying it would become much more difficult.
The Coronata(Advent Lotalist Titan):
Problems:
This titan is currently probably the weakest titan. Suppression Aura is strong, but that's about it.
problem 1: Subjugating Assault needs to do something when attacking capital-ships. As it stands the enemy can just focus on carrier fleets(all the carriers of course safely parked on the other side of the gravity well ready to jump away if any trouble arises), using only cap-ships/titans as a fronline. this is a decent strategy in general as you want to avoid feeding the enemy titan, and use of these sort of tactics basically nullify the benefit of any skill points put in subjugating assault.
problem 2: Subjugating Assault is unreliable and drinks AM way too fast. Sometime you get ships almost instantly, other times you waste AM for 20-30 seconds without a single conversion. Regardless this ability drinks AM way too fast. A smaller concern is that even when this ability does steal a ship, the ship often is nearly dead. Regardlessonsidering so many titans can positively shred large fleets of frigates, Coronata's ability to maybe steal 3-5 frigates(many of which are probably heavily wounded when stolen) over the course of a large late game battle seems a pretty small impact
problem 3: Unity Mass feels a bit underwhelming. It's basically a much shorter range version of the Ragnarov's snipe with 2-3x the cooldown that potentially does maybe 15-20% more damage and requires a large fleet to do so(which in long late game fights where frigate survivability is abysmal may not be reliable). This is probably the lowest priority problem however as Unity mass may feel overwhelming by comparison to snipe, but it is still already useful.
problem 4: Well this one is primarily only a super-lategame concern, but as a support-titan the Coronata needs to be able to protect it's fleet, but can do very little to mitigate the effects of massed bombers(since suppression doesn't reduce the damage of strikecraft). This means it's retinue is basically about as vulnerable to massed bombers as fleets in trinity are. That said ti seems like a fairly major oversight that likely the single most dangerous form of weapons-damage(bombers) happens to be the only thing coronata can't protect it's fleet against .
Solutions:
problem 1: Simply put this ability needs a secondary effect for attacks against enemy capital ships. I think a chance per attack to drain some AM from the damaged enemy(similar to the Kortul) would fit the bill perfectly(and go well with the Coronata's role as a support-titan)
problem 2: In it's current form a simple solution to the overly high AM costs would be to have AM only drained on a successful conversion(maybe increase the AM cost from 6/5/4/3 to 14/12/10/8). For reliability I think it may be nice just to increase the activation chance, perhaps having the conversion chance scale to the rank of the ability. A more complicated method to increase reliability may be nice(such as the conversion chance getting higher the longer coronata attacks the target), but simply increasing the chance would likely do the job well enough
problem 3: I'd rather not just see a damage buff. the coronata is supposed to be about utility & support rather then raw damage potential. The two methods I see are to either add some sort of debuff to the targeted enemy(perhaps disable the target's abilities or reduce it's max shield mitigation?) or alternatively to grant some bonus to all allied ships that take part in the Unity mass(perhaps regenerate some shields, or hull?). Again though as stated in the problem, this is likely the lowest priority issue.
problem 4: While at first I was hesitant to make this suggestion, the more I think about it the more I think the best solution is simply to make the weapons damage reduction(but not the slow) apply to strikecraft as well as frigates/capitital ships. That way coronata could mitigate 40% of bomber damage. The slow certainly shouldn't be applied to strikecraft(the synergy with telekinetic push would be too great). That said, as a support titan I think it's reasonable for coronata to be able to apply it's damage debuff to all types of fleet compositions rather then the ability only really debuffing the damage of non-carrier fleets(a titan should be consistent).
Conclusion:
Anyway, I definitely think the Advent titans are stronger(and have less issues) then my original reaction a week ago(as you may see in my previous post which highlighted many more "issues"). That said, they definitely need a bit of work(mostly on the Eradica).
Anyway, please post your own thoughts on these new titans!