Whats the use of phase missiles?

the idea being that you can do max damage when the shield would otherwise block a great ammount.

that being said it doesnt appear to have a great big effect

so how much damage do shields actually "block" if they would really negate a whole bit of damage this would be nice, but currently i have really only the impression that they migate the damage from hullpoints to shieldpoints.

*shrug* it changes, however it can climb to high percentages, 80% I've heard


and I dunno if it switches from hull to shield damage without mitigation, that sounds extremely pointless...

no, what i mean with migration is that instead of the hull, the shields get damaged
i know that mitigation supposedly blocks some shots, but if i look at the damage it seems that hull goes down just as fast as shields.
Has any modder tested this?, by lets say setting the mitigation increadibly high and the shields should be neigh invulnerable.

like schod said, it makes focused fire more attractive.

when I looked at capships under heavy fire, the shield points drop noticeably slower than the hull does afterwards, which is very likely this shield mitigation effect. now, if you have a weapon that can ignore part of this mitigating effect and stack damage directly on the hull it could potentially be very dangerous. whether it works is another issue, I haven't been able to try.

does make for an interesting research position when facing vasari. hull research would probably be favoured over shields if the latter can be - at least partly - be ignored. a bit like in GC II where select weapons do bonus damage against a certain defensive system. actually, now that I mention it, a bit more of that would be cool. like a ship good in taking down shields so other units that are better vs armour can do the rest.

Players are more or less forced to do this as it is, though, since for the TEC the shield upgrades start at I believe 5 military labs? Vasari shield upgrades at 2? Also, one of the Vasari cruisers basically just zaps shields off enemy ships

mmm, another tactic you guys havent seemed to notice is that the planet sucker has an ability that reduces armor and deals 30dps, stick that with ignoring shields, and you have one bad ship (especially if you can get a marza to help)

PS, at max level, that ability can solo a kodiak, killing it even while it has full shields

Is very usefull, you bypass shields. So 30% means that of 4 misiles fired, 1 will hit hull, so if you have 4/5 ships firing to a Capship you could strike serius damage to hull before even shilds start to go down.

This will work speacily good if Phase misiles are fire from cheap ships. Cost/damage ratio will be huge. Also if they fire quickly.

which they sadly don´t, those vasari tropedo frigs fire just so slow

And as said if one of 3 missiles hits the hull that usually means that the shields are down when the hull is around 60-75% (in most of my tests) and then the advantage from the
missiles vanishes.
And while the shields are still up the hull and the shields are regenerating, thus effectively double the healrate.

They would probably shine against fleets with those thrice damned Dunovs, though 2 Dunovs accompanied by heavier hitting capitals can make it a nightmare to take them down

that could work

But even at max tech (30% passage) you would have to do 3 times the damage to kill the ship than you´d normally do.
I dunno, how much a dunov can restore, but i don´t really think it can restore a caps shields two times completly over.

I have also tried experimenting with the Torpedo Frigates special ability, but it doesn´t seem to increase the range as stated.
Has anyone else experienced this?

Depends on how much fire the ship is taking and the rank of the Dunov's skill.. it can easily keep the shields up under moderate fire, as long as it has antimatter. It can restore upwards of 2k or so I believe and the cooldown isn't very long.

I think phase missiles don't really have a noticeable effect on smaller targets. Most frigates/cruisers lose shields quite fast regardless. It's mostly the capitals that take a while to lose their shields, letting you get a slight head start on the hull before everything else is able to damage it.

Whether or not that was the intention of the devs when designing the weapon I don't know

Yeah, but its not quite a headstart, as the damage does not increse for a missile bypassing the shields. The 30% that go through the shields and onto the hull are also 30% damage the shields recieve less, right?
If a phased missile that goes through would both damage shields and hull the upgrades would actually increse the damage and not only migrate it and give the vasari a headstart

But currently with the double regeneration of both shields and hull it puts you at a disadvantage.

True, but the hull traditionally regenerates much slower than shields. I don't really know how exactly the shield penetration works as far as numbers go, though, didn't get to play with it that much.

It also occurred to me that we don't really know how heavily reliant on shield technology the Advent will be. Perhaps phase missiles are meant to be more useful against them? Because as it is, the best scenario I can think of where phase missiles are really useful is the Kol + Dunov combo, since it takes ages to chew through its shields with its defensive ability up and the Dunov recharging, and then even the fairly small damage that goes straight through to the hull starts looking very appealing

Well, especially against a Kol the phase missiles wont do any good as the kol has especially the ability to block those.
And bad as it is that ability is incredible cheap and has short cooldown

I have admit that i like to use LRM as Tec very much, as they have good range, firerate and stuff.
With the vasari i find the Torpedo frigates really lacking, they fire so slowly and everything.
I think they are especially designed to be capkillers, but they don´t really do their job that well :/
Skirmishers are much better and also much more resiliant.
They are quite good at killing the shields and then can cut through the hull awell.

As noted by some others, the biggest benefit is that you can avoid damage reduction from shielf mitigation, and get a head start on hull damage in the process. Since the missiles seem to mostly come in swarms, I'd imagine mitigation comes into play with them quite easily.

I think the question in the first post was this, though:

When the missile damages the hull through the shield, the assumption is that damage is the base damage of the missile mitigated only by the armor. But does it still damage the shield (with the shield mitigation) or not?

The point Pithlit is trying to make, from what I understand (and I apologize if I'm putting words in your mouth) is that if the missile doesn't damage the shield when it passes through to do hull damage, then effectively you spread out your overall damage between two constantly regenerating sources. You'll do less total damage to shields because 30% of your missiles will now pass through harmelssly, allowing shields to last considerably longer due to regen rates. At the same time, only 30% of your firepower will be hitting the hull, which at the same time regenerates also. The final effect is that it may take *longer* to destroy a ship when you effectively split the damage like this than if 100% of your firepower went to shields first, and then to hull once shields are down.

NOTE: I'm just paraphrasing my understanding of what Pithlit is trying to get at

My understanding is that they completely bypass shields. Theoretically, that results in lower mitigation so the rest of your attacks that are still hitting them deal more damage.

Annatar11: exactly my point

30% of your firing power? well i understand badly. i think it was 30% chance to bypass shield, full damage to hull if hit.=S

Right, but if 30% of your missiles bypass the shields, then you do 70% of your combined max potential damage output to shields and 30% to hull, basically splitting your damage. So the discussion is if this way ends up being slower than dedicating 100% of your damage output to shields first, then to hull

It'd be fun to test this, too. Any volunteers? Could do something like 20 missile frigates with phase missiles unresearched and then researched to 30%, timing how long it takes to destroy some capital of choice

yeah, that should do it, lets do a lab

Armor nuke + phase missiles = very dead TEC capship setup. Probably not real great against a fleet with command cruisers though, letting them restore faster.

Going to be around tonight? I'll probably be able to hop on around 5:00 central/6 eastern. Not sure what time zone you're in

i´m around now