You can find them here https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2439457217

Nah there is a whole set of extra mission mods (also by me)

(And I haven't found any ionized weapons for some raisin)

Like, random missions from stations? I've done just about every one I've seen so far, just for the fun of it. Feels like heavy shielded enemies were the strongest against weapons like pre-update mass drivers (but many other lower DPS weapons have that same feeling), so I try to also keep a bunch of plasmas or teslas on hand in my fleet, to take down heavy shielded enemies.

....but I just realized you said "in one volley". I don't usually one volley anything, no matter the weapons I use, unless I go into lower tier space, or lower tier pirates invade.

Do you play any of the extra missions? They are incredibly bad at taking down anything larger than a ravager in one volley (prowler, pillager, etc.)

Ah, shot speed.. yep I thought you were talking about fire rate. 😇

Whelp, I'm headed out the door. But thanks for clarifying that.

As for them (pre update mass drivers) being weak, idk... I have quite a few mass drivers that are like, top 100 DPS in slot, out of the thousands and thousands of turrets I've collected on our server now, mostly pre-barrier. Yes, you can build a turret to be better. But pre-barrier, Mass Drivers are very good IMO. If someone finds themselves really lacking DPS, they can always supplement it with some DPS focused weapons for situations where DPS is more important than tactics/sniping.

...or you know, just have a 2nd ship follow you loaded with DPS weapons, so anything that survives your sniping barrage, gets DPS'ed once they're in range lol. Or 3 extra ships, covered in mass drivers. I really think you're too hard on the effectiveness of Mass Drivers based purely on 1 to 1 comparison. Their previous range and accuracy allowed them to really shine when stacked, like when the cultists were all using them.

It's the 3rd note down - reduced shot speed by 30% for common / petty / uncommon turrets. I broke it up into a larger list because I didn't reduce it uniformly by rarity.

I have updated the patch notes to clarify that I am referring to projectile velocity. I can see why you might have mistaken it for the fire rate.

Well, partially my bad then. I didn't see anything related to velocity in the change notes, and still don't, so I took it wrong.

The free loot is absolutely a thing.. I use it a lot lmao. Very frequently in busy sectors, it's impossible to get to raiding pirates in time. They warp in, and die almost immediately from the first salvo of guards hanging around the warp in point. But if you have a massive range weapon that can hit them in time, all you have to do is tag them before they get killed, and you get credit. In vanilla, you can do this a little with a really long range cannon and some luck. But you'll likely miss, and will still have half or less of the range of mass driver, so it won't happen nearly as often, unless you specifically park near where the enemies show up. With mass drivers, I often get this free loot while going about my business, even docked at stations.

God dammit I wish steam would let me edit these.

My initial response read a little more rudely than I intended, so let me try again. I did not miss the point - I did exactly what you asked and reduced both the projectile speed and accuracy. In my testing, I noticed that the AI had a lot more trouble hitting targets with the weapons due to the accuracy reduction.

Balancing weapons is a lot of work and I want to move on from this mod. I already think the weapon is one of the weakest weapons in arsenal extensions (and it's even weaker than numerous vanilla weapons, imo) after all of the nerfs, and I think further nerfs would push it into unusable garbage territory.

I disagree with you that the weapon is "free loot from the pirate attack event". You can do that trick reliably even with a chaingun. It depends entirely on how fast your ship is.

If I see the need for tweaking this in future playthroughs I might come back to it.

[continued]

It's your mod. I will respect your decision. Our server just won't be using this weapon now no offense, and I can't recommend it to others, since you're no longer interested in balance discussion. It is what it is.. functionally a 60K range laser with some DPS randomization, with no drawback other than DPS and damage type. Some will want that, but some will find it cheesy.

Based on the change notes, you missed the point entirely.

The problem wasn't it's DPS. The problem was the inescapable damage at extreme range, whether it's you doing it to enemies, or the enemies doing it to you. There is no counter balance, other than tons of shields.

By reducing it's fire rate and accuracy (at lower tiers), but presumably still having given it enough accuracy to hit "most" of the time, you have done nothing but make it take a little longer to still reliably hit things regardless of movement. Against you, that also means your shields will not be refilling. This also results in a lot of free pirate loot, from always hitting pirate invaders before they die to local guards. Again, there is a reason cannons and homing missiles, have slow projectiles.

[char limit]

Took me a while, but I finally came up with a solution I am satisfied with. This weapon should feel more balanced now. I will probably not be taking many more balancing suggestions on it.

"Keep in mind that even if I adjust things it will not affect already spawned turrets."

🤨

(furrowed brow at Avorion dev, for not coding weapons to be able to update retroactively after a weapon change, kek)

Hey, I said there's a point. I didn't say we were at it yet. :D

Let me look at some numbers. Keep in mind that even if I adjust things it will not affect already spawned turrets.

(continued)

If the point of Mass Drivers, is never missing from across the sector.. they do that lol. But that inescapable damage in a dogfight (unless you boost to potentially 40+KM away with velocity bypass) is ouch, and is basically setting a trap for any player not built for speed/shields, if they come across multiple enemies using them (with 0 damage avoidance, you have to burst down the enemy before your quickly dropping shields/armor hit 0, which may not be possible without endgame built turrets DPS and massive shields, forcing you to retreat or lose some of your fleet). This logic applies in reverse against enemies too.

It's up to you of course. I haven't been able to think of a better suggestion on their balancing personally. I'm really enjoying their range, and on our server, I just found an orange 350 DPS per slot 65KM range mass driver, I'd like to not give up lol. But.. I do feel such a powerful weapon should have slow projectiles. I fear for our server balance.

Cannons hit things just fine tho? But the thing you're hitting, needs to be not moving, or coming at you, or be huge like the AI boss or a station. That's an intentional balance point I believe, making them a long range weapon, but not a 100% accurate DPS/dogfight weapon. Which was my suggestion for mass drivers, so they can be avoided in a dogfight.

I find cannons very useful still, for starting fights from really far away, and even killing weak enemies before they can get to me. It would be the same for a mass driver with slow projectile speed - just even longer range, but potentially easier to evade target movement prediction. A sniping weapon "should" risk missing moving targets, in my opinion. Like, lasers and lightning weapons have capped range, to balance them always hitting.

(character limit)

That said, I do think that there's a point where lowering the projectile speed makes them trash because it becomes impossible to hit anything past 10km, which is... sort of the point of the weapon.

Hmmm. I could counter that by lowering the fire rate even more.

I'm not necessarily opposed to reducing the projectile speed but I'm worried that if I do it will cause performance issues for servers due to slower projectile speeds + longer projectile lifetime.

(continued)

I think I'm starting to understand the other comments now. I don't think Mass Drivers can really be balanced by just trying to find a sweet spot for DPS, due to how the game works. They're effectively a 25KM to 60+KM physical damage laser that can't be avoided, breaking several gameplay aspects. The more you lower their damage to compensate, it just means you have to spam more of them, or wait longer for the enemy to die from across the zone (or they get nerfed to the point players don't want to actually use them, yet they're still extremely annoying if the enemy uses them).

Kinda feels like a better fix, would be reducing their velocity and accuracy to cannon levels (or lower velocity to be honest). That way, they're effectively smaller longer range single hit cannons, available earlier in the game, useful for shelling/sniping far away targets, but not impossible to counter. But that's just the feeling I get.

Alright, played a bit more. But this time, got to experience what it's like being on the other end of the weapon. Came across some higher level cultists, with nearly all of them using mass drivers.

The weapon is busted lol. It was impossible to fight them. They could accurately DPS me from 40km away, no matter my speed or trajectory. Weapons like cannons, you can dogfight against due to projectile travel time. And that drawback comes into play against enemies, as when at max range you'll miss a lot of shots if the target isn't flying straight at you. Cannon accuracy also often isn't perfect without bonuses or custom building. Mass Drivers don't have that issue, being naturally very accurate, and can reliably hit moving targets at double the range of a cannon.

(continued in next comment)

I made them have a 0.6 damage multiplier after tech 32 so they'd stay relevant. 0.5 was too harsh, imo, and made them strictly worse than cannons.

*Xanion, not Xavorion

I see what you're talking about. I'm now in the Xavorion area on our server, and I am seeing less mass drivers drop now. Previous comments were made mostly in titanium/naonite area, where their commonality made it pretty easy to collect/equip a bunch, which in turn, made early unshielded enemies very easy.

It does seem like mass driver DPS/slot is scaling higher than I expected, as well. Competitive with some other weapons, despite having the massive range and accuracy. Last night after collecting a ton of loot (hundreds in the Xavorion area), I rebuilt my ship, stripped off all weapons, then sorted by DPS/slot before re-adding, and to my surprise mass drivers were still pretty high in my list. I guess I should have held off on my 2 cents lol.

Also yes, we're using all of the Arsenal Expansion mods. Thanks for them btw. ^^

I really wish Steam would let me edit these stupid comments. I had to rewrite that first comment like three times.

Also I'm pretty sure they get set to be like... the faction weapons of some pirate factions so they are a common drop from that pirate faction. I've had some instances where I get like a stack of 30 or 40 while fighting pirates. It's bizarre and I have no idea how the loot system works outside of the lua scripts.

so I'm not surprised that they seem common - especially since they can drop anywhere in the galaxy.

It wouldn't be too big of a lift to reduce its weighted value to 1.5 or 1.25, though - that would drop the % chance of encountering them from 22.58 to 20% (assuming you are not using pulse lasers) if dropped to 1.5, or 17.24% if reduced to 1.25.

That said - trust me when I say that they get a lot less common closer to the center of the galaxy, especially if you are using all of the arsenal extension weapons. Part of the commonality of them is that they can drop anywhere, even on the very outer edges.

[2/2]

Relative to chainguns, they are about 70% as likely to drop (chainguns have a 2.5 weight, and mass drivers have a 1.75 weight) - the actual odds are difficult to calculate since it depends on what other weapons are available. For example, at distance 500 you would have roughly the following odds of getting each of the following weapon types:

chaingun - 32.26%
mass driver - 22.58%
point defense chaingun - 12.90%
mining laser - 19.35%
salvaging laser - 12.90%

If you were using pulse lasers as well, the odds would become the following:

chaingun - 25.64%
mass driver - 17.95%
point defense chaingun - 10.26%
mining laser - 15.39%
salvaging laser - 10.26%
pulse laser - 20.51%

[1/2]

My own 2 cents, testing the current version.. They do feel powerful in that you can accurately attack something very far away, and if the target is lower level than you (like random paper pirates) you can actually kill them before they can get close. That said, the DPS is bad enough (and most overheat fast enough), they really should not be used as your main weapons at all, against pretty much anything else lol.

Current iteration feels pretty good because of that - can start fights from far away and snipe weak enemies, but won't help much against enemies your level.

The weapons seem oddly common though.. finding a lot of them both as drops, and in stores.

Hm. Time to eat my words I guess. Apologies to the people in the comments. There will be one more balance adjustment.

I have a version that I nerfed a bit more, but I'm not quite comfortable pushing out nerfs that severe without seeing how well they play vs. the rest of the available weapons. I'll be starting up another playthrough once I'm done fiddling with all of the various missions to test weapon balance, since I've got another couple of weapons I'm planning on adding.

@Imp0815 That's what I was mentioning. I don't understand the concern with low DPS since DPS isn't really the point of a weapon like this, it's a sniper to attack from outside the enemy's own engagement range, doing moderate chunks of damage, but punishing the player if used up close with its high cooldown (pre-nerf it was really a one-click-delete from anywhere even with just 3 or 4 installed), though if slowing the projectile down causes server issues, fair enough.
(As an aside, I like seeing this as the opposite of 丢雷楼某's shotgun mod, which has huge DPS, but unless the enemy is right next to you most of it gets wasted on empty space. They compliment each other quite well).

Oh I missed that you said slow projectile speed. My mistake. I made it have a high speed because long range + slow projectile speeds can cause problems with servers.

A long-range, high-damage, low fire rate turret with a massive projectile velocity is not slow projectile speed? This basicly reads like a point and click delete button this way.

I mean that's exactly what it is.

Shouldn't it be more of a high damage, absurd range, low fire rate and slow porjectile speed weapon? So this is more of a skill based weapon against larger targets?

Burst damage should be less of an issue now. I'm worried that if I nerf them more they won't be worth using due to low dps.

The funniest thing about asking for reduced damage is this thing already does 30% less DPS than a comparable chaingun / bolter in the same sector. The only reason it does so much damage in a single shot is because of the extremely long fire delay.

How about a nerf. Reduced damage and velocity, but keep the long range, something that acts as the transition point into using cannons, because right now it is definitely overpowered going both ways.

I'm guessing that's where the negative ratings are coming from, lol.

I'll ask Boxelware about better controls on what weapons can generate for AI factions. The problem is that it's too deeply embedded in the faction initialization code to rip it out without making the template much more complicated.

Awesome early game sniper that makes dealing with pirates a breeze, but woe to anyone who encounters an enemy faction wielding these, death is basically instant.

That can ofcourse be a coaxial weapon

Oh please make a larger version, it would be amazing

I could probably make a big version. I thought they'd be kind of overpowered if they could get coaxial (they even have less DPS than a chaingun per tech level, generally speaking) but new weapon types aren't that hard to do.

Oh thats a shame, there goes all my dreams of a perfect MAC cannon

I don't think it can. Pretty sure I made it just under the slot count to make it possible to spawn as one.

Can this spawn as a coaxial? If it can, this would be spot on for a Halo MAC Cannon.