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[color=#FF0000]WTF? WHY?! That would cripple capital ship gunners who's missiles make up most of their damage!

Gunner needs a nerf of some sort, but not to that extent. But perhaps we're so broken 'cos the admins felt sorry for us because we have no gear :'(

Time Warp[/color]

Fighters make up 90% of my dps but im only allowed one launcher at a time.

/me equips 12 freighter fighter bay 4's to his thatch just to check... yep...

what are you talking about, you can equip as many fighter bays as you can fit in your hull... it just speeds up the launch rate, and if your fighters stay out for a whole minute i just doubt that that would make much of a difference for you.

most of their damage

Even when Churchill's alt was a crappy gunner, missiles was NOT his dps.

He played by using beams, and large lasers, making the most of his destruction skill, which was far more effective than any missile barrage.

The key is to not run around with only a pair of capital lasers and use a wide variety of weapons. Sure, the mining boost helps, but that and missiles are limited to physical and mining, which is not the sole weakness of ai.

The Dreadnought is not meant to be a Gunner ship. The class skills are set for a ship like the EF Cruiser and Battlecruiser.

A Gunner, however, can make very good dreads, but it's not designed to tank. Thats the job more fit for an FC.

And you can play realizing that missiles are 90% of your dps when you use them right.
However, Please nerf gunner. One Launcher. Per. Ship. Then launchers can be balanced properly...
But sure leave muyltiple launchers in. Not rigged at all to equip 20 launchrs and get 80k missile dps.. for 8k eps...

There is no /showmissiledamage command yet, but I read somewhere that a large armor piercing missile does 5500 damage against 0 mining resist if you have the Missile Mastery subskill maxed. I don't know whether that includes the destruction bonus from MFing a mining wep against the target at the same time or not.

So, in theory, a gunner could do 55k dps with an RoF of .1. However, there are some difficulties in actually achieving this:

#1 You have to press the hotkey to launch your missile every time you fire. They don't keep up max RoF like normal weps. Plus, there is time used in opening new crates since nobody could possibly carry that many missiles unpacked. Pressing a hotkey 10 times per second for any amount of time would be difficult, if not impossible in reality.

#2 Missile flight time. In order to attain max dps on missiles, the gunner has to sit close enough to his target that the time it takes to fire 3 missiles (the max a broadsword MK IV can handle at once) is less than the amount of time it takes one missile to fly to the target. However, if the gunner is directly on top of the target, the missile won't fire. So, to attain that max RoF of .1, the gunner would have to position himself so that the center of his ship is within .3 seconds of missile flight time from the target without being directly on top of the target. This would be extremely difficult even with a stationary base and no tractors / grem weps / physical weps firing back at him, and pretty much impossible with a moving base or target. Trying to stay in position would also slow down the RoF due to the human factors I mentioned in #1.

#3 Lag. Lag spikes are inevitible during PvB. When an SD experiences a lag spike while firing a weapon his ship appears to quit firing or all of the projectiles appear to go through the target like misses, but when the lag spike ends he sees all of his past shots hit the target, so he doesn't really lose any dps unless he drifted out of range during the spike. A gunner actually loses the opportunity to fire missiles during the lag spike since he is limited to 3 missiles in the air at one time and his computer thinks the 3 previously fired missiles still exist. A lag spike of a few seconds has a big effect on a normal gunner, let alone one who was trying to achieve 10 missiles per second.

#4. If I have the formula right, achieving .1 rof on large AP missiles would require 8 Broadsword Mk IV missile launchers, which are still pretty expensive and hard to find. 8 of them would take 376 space, which isn't terrible on a dreadnaught, but it does make it more of a challenge to carry them.

#5 Electricity. Each missile requires 500 elec to launch, and that amount is not affected by electric tempering. At .1 rof, that's 5k elec / second if you don't fire your guns for the destruction bonus, use a radar, diffusers, charge a shield, etc. Capships can still get energy banks that are quite large, but not nearly as large as they were before the rebalance. Also, large bank energies take up a lot of space, which compounds the problem of carrying 8 launchers.

#6 Shields. If you have to sit right on top of your target like I mentioned in #2 you're going to take a lot of damage. If your target is a halfway decent base the limited number of diffusers you can carry are going to blow quickly. Capship shield banks are still big, but nowhere near as big as they were before the rebalance. Just as with your energy, you're going to have a hard time fitting in a large bank shield along with enough diffusers to make a difference. It's possible, especially with help from enough ShMs to outheal the base you're trying to kill, but it's just another challenge to overcome in a ship that only has 2 aug slots.

This has turned into a monster of a post, but I hope it's at least comprehensive. In conclusion, I would have to say that while .1 missile RoF, while technically possible, would still be very difficult to get and sustain simply due to equipment requirements. However, my guess would be that due to human limitations and all of the factors I listed in #1 - #3 it would actually be impossible, and you would be extremely lucky to sustain an average of 2.5 missiles per second for any long period of time. That's a lot of DPS, but it would still require support from an ShM and probably an engineer with an energy beam, which brings the gunner in PvB under perfect conditions closer to the type of dps a zerker can do. Of course, that near equality with zerker dps only occurs when the target is very weak to mining damage.

Gunners should have a Laser based Capital series as well as a +% laser damage boost. Hardly anyone uses laser.

Also, the Capital CR should be renamed to Gunnery CR(a gunner version as FC doesnt need elect temp on his main ship) and stats beefed a bit.

Even when Churchill's alt was a crappy gunner, missiles was NOT his dps.

He played by using beams, and large lasers, making the most of his destruction skill, which was far more effective than any missile barrage.
Imbecile, you said it yourself, he was a crappy gunner. Every high end gunner knows that Missiles are a vital part of your dps. Without them I cant even break the regen on an AI Zebra.

The key is to not run around with only a pair of capital lasers and use a wide variety of weapons. Sure, the mining boost helps, but that and missiles are limited to physical and mining, which is not the sole weakness of ai.
Gunner in a capship gets 60% boost to mining damage and no boost to other damage types. Unless the other weapon you are using is considerably better than a capital laser and the AI has considerably less resists to that damage type, then there is never any reason to use a different damage type.

The Dreadnought is not meant to be a Gunner ship. The class skills are set for a ship like the EF Cruiser and Battlecruiser.
It is the only tech 20 capital ship ingame (until the ruins are found, in my opinion the other ships dont exist), and can be used very effectively as Gunner as countless players have shown.

A Gunner, however, can make very good dreads, but it's not designed to tank. Thats the job more fit for an FC.
No Gunner pretends to tank, the idea is always kill the opponent before it kills you. The only time a gunner "tanks" is holding aggro off of your slaves.

Are you Churchill?

We have 100-200 active members of Axis Inc. I could be anyone of them.