Kirk Tome · Lead Designer

We've noted that the community has raised some issues with EMP and they're very valid issues. So the reason that EMP was such a problem when we released 3.0 is that when we converted the items to 2.0, EMP relies on a type of damage that we are calling distortion for now, but distortion damage wasn't properly set up on ship items. So the Warlock and the Raven were doing about 500,000 units of distortion damage on ships because we hadn't transferred the proper distortion damage pool onto items like the power plants, shield generators, and then the new controls we have for doing things like flight control and power control and whatnot. Those were set at default tiny levels, like I think 500. So you're doing these massive amounts of damage to ships that just were simply unable to cope with the previous values that we had before. So we did several things. We generally tuned both the Warlock and the Raven's EMP behavior so that it takes quite a bit more time to charge them and it requires more energy to do that. So in order to prep the EMP to fire, you're basically sacrificing some shield performance, as it'll drain the power to reduce your shield, and it will also disable your weapons for the most part. You can still do a little bit of energy triangle balancing to maybe get some of those systems online. But for the most part, you kind of have to really commit to discharge of the EMP. So there's a preparatory stage that you need to do to become an EMP bomb. And so we've balanced the EMP blast itself. We tuned the radius for that. So for the smaller ships, you can pretty much get them at a pretty good range, but you would have to get in close for ships that have larger size items in there, because those items can absorb more distortion damage. And finally, the other thing we did was we really, really toned down the time it takes, the cooldown time between blasts. So the cycle of being able to cripple a ship by performing an EMP blast and then having the time to restart the EMP cycle and shoot it again before the ship that you crippled is able to get out of the crippled state was tuned. So I think for the most part we settled on about three minutes between the EMP blasts. So really it's much less of an OP ship item. And now you will have to commit to doing it. Once you get it, you do get the reward of being able to just wail on them if you want. But at least it's more fair in that if you don't get a perfect shot, the ship that you're targeting at least has some chance of recovering. And then because your shields and weapons are down, either the ship that you haven't fully crippled or any of its comrades can come and take you out, because you've kind of sacrificed safety in order to blast the ship that you're targeting.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Is that going in 3.1?

Kirk Tome · Lead Designer

Yes. It's actually in our build that we're having the testing public work on at the moment. Anybody that's able to participate in our playtest should be able to see all these changes.