I’m curious what others are seeing on the battlefield, and what you’ve been doing with your own builds since the projectile changes.
From what I can see, hover players are still experimenting a lot with different approaches, and it doesn’t seem like a new meta has been established yet. It’s weird seeing hovers with big plows on the front and slabs of heavy armour, but I’m also seeing more stylish hovers with more compact designs. Haven’t tried any of my own hover builds yet, as I’m having way too much fun playing wheels and augers right now.
I haven’t actually been building much, and mostly just testing older builds. My old approaches seem to be working as good or better than they used to, with the exception of Thor generators being more vulnerable and deframing happening more often with some builds.
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When the hover meta settles it will have more armor parts that add to the cabin and a mix of high HP bumpers. It has become very important to be able to tank some shots right in the cabin (which was not the case before)
Spaced armor is still a things because of explosive radius.
Compact (better looking) armor has no advantages.
You need enough armor up front to take hits, but enough gaps to disperse the explosive radius damage.
Plus - as mentioned in a post last week - no mater how much they change armor high PS builds will always need to used spaced armor because we do not have enough parts to cover our large builds.
Re: compact armour
I would agree that it doesn’t have an overall advantage, but would also say that it’s less of a liability now. You’re still unlikely to see many smaller builds in CW or top PS, but it can work good enough in the rest of the game that people can choose to use it and not be a huge disadvantage.
In particular, fast light builds can make good use of compact armour just by being harder to hit with cannons and other alpha strike weapons. Because spaced armour builds are carrying more HP in their screens now, every cannon shell that hits them is doing decent damage, no matter how spaced out it is. The smaller vehicle is just a lot harder to hit.
There are ways to build compact vehicles that can tank damage, and it definitely uses some theory borrowed from classic spaced armour, just with a different priority (most effective durability in the smallest footprint possible).
Now that we have had some time to test this change - I don’t think it affected building as much as people hoped it would.
I’ve noticed a difference in the damage mechanics in that my light hovers tank a lot less cannon damage. That is, ultra light builds such as Kami/Griffon hovers or a Hot Red Beholder hover. These just aren’t big enough to hide from blast radius.
My larger hovers, such as Beholder with Cheetah, and Nova hovers can tank cannon shots just fine as long as the shots are from the front. From the side, cannon shots are devastating.
Overall, this doesn’t seem drastically different. Also, Typhoons are still weak.
Cannons are more fun to play, and I don’t see quite as many hovers as I used to.
But I agree that things haven’t changed that much.
I did notice that some raiders seem to be benefiting from the faction armour changes, if you’re unlucky enough to be playing a weapon they have resistance to. But I haven’t really been taking those attributes into account much when building.
These changes would have been good if they didn’t fuck us with penetration percentages. 55% on my Astras is a joke. Atleast with spaced armor I had the option to avoid aiming at the spaced armor to do effective damage. Now I can’t do that.
I had to retire my 499 hp triple Executioner build. The change made it waaaaaaay to powder puff vs other cannon builds. (before I could tank quite a few hits).
Other than that one particular build, nothing really changed much imo.