Just to summarize for the devs:
Acetone Beam is an excellent energy weapon debuff. In fact, it could serve as a wonderful incentive for a PvP team to target the other team's cruisers. If it was relevant.
However, in PvP it suffers from two sad facts:
- Everybody uses Hazard Emitters, which everybody must do, because it is both the best heal and a universal debuff-remover, and it is useable on allies. Therefore, even if you time your acetone beam correctly, just after the target's HE wears off, you can be quite sure that your AB will be removed by some other ship's Hazard Emitters. To make things worse, HE's cooldown is 45 seconds or 30 seconds with two copies, while AB's cooldown is 2 minutes or 1 minute with two copies - so a target will recover its ability to remove the debuff much, much faster than the attacker can cooldown his AB.
- In a world where HE was not as omnipresent, acetone beam would still have one problem: It is useable mostly by ships with very low turn rates - and their most likely target for an AB will attack these ships from behind most of the time, meaning that AB won't be useable on them.
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edit: Thinking about it, it's a quirky thing - because it's basically a tanking/survivability ability - mitigation - debuffing, etc, etc, etc. But unlike PvE where mobs might clear something once in a blue moon, like almost everything susceptible to spammed cleanses - it's going to have issues.