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Hurq Swarmer Hangar Pets - Please Update
voodoopokey
Member Posts: 244 Arc User
The hangar pets for hurq ships do not well suit their role, or well represent their NPC counterparts, in their present/initial form.
Chidyat Swarmers as enemies are numerous and unceasing in their presence, though they are fairly easy to dispatch. The hangar pet version is just a low-performing hangar pet with no shields, limited weaponry, and standard launching recharge (40 seconds). Compare this to the House Mokai Raiders from the sarcophagus ship which, honestly, better suit the role of endless, expendable swarms: 20 second recharge, no ability to rank up, an extra damaging core breach on death, and temporary hitpoints given to the carrier upon death.
If nothing else, the 20 second recharge would well-suit the swarmer, though almost all the features of the faction-specific mokai raiders are in some way appropriate.
The hurq are a cool species, and their ships are interesting and alien.. I'd love for them to have a more unique play style involving the swarmers. The two swarmer-summoning traits added in the Swarm Lockbox were both excellent steps in that direction, but the slow launching, weak hangar pets are a bit of an oversight in the design (imho).
Chidyat Swarmers as enemies are numerous and unceasing in their presence, though they are fairly easy to dispatch. The hangar pet version is just a low-performing hangar pet with no shields, limited weaponry, and standard launching recharge (40 seconds). Compare this to the House Mokai Raiders from the sarcophagus ship which, honestly, better suit the role of endless, expendable swarms: 20 second recharge, no ability to rank up, an extra damaging core breach on death, and temporary hitpoints given to the carrier upon death.
If nothing else, the 20 second recharge would well-suit the swarmer, though almost all the features of the faction-specific mokai raiders are in some way appropriate.
The hurq are a cool species, and their ships are interesting and alien.. I'd love for them to have a more unique play style involving the swarmers. The two swarmer-summoning traits added in the Swarm Lockbox were both excellent steps in that direction, but the slow launching, weak hangar pets are a bit of an oversight in the design (imho).
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Indeed the "base" hangar pets are always so weak to be practically useless, this is both (probably) intentional and logical since the advanced and elite versions have to be more powerful then the base version and if the base version was too powerful you'd end up with "you must use this and only this pet" for the higher versions and that's bad design.
I'm sure I'm talking about the right hangar pet, yes, and I would never refer to the base version of a hangar pet. The Hurq swarmers are both weak and not in line with the theme of the hurq - you need a lobi starship trait and a lockbox trait to even start to be "swarmy".
Consider some of their peers:
Obelisk Swarmer: antiproton array + defense array, beam overload 3, transphasic torpedoes
Scorpion Fighters: shields, plasma cannons + turret, rapid recharging high yield plasma torpedoes
Mokai Raiders: shields, launch cooldown HALF as long, fore and aft disruptor array, fore dual bank, increased core breach damage, give carrier temp hp when they die.
The Hurq Swarmers, like the obelisk, have no shields... but have only the short ranged mining laser as a weapon, and the only damage boosting cooldown they have is the Focused Assault 2 ability, that gives 15% increased damage for 20 seconds... compared to the Beam Overload 3 that gives 680% bonus damage for the next attack, and then 50% increased damage and crit damage for 10 seconds after that.... not to mention also having torpedoes and a longer range on their beam arrays.
This is a species that has, as one of its key themes, the swarming of small attack ships... yet the discovery era klingons can launch fighters twice as quickly, and those fighters have shields and the unique ability to shield the carrier with temporary hit points.
I'm not sure how you managed to get "toasted" by these TRIBBLE pets... even with TWENTY NINE (29) of them under my control (admittedly, nine of them are legitimate chidyat swarmers, not the hangar pet hurq swarmers) it takes longer to chew through enemies than it does with only 12 of those other three. They're dealing an average of 120 points of phaser damage with their attacks.
To give a simple damage comparison I just equipped a hangar with elite hurq swarmers and one with elite obelisk swarmers, and sent them to attack the same target:
Your Short Range Salvage Laser gives 378 (420) to Destroyer Escort's Shields.
Your Short Range Salvage Laser deals 47 (467) Phaser Damage to Destroyer Escort.
Your Focused Antiproton Array gives 1582 (1758) to Destroyer Escort's Shields.
Your Focused Antiproton Array deals 195 (1953) Antiproton Damage to Destroyer Escort.
Your Transphasic Torpedo deals 7857 (7483) Kinetic Damage to Destroyer Escort.
The obelisk beam arrays are doing almost 4x the damage the hurq swarmer mining lasers are, and that's when they're not using beam overload... plus the obelisk swarmers fire torpedoes as well.
So no, these pets are not "so powerful", they're terrible.. and they really should be updated to be, at the very least, a passable hangar pet if not something inspired like the mokai raiders were, given that these are pets from a set of ships belonging to a species that is pet-focused.
Your Short Range Salvage Laser deals 549 Phaser Damage to Destroyer Escort.
Your Short Range Salvage Laser deals 561 Phaser Damage to Destroyer Escort.
Your Short Range Salvage Laser deals 539 Phaser Damage to Destroyer Escort.
Your Short Range Salvage Laser deals 490 Phaser Damage to Destroyer Escort.
Your Plasma Turret deals 502 Plasma Damage to Destroyer Escort.
Your Plasma Turret deals 585 Plasma Damage to Destroyer Escort.
Your Plasma Turret deals 550 Plasma Damage to Destroyer Escort.
Your Plasma Turret deals 558 Plasma Damage to Destroyer Escort.
The main (only) weapon on the hurq swarmers, even allowed to ramp up over time, is being outpaced by the TURRET on the scorpions... turrets... literally the lowest damage weapon type... and NOT the only weapon the scorpions have:
Your Dual Plasma Cannons deals 967 Plasma Damage to Talon Battleship.
Your Plasma Torpedo - Heavy I deals 11320 (16913) Kinetic Damage to Talon Battleship.
Hurq Swarmers are like throwing sadness at your enemies. There's no good reason for it!
> Just to really emphasize the **** damage these do, I wanted to post a comparison made with a wing of elite hurq swarmers and a wing of elite scorpion fighters... and this is after letting the mining lasers ramp up their damage (it increases over time against a single target):
>
> Your Short Range Salvage Laser deals 549 Phaser Damage to Destroyer Escort.
> Your Short Range Salvage Laser deals 561 Phaser Damage to Destroyer Escort.
> Your Short Range Salvage Laser deals 539 Phaser Damage to Destroyer Escort.
> Your Short Range Salvage Laser deals 490 Phaser Damage to Destroyer Escort.
> Your Plasma Turret deals 502 Plasma Damage to Destroyer Escort.
> Your Plasma Turret deals 585 Plasma Damage to Destroyer Escort.
> Your Plasma Turret deals 550 Plasma Damage to Destroyer Escort.
> Your Plasma Turret deals 558 Plasma Damage to Destroyer Escort.
>
> The main (only) weapon on the hurq swarmers, even allowed to ramp up over time, is being outpaced by the TURRET on the scorpions... turrets... literally the lowest damage weapon type... and NOT the only weapon the scorpions have:
>
> Your Dual Plasma Cannons deals 967 Plasma Damage to Talon Battleship.
> Your Plasma Torpedo - Heavy I deals 11320 (16913) Kinetic Damage to Talon Battleship.
>
> Hurq Swarmers are like throwing sadness at your enemies. There's no good reason for it!
That doesn't look anything like the damage I was taking at all. I was eating like 3000 damage hits from the salvage laser. Perhaps the pets have something really buggy going on with their power scaling like with weapon power or they start off with an abnormally low weapon power, such that something like the trait that applies emergency power to Xs to them causes them to go from 0 to hero. Since you seem to be an obelisk owner, have you tried the emergency power to pets trait on them?
I don't have the Obelisk carrier - the obelisk swarmers are universal-equip fighters available from max tier Spire without need of an unlock.
In theory the mining lasers should increase in damage the longer they fire on the same target, but the damage doesn't seem to be increasing quickly enough to notice any effect. Additionally, these are fighters without any shields which means they're typically not long for this world against any opponent that plans to fight back, requiring regular re-launching - something that would prevent slow ramping up of damage.
If you have your combat log that shows you taking 3000-point hits from elite hurq swarmers, I'd be interested to see it... or even just the lines in the log that show that. I've never seen them do anything but sub-par damage.
Honestly, I'd be happy if they had the 20 second cooldown the Mokai Raiders so that they at least... swarmed more.. even if they continued to deal sad, sad damage. The optimal result would be for them to give a stacking damage resistance debuff like the mining laser console, such that a large group of them could tear targets down with some decent speed... even if that debuff only applied to other hurq pets (all three types, though...)
Do they bounce between targets and reset the buff back to zero?
I know other hangar pets will often ignore the command "attack my target command" and take pot shots at whatever they want that's nearby before going back to the actual one they need killed.
40secs CD seems a little long, thats on par with the frigates like yukawa but a quick look at my f2ps spoonhead sci ship the CD for them is 23secs without any doff boost. So maybe that could be tweaked at your end with power to aux a smidge higher or a hangar doff.
If the hurq beacon device summons swarmers as well then that represents a FOURTH variety of player-side swarmers, and one that was not included in my testing. I can assure you that the chidyat swarmers from the new space trait do not deal massive damage, however... only slightly higher damage than the elite swarmer hangar pet version.
The lowest damage comes from hurq swarmers that are created by the starship trait associated with the hurq science ship, which may well be base-level swarmer pets (rather than advanced or elite versions). They really should be higher than that considering there can only be 8 of them (compared to the space trait's 9) and they only last 30 seconds (compared to 60 on the space trait).
Well, as I mentioned, I did let them ramp up on a target... if there's an increase it's not particularly noticeable. It doesn't seem to apply any visible buff to the pet, or debuff to the target, either, making it tough to say. Really, if we can only theorize about the existence of the damage increase, it's probably not that relevant.
40 second cooldown is the base cooldown for hangar pets. There's little point in declaring the modified value which will be subjective and based on the individual build's aux power levels, mastery traits, skill selection, doff setup, etc. The House Mokai Raiders pets that come with the Sarcophagus ship have a 20 second cooldown, allowing them to be launched much faster than other pets, even if you don't max out your aux power and slot 3 launch doffs. Given that the Hurq are all about filling space with swarmers, it seems reasonable to expect them to launch at least as fast as old-era klingon fighters...
Since the pets are doing kinetic damage which ramps up over time they do doing crazy DPS in the 100k+ range via the Kinetic bug. Sometimes these pets do more damage then all 4 player ships combined. But only on the same maps that suffer from the kinetic bug.
I'll have to check to see if the beacon-spawned hurq swarmers do kinetic damage... the other three types are doing phaser damage (see the log lines above) with their mining laser despite the fact that the player console mining laser is, in fact, kinetic damage based.
Since it looks like I don't have the beacon from the "Home" mission, I guess I'll go run that, get it, and then test those hurq swarmers to see if that explains the one guy's experiences. Certainly the hangar pets and trait-spawned versions are in no danger of dishing out anything more severe than a back rub.
The beacon does summon some larger ships, like a ravager, and the ravager hits for some appreciable damage with its phasic harmonic phaser arrays.
So, all 4 types (well sources) of player-owned hurq swarmers do piddly damage.