Actually Malice was a bit over the top.

I'd like to CB to be more of mini-missile barrage (increase the damage output and increase the effect area of the beam. So it is more like hard-to-avoid, but small area wreckage.)

right, so if the harder to achieve, easier to disrupt one shot fleet kill was deemed too powerful than why is Missile Barrage even close to acceptable?

also, for those of you say "buff everything else", this "buff everything" argument just sucks. as if some form of equitable exchange was the answer. nothing of the sort is true. overpowered can be measured objectively. everything overpowered is way more unfun than just 1 thing overpowered. i think you wouldn't even enjoy playing that game. it would be effectively nothing but a capital ship knife-fight with meaningless frigates thrown in for flavor. it would degenerate very quickly into a game where the only thing that mattered was being the last man standing with a level 6 cap ship.

simply put, i think you're all wrong and have a crappy idea of what constitutes game balance. games are balanced if and only if no individual unit/ability can influence EVERYTHING ELSE in the game. complex systems have to be balanced around the amalgam of their components, not everything vs. Marza. 

WALL OF TEXT! (Jump the bottom if you simply want to read the proposal itself)

There was nothing hard about malice and cb.
 Line up your radiance to hit several targets and hit them with malice before it is about to fire. easy. easy back then, easy now. And Malice wasn't needed to be level 3 either, and isnt realy needed to be level 3 now, although its preferable.



If you want to rebalance mb, you need to re-evaluate the TEC capitals alltogether. Marzs and MB stand out so much because all but 2 TEC capitals in general simply have underwhelming abilitys when put into fleet context, and the mb is a shining beacon.





I'll break it down for you:



Kol: Gauss gun. Only EVER usable when you have exeeded level 7 and need to skill it. even then only used when combined with either finest hour, to keep the am up or dunovs flux field. Even then the already  short but still way to long cooldown prevents it from being a valuable asset. the DPS is simply to negliebly when you consider the loops you got to jump through.

Flak is awesome, if you face an overwhelming amount of sc and just need something to get rid of them. While decent, its not a shock and awe move.

Adaptive FC: Tank. A Tank does nothing for the fleet if the enemy can choose to simply ignore it.

Finest hour: superb tank enhancement, but the area of effect for the weapons is hardly noticed. theres not even a clear indication showing "wow now theres omething going: vroom! vroom! Booom!"
 In essence: its good for the Kol, but doesnt do jack for the fleet.


Sova: early on a rush boat and later on a stealboat. Does not do anything worthwhile for a fleet and is, aside from a rush sceanrio, completly optional. Just to rub victory in the face of your already beaten opponent.

All its ability fall into the "nice for when you win anyway" category.




Akkan: Colonizer and retreat prevention. Good ship. One of the two mentioned above.

Ion bolt is what allows you to kill(prevent retreats) and interrupt and as such its good for the fleet.

Colonize 1 is mandatory but beyond that its fckn useless.

The Uplink is nice to increase your argonevs range from "aw! damn starfishes!" to "lol! eat lead!" and that alone makes it decent.

Armistice is seriously nasty, stalling an unlimited amount of enemys with the click of a button.

Dunov: Made of win and gold. Second of the above mentioned

Restore shield - decent

EMP: clusterfcking a whole fleets shields and am instantly is gold, no matter how you look at it.

Magnetize is your long term interrupt and ability lockdown, combined with suicide sc hillaritys.

Flux field: now do all the above, over and over and bring your dunov friends and your other am hoggin tec friends.

Marza:

Top to bottom damage dealing god, and needed so because no other cap does its job like that.

Wiping light ships off the field (remember: every light frigate is a threat to your hoshi/cielo combo) is invaluable and no other cap can do it for TEC.


every faction has a light frig wipe ability.

Malice will kill light frigates simply because all your damage gets freely distributed among all maliced vessels. and its cheap to use. Simply activate malice and let the illums/diciples/destra do their jobs. You get free damage on your op. it murders light frigates. Cleansing brilliance isn't even needed for that (but its nice to have), its easy availability is countered by limited number of targets and a certain randomisation. consecutive uses are needed, and easily doable.

The Vasari get volatile nanites which can cause freak chains of death. Easy to use, even more so after stunlokcing your ops fleet with subverters.


Tec get.... yes Marza. The KOL is not up to it at any level and the other ships, while having some awesome manipulation abilitys, do not do any form of frig wiping.





If it were up to me (i know it isn't) id make following changes:



The kol looses the gauss gun. It instead gets a slightly revamped radiation bomb. Rad bomb now does area of effect direct damage on impact, but less damage per shot. the dot remains. short cooldown (10 seconds) AM cost subject of discussion, as is damage. please take into account am regain with FH and am discount with flux field.

Reasoning: The Rad bomb scales nicly with levels and having an area of effect direct damage ability right at level 1 is what the kol and TEC needs. at higher levels it will quickly fire off those things thx to fh and flux and culture support. 


The Marza, having lost its rad bomb gains the gauss cannon instead.
I mean the whole ship is a huge mass driver (raze planet) with missiles and drives attached so aiming that thing at ships seems rather natural.

Level 1 does 3 shots a 50 Damage on a single target. range 10 k, narrow frontal arc.
Level 2 does 6 shots a 75 Damage on a single target. range 10 k, narrow frontal arc.
Level 3 does 9 shots a 125 Damage on a single target. range 10 k, narrow frontal arc.
The weapon ignores mitigation.
Each shot is fired in 1 second intervals. level 3 needing 9 seconds to get off all shots. (interuptable ability)


Level 6 missile barrage is changed to:

Area of effect around impact Damage.
Streams missiles at the target for 15 seconds dealing its listed missiles damage (based on levels and upgrades) onto the target and all units in an area of 1200 around the target.
Every 0.5 seconds a volley is fired, effectily increasing the damage done by inceasing the missiles rof.
Still a channeling ability.



kol is basicly a tank/aoe damage dealer that is avaiable right from the start and offers decent growth in both damage and tank as it levels, but offers no overwhelming "shock and aw now youre dead" moves.

Marza loses the fleet instant kill and gains powerfull assasination tools, still being a victim to interupts. And its gets to use its huge ass mass driver more, which is cool in my book.





*All numeric values are to be treated as not set in stone.

Completely agree.  Nolatile Vanites is hard to use.  And the blow radius is pathetic (1000).