Rank +519/2 would kill young players and low rankers much too easily I think, and with it all new blood.
Rank by itself... rather than (Rank+19)/2... would probably be too much but Rank/1.5 might be more fair.

Also intrigued by the idea of a 3rd parameter, based on days played (since reset or first medal awarded).
Maybe just something like a flat: "days played" x 2? Capped at 2.5k or something maybe.

Haven't run numbers on any of these in any detail but I think subtle tweaks along these lines might help even the playing field without completely nerfing one play style or another.

So my very rough suggestion to throw in the ring would be:
Damage Cap= Rank/1.5 or Decks/2 or Days Played on current ship x2 (up to a max of 2.5k), whichever is higher.

Nothing to do with the OP of course, but a productive discussion seems to have somehow broken out

I do not like it, and hope that Dan totally ignores it. Damage cap should be left as it is. It has been around long enough now, people knew what they were doing when they added their decks...

I'm with umbongo on this one because overtime Dan would also have to be pressured to come up with more mods to fill up the spaces needed for LSB ships. There will be a lot of empty decks with no mods.

Also this suggestion is unnecessary because I know many LSB ships that already demolish, crush and eat SSB ships for breakfast with their large artifact productions and crew.

I'm sorry but isn't a 4k rank SSB... 4k decks? that's not exactly missing out much anyway.... Even the 3k ones are horrible examples for similar reasons.



Laziness doesn't enter into it. Unless there is no alternative(i.e. the ship is guarding a planet or every other pvp target is pacified or dead), there is no reason to attack an SSB. Quite frankly, choosing to attack SSB simply to prove that you can is nothing short of stupid as far as cost-benefit goes. So no, the advantage SSB have is that most people are actually rational.


As for the OP, I have been considering a similar but fundamentally different concept. Thou my concern was regarding crew vs module crisis.
Specifically, introduce a secondary damage cap based on the module based attack and defense value of the two ships. This second cap will be calculated separately from the current damage formula and then the lower of the two would apply. At the moment, I'm considering maybe Atk/qdrt(def+1) where qdrt means quadroot(sqrt of sqrt), for this formula(again, atk/def here is MODULE only). As this cap is applied independently of the damage formula, ships with high TO count will be able to hit this cap on every attack. Realistically speaking, a ship cannot possibly hit for more damage than its guns can shoot out, no matter how many TO it might have and how freakishly gigantic the target is and that's what I base this on.
But while this would resolve, to some extend, the crew vs module crisis, it will favor LSB over SSB as now SSB damage output is further limited. Although considering the damage formula itself is unchanged and the lower of the two will apply, SSB will maintain its defensive advantage since the new cap only matters when it's lower than the amount of damage that would have been dealt.

Just as one more item of interest...there is soooo much chatter about how lsb's that chew ssb for breakfast are out there like hydrogen atoms filling every corner of space...exactly how many lsb's do you see in , oh let's say the 800-1800 rank area? If by and large the decent lsb's--due to whatever- are so high ranked they never even see an ssb..barring LA or guarding a planet, then i'm not sure how people could fairly assess that lsb's eat ssb's for breakfast.

I'd love to get some high rank EOTS feedback on this part as they most likely would have the highest concentration of older, and bigger ships that might even qualify to answer this type of suggestion.

As almost any new ship would be ssb by design..or would die out so quickly they are irrelevant, then i'd love to see some concrete data on who these lsb's are and who they are pvp'ing against.

Also the silly assertion that at rank 3k, 4k, 5k that everyone is the same is still not correct. So, if I have say 6000-800 decks, which a chunk of people do, to be 'ssb' that means i would have to be rank 12k-16k, right? Decks+19/2.... Not the 4k as suggested. And..just how many people past rank 3k do we see? According to the in game board there are 11. Of those how many are out there pvp'ing their hearts out.....think think think....and how many ssb do they see on bt......think think think.

You want a radical idea on pvp....drop the dam cap and only let people fight people with same ship class. So now ssb don;t have to worry about all those bazillions (cough) of lurking mega-hulks waiting to smash them...they could just nut up on the other ssb's hanging out in their range. Or heck, we could just ditch pvp and be a my lil pony galaxy. Softly stroke other ship's...give away planets and have people over for pudding and lamb chops. Maybe put out the good enum crystal ware service set.....

Please Fact check before posting:

PvP Damage Cap Formula
The current PvP damage cap formula is the LARGER of the following two possible formulas:
Decks / 2
(Rank + 19) / 2

http://galaxylegion.com/wiki/index.php/Damage_Caps_(PVP)

So the deck of a SSB is EXACTLY 19 larger than their rank.

Not many true LSB out there, even in the high ranks it's somewhere between MSB and LSB really, mostly because attack/def/hull/shield modules really won't do much for them. So 3-5k deck is more of the norm, which means they become technical SSB or close to it once they cross the 3k/4k line. The ship builds themselves would differ but that's mostly due to module choices and crew count, as far as damage cap goes the variance rarely go above 50%(6k deck for the 4k+ players). There are, of course, players who are OCD and decided to put on every module, they have well over 6000 deck thou I'm not entirely sure if it reaches 8000.

On the other hand, the problem with high ranking pvp is.... lack of targets. The 4k+ can only hit 2400 or higher players as far as battle tab and badges are concerned. there are only a few dozen of those. Quite frankly SSB within those doesn't mean that much as compared to a bigger build, say around 5k deck, the damage cap is only cut in half. The problem in those ranks is the amount of brackets the players have accumulated, it makes it very difficult to drill a hole in, even if they are not SSB.

Aside from super slow rankers who would be a pain to kill anytime, 500-1000 is where SSB shines the most, as this is the rank where they would have enough crews and brackets etc to actually do something(and absorb the hits) while still having a significant lower damage cap than their peers. Once they pass the 2000 mark, it doesn't matter nearly as much.

That has not been my experience. Even with ships that are less than 3 years old, in the rank 800-1.5k I have run into lotsa ships that receive 2.5-3k+ damage on critical hits.

'tis definitely true that attack/def/hull/shield mods don't do much for you after a certain point, tho

I never said that there is none, I said there aren't many. You will most likely encounter some glass cannon along the way. We tend to remember outliars more than unfun regular hits as remembering target we kill over ones that we hit traps on. Try to do a PvP run and record what you run into, including the ones you run into traps on. That should give you a more statistically correct result.

I'm not really interested in the maths. I think we may just disagree with the meaning of "many."

Having over 6800 kills and having hit thousands of ships ranging in rank from 800-2400, halc or no...I can safely let you know there are a chunk-a- chunk big ships out there. I frequently pvp at about 100k attack and there are a LOT of ships taking variable damage from say 1300-2600 on ave with some hits way up there in the 2k's or low 3k's.

For FACT checking puposes...I accidentally typed decks+19 rather than level...glad you set me straight , i might have missed the plot if you hadn't said that.

I also love how people loosely sling the terms 'glass cannon' and 'tin can'. One man's tin can is another's behemoth. One man's PITA is another's bread and butter. I won't call anyone out, but there are quite a few people who post on here as regulars who ive slapped like red headed stepchildren. My ship is probably about average - so does that mean they suck or are GLASS cannons? I think not.

There are some ships a few hundred levels below me who could jack slap me like their grand theft auto hooker. Does that make me a glass cannon? Or does it suggest a wide expanses of ships and corresponding power. Power which in great part is driven by AP and completed by deck capping.

also--- FYI is damage is rank +19 /2 then again i Say it takes a level 7981 ship to be true SSB for 4000 decks. Know any of those?

I further disagree that after the ssb reaches a higher level that it "doesn't matter as much". I know several people in legion who are what most people would consider ssb or very close to it. OVer time and with their AP production they keep getting harder and harder to kill.

Example someone today who takes over 200 minimum hits to kill and has let's say 2500 decks...with decision to never increase it...they will become something between linear and geometric in difficulty to kill as time passes. They will add xcells, brackets, etc but their 'cap' won't go up. Not till they go over around rank 5k, which is roughly the same time frame game-wise as when the sun becomes a cold dark chunk of coal the size of your brain.

You could of course argue that higher ranks have typically a corresponding higher e bar and thus don't care....this is likely untrue. How many people do you know that go, oh sure I like spending 1000-2000 e to kill someone..and that is ASSUMING you are capping them...which may be a big assumption based on defense that good ships (ssb or otherwise) will accrue.

I submit to you that people don;t kill ssb's not out or laziness, but because it's a colossal waste of time, e, and effort. Plus if someone was treadmilling, knowing they could have 200-400k hull in the first place and with shield regen, you might waste 15 minutes of your real life for their satisfaction.

NOMNOM NOM

Pretty much.

I'll spend anywhere up to 4k energy to kill a target, and i can do that in 4-5 minutes. I take one thing into account during PvP & that is how much dmg i can do per shot. If i can average 1k per shot and i get shots up to 2k per shot on occasion imma take you out, and do it often.

However, there are some players like zakwas for example, who has 4400 decks, but even with 260k PvP attack you'll get most hits of 300-600 per shot, and when your target has 700k combined hull/shield that's a joke amount of time/energy & xp(most important) wasted.... and its even worse with sharnhorst, whose SSB could make a 400k PvP attacker look like they're swinging a limp #*&$ for a weapon.

Anyone can be disabled, doesn't matter what build they run, but i ain't gonna use up all that xp for a red/yellow.

Take rank 2500 for example, an SSB would have deck 2520(20 because it rounds up, you want to add 2 deck on your even ranks as opposed to one deck per rank), with a damage cap of 1260.
A ship that is 5040 deck, not SSB by most player's standard(not quite LSB but bit bigger than common MSB), would have a damage cap of 2520, exactly 100% higher.
As such, assuming the ship stat are the same in all other respect, the larger ship will fall exactly 50% faster than the SSB, that is to say perhaps 100 shots instead of 200. But that would be the extend of the difference. In fact, a 7560 deck ship(which is more or less as large as it can come) would only fold 3 times as fast as the SSB, still tanking 67 shots. The difference is less significant than comparing a rank 800 SSB with 405 cap versus a LSB 800 rank that have 4860 deck, which would fold 6 times faster.

The thing is, given a high enough rank, the alloted deck would be fairly large such that further practical increase(you can be 50k deck but you won't because there is nothing to use) is limited, usually within 100% difference, hence at worst halving the amount of punishment you can take.

And yet again, fact check, the formula is (rank+19)/2, the () matters in order of operation. 2500 deck will only last you until 2481 rank, as at 2482, (2482+19)=1250.5, which rounds to 1251.

Why are you nit-picking? Juiceman knows the damage cap formula. It was just a freakin' typo or oversight on his part.

Fact remains, there are still a ton of ships with 6-7k decks out there to kill. Though as more and more people start/reset, nobody with a halfway decent mentor will be going much over 4400 decks (assuming they care about the "Huge" medal), due to the inherent static limitations on most atk/def/shield/hull modules. I wonder what this will do to PVP?

I think Uy23e is just trying to point out that both (Rank+19) and Decks are divided by 2 to give you the damage cap.
Therefore, Rank 3981 (not 7981) is "strict" SSB at 4000 decks.

That's exactly it, I know for a fact that he DOESN'T know the formula because the following statements:


Now we know who reads the posts carefully and who merely skim through them. Arguments would be settled much faster if everyone is as attentive as Deigobene.

Now, back to your(Pongoloid)'s statement:
Let's walk down how this sub-argument started:
Some player claims SSB are OP while others disagree.
Someone claims that none of the 4k/3k+(in that order) are pushovers whether they are SSB or not so that SSB does not matter.
My assertion is that the claim is moot as the effect of SSB is not properly represented by this group due to the fact 4k/3k receive a diminished SSB effect.


Now, using the numbers that YOU have provided:
"ships with 6-7k decks"
A ship with, for example, 6000 deck, would have almost exactly twice the amount of damage cap of a rank 3k SSB, meaning it will take 50% less attacks to kill if all other stats are the same. This is not, in my opinion, signficant. Worse still is 6k vs 4k, as that only takes 33% less attack. Of course, there is the 7k deck end but that is still marginal, I think you see my point.
On the other hand, a rank 1k SSB vs a ship with 6000 deck at rank 1k, would be a 1:6 ratio in terms of damage per shot. Which means the 6k build would only take 17% of the number of attack as compared to the SSB, this is a much larger ratio.
So as you can see, with higher rank, the SSB effect will diminish, and when one reaches rank 4k/3k+, it is fairly insignificant in itself. Quite frankly, at that rank passive hull/shield pileup is what really matters.

Do you understand my logic now? I'm not really arguing for or against SSB in particular, but if someone is going to argue on the point, they should use better examples.


Edit: In other news:



I kinda missed this earlier. So.... is there a lot of LSB or isn't there? Or perhaps you mean you frequently see MSBs?

They are still growing stronger at a faster rate than somebody with 2k more decks, and most likely with very, very high artifact.

If you have two rank 3981 players, each bringing in 50 brackets per day, one a true SSB, the other with 6000 decks, the SSB gains one more of those theoretical "min shots to kill" (no buffs) every 4 days, while it takes 6 days for the larger ship. Definitely not insignificant. (I mean, if you've got a player of kirk's AP/attack and rank talking about how high-AP/low-deck SSB's make him feel like he's whapping them with a limp #*&$, I'd that's pretty significant.)



Of course from a mechanics standpoint, it is true that the rank 3981 player may eventually reach rank 5981, making all things equal -- however, with only four active players in the entire game above rank 3891, the "It gets insignificant at high ranks" argument is not really applicable to the vast majority of pilots in the galaxy. Most people are going to retire looooong before then.

And as for Juiceman, we have discussed game mechanics like this many times in the past, and I can assure you he understands 'em. If parading his error makes you feel good, go for it, but I truly doubt he forgot how the damcap system works so much as mistyped


Unless their defense is very low or you are arti spamming, you aren't going to come close to capping most LSBs.

I would understand if he makes a typo here and there, the problem is that EVERY rank related cap figure(or rather, cap related rank figure) he gave was wrong, it's highly unlikely that it was just typos. I highlighted them to support my statement. If you didn't make the claim that he knows what he's talking about, I won't have bothered high lighting them all(and there is one more, before my first attempt at correction, the +19 error aside, he was also talking about rank 12k-16k). Unlike you, I like to talk with evidence and facts. Show me ANY evidence that he knows what he's talking about please.

And you need to realize I'm talking about relative significance. You can't possibly think that 3:2 ratio comes close to 4:1, 5:1 or even 6:1 ratio now can you? SSB shines when it have those higher ratios, 3:2 is really not much in comparison.

And while it might take 2 extra days to grow the same number of hit-to-kill and it might very well be one million clicks, you need to remember that the ratio stays the same. In the end, it will come down to saving 33% of your energy. When it comes to 1,000,000 clicks vs 1,500,000 clicks, the horrible part comes from the giant base number of 1,000,000 not the 1.5 multiplier. They might be large absolute difference(500k), but not really large relative numbers. I personally won't mind spending 50% extra energy on badges but I won't touch ones that cost 200% or more extra(if I know about it that is)

Juiceman has let this go, so I will to. Just gonna say this: I am in a legion with him and talk to him daily, and he knows what he's talking about (especially in regards to damage cap. Kind of a pet issue). But if you would rather believe he did not know/understand the damage cap rather than simply reversing some numbers, have at it

If you have 250k attack and hit a ship with 150k defense, 3k decks, and 450k health vs. a ship with 150k defense, 2k decks, and 450k health, it is going to take you a little more than 1100 extra energy on the smaller ship. That's a lot of clicking.

Would 4:1, 5:1, even 6:1 be even worse for an attacker? Of course, but like I said -- still a lot of clicking, still a big advantage. If I'm just going for badges, I know I'd stay away from a ship that costs 1k more energy to disable!


Depends on the number of clicks for me.

+200% to 150 clicks -- not a problem. +50% to 900 clicks... pass, please

You are merely demonstrating that some ship are tough because they are tough, not necessarily tough because they are SSB. You say you'd want to stay away from ships that cost 1k extra to kill, but I'd say I'd avoid ships that cost 2k to begin with, regardless of whether there is another 1k on top. Quite frankly, if you are given a pool of similar strength players to fight against, the 200% are the ones you will end up avoiding because they stand out more. In fact, it's very possible that you won't notice a 50% SSB as a SSB, because attack damage is quite random. Unless you have confidence you are hitting or near hitting cap everytime you can't really tell(unless you already know of course)