Thermal Sunder Needs More Work

[Seele]

The fundamental flaws with this ability are yet to be addressed.

In my previous mission, a Gauss player who did nearly nothing but use heat thermal sunder (47 of their 373 kills were melee, no gunshots fired) achieved 54% of player damage against a Harrow with Incarnon Lex and 384% weapon accuracy, a Mesa with Tenet Envoy, and a Wisp buffing us both while not contributing much to the thermal sunder spam plan. Granted, I was still able to keep myself occupied because spawn density in mirror defense is intense, so this wasn't an issue of thermal sunder actually ruining the game. But thermal sunder spam outdid Mesa - which one vocal apologist for Thermal Sunder in this very thread insists is far better and more unfair - and incarnon Lex - which another vocal proponent here insists is far more powerful than any melee weapon in the game even when equipped with only half a suite of mods.

I can't speak for Mesa beyond knowing what their equipment was, I didn't notice very much Regulator fire, or Envoy explosions for that matter. But a properly built incarnon Lex with what I would say is at least average player competency was unable to score half as much damage as someone who picked Gauss and pressed 3 a lot.

This was in a Munio bounty - far from level cap, sure, but also rather far above the point at which an ability 3 ought to be independently sufficient for mission success.

Originally I wanted its functionality on Gauss to be perfectly preserved, but I see now that the cutesy subsume builds were far from necessary and only made the loop somewhat simpler. Thermal Sunder remains too powerful, even on its base frame.

[Traumtulpe]

6 hours ago, Seele said:

[...]

Your post looks quite ridiculous to me. Also one guy bringing an Incarnon Lex to a low level bounty where he'll be hard pressed to find anything he won't oneshot (and thus get no charge), and an AFK Mesa being proof that TS needs (more) nerfing. Funny stuff.

I'm not even being facetious, honestly it's just peculiar and amusing.

Oh, and 4 rotations of Mirror Defense take 25 minutes, so that Gauss apparently did at most 50 kills per minute, which is *very* low.

Edited December 15, 2023 by Traumtulpe

[FeRixia]

This is utter nonsense such that I'm even surprised this thread is still going/you posted the latest anecdote. The devs had plenty of time to evaluate after the nerf and the fact that it wasn't touched this update shows they're fine with it and it's time to move on. Your arguments up to this point have been exaggerated. You even said 47 of their kills were melee and say he did "nearly nothing but spam..." in the same sentence.

 

Back to the anecdote though, this is weak correlation at best. Gauss is a strong nuke frame and requires energy and battery management. It is highly unlikely that he spammed sunder the whole time because that would run out of energy, and battery mechanics make it weaker (though I doubt this was on SP). It also needs multiple casts to kill anyway. You also mentioned his damage. Damage is not indicative of anything needing a nerf in any capacity. Maybe the Mesa was afk, maybe they had a bad build. It doesn't account for build or playstyle. But pure damage stats can be heavily biased anyway. I have encountered exactly zero TS users in all the public bounties I did, aside from myself when I felt like it. Plenty of nuke builds go past the 28-30m TS does (Gara, Volt, Mirage to name a few).

 

Also, incarnon lex? Incarnons are notoriously hard to charge up in public non sp missions. That doesn't mean anything. 54% dmg isn't anything to write home about either considering most pubs don't have optimized builds or aoe. Heck even a prism Mirage standing there and pressing it every 10 seconds would've cleared easier with less button pushing.

 

[Seele]

On 2023-12-16 at 1:57 AM, Traumtulpe said:

Your post looks quite ridiculous to me. Also one guy bringing an Incarnon Lex to a low level bounty where he'll be hard pressed to find anything he won't oneshot (and thus get no charge), and an AFK Mesa being proof that TS needs (more) nerfing. Funny stuff.

I'm not even being facetious, honestly it's just peculiar and amusing.

Oh, and 4 rotations of Mirror Defense take 25 minutes, so that Gauss apparently did at most 50 kills per minute, which is *very* low.

Who said 4 rotations? We defended each objective once. It was a bounty. This was steel path so I charged my Lex very easily.

On 2023-12-16 at 3:00 AM, FeRixia said:

This is utter nonsense such that I'm even surprised this thread is still going/you posted the latest anecdote. The devs had plenty of time to evaluate after the nerf and the fact that it wasn't touched this update shows they're fine with it and it's time to move on. Your arguments up to this point have been exaggerated. You even said 47 of their kills were melee and say he did "nearly nothing but spam..." in the same sentence.

 

Back to the anecdote though, this is weak correlation at best. Gauss is a strong nuke frame and requires energy and battery management. It is highly unlikely that he spammed sunder the whole time because that would run out of energy, and battery mechanics make it weaker (though I doubt this was on SP). It also needs multiple casts to kill anyway. You also mentioned his damage. Damage is not indicative of anything needing a nerf in any capacity. Maybe the Mesa was afk, maybe they had a bad build. It doesn't account for build or playstyle. But pure damage stats can be heavily biased anyway. I have encountered exactly zero TS users in all the public bounties I did, aside from myself when I felt like it. Plenty of nuke builds go past the 28-30m TS does (Gara, Volt, Mirage to name a few).

 

Also, incarnon lex? Incarnons are notoriously hard to charge up in public non sp missions. That doesn't mean anything. 54% dmg isn't anything to write home about either considering most pubs don't have optimized builds or aoe. Heck even a prism Mirage standing there and pressing it every 10 seconds would've cleared easier with less button pushing.

 

 

47 kills out of 373 is 12%. May as well have been accidents. The entire playing field was saturated with thermal sunder the entire time and the sound effects never stopped for any significant amount of time. There were still some enemies on occasion, so I was able to consistently charge and expend the charge of my Lex, but even hitting more than 3 enemies per shot on average was not enough to keep up with thermal sunder.

"Damage is not indicative of anything needing a nerf in any capacity" is a wild and very wrong claim to make. Surely it would be fine, then, if they released a gun that did one billion damage per shot because damage is never indicative of something needing a nerf.

And again, all of you who do not play in SEA servers should not cite the build's rarity as a reason to leave it alone, because it is not at all rare here.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Seele

[Traumtulpe]

1 hour ago, Seele said:

Who said 4 rotations? We defended each objective once. It was a bounty. This was steel path so I charged my Lex very easily.

You can't do the bounties on Steel Path, so what you're saying doesn't add up. Also if you can charge your Lex on a regular bounty you probably have a very special build, specifically designed to deal no damage.

Also I said 4 rotations take 25 minutes, because that's what I had to measure the length of the mission (you don't get the good loot until rotation C, so that's what I did a couple times, on the actual Steel Path by the way). I was well aware that you merely did one rotation to get the bounty done and factored that in.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Traumtulpe

[Seele]

1 hour ago, Traumtulpe said:

You can't do the bounties on Steel Path, so what you're saying doesn't add up. Also if you can charge your Lex on a regular bounty you probably have a very special build, specifically designed to deal no damage.

Also I said 4 rotations take 25 minutes, because that's what I had to measure the length of the mission (you don't get the good loot until rotation C, so that's what I did a couple times, on the actual Steel Path by the way). I was well aware that you merely did one rotation to get the bounty done and factored that in.

It appears I was victim of a long-lived bug wherein I queued a bounty from the hub area and was added to a non-bounty SP mission in progress. I have only ever tried to do bounties, but on the SP chart I have Munio completed and no other nodes.

Point remains that it was SP and only one defense of two objectives. I don't know exactly how much time it took. My Lex has a bog standard build.