I mean, it totally makes sense that a ship that only requires a hard node farm and no crew to star and gear is effective in defending against relic'd pilots. Sure, why not. The only thing that would make more sense is if you then gate access to capital ships behind guild activities, because everyone loves to have who they game with define how successful they can be in arenas.
Bravo.
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It is definitely the efficient way to go. Struggled mightily as a five star Negotiator against a six star R4 Mal starting a 7* vulture, 6* hyena and G12 Sun Fac. Then just beat a 7 star Negotiator with R4 GK / R7 Eta / R6 Fives / R4 Bossk. Quite different ROIs.
(Edit: actually proof read...)
Another issue is that there are far fewer gradients available to avoid (or at least delay) the return of the dreaded ‘everything is a coin flip’ speeds are all the same metas that so many of the ship metas have had.
Edit: jkray kinda ninja’d me while I was typing my response!
As someone who went with Negotiator, I also think crewless ships are a great idea. One of the worst parts about older fleets is gearing bad characters that are not ideal in character battles.
I agree with respect to the fact that farming Neg and Mal are pretty much dependent on completing the new TBs which my guild can't do yet. Its not necessarily the fact that the ships are blocked except to higher powered guilds (certainly its been done with toons like Traya originally), but the fact that even having one of those capital ships at 5* with low starred and low powered fleet ships allows you to beat teams that have 100k more GP easily. With the raid toons, simply having that toon at 5* with garbage on the rest of your squad would not allow you to dominate arena, but now with Fleet thats the way it is.
My G12 FOTP is like
me.gif
EDIT: I avoided Bistan and SRP.
EDIT2: I removed the gif - wow was that large.
For now. Fear not, lots of people that didn't live through the FOTP meta will start complaining about having to put gear on him with the next few batches of GL requirements releases.
I agree with the sentiment, but I think they struck out on trying to attain any balance. I could have seen them adding gear tiers for the ships themselves for un-crewed ships. Would have created some initial balance with the current set of ships and allowed for the future proofing concerns of jkRay and theJeff to be met.
How were they made more irrelevant?
My relic piloted ships have far better stats for health/protection .
Well, at max levels, the Hyena is within just a few thousand combined HP of the other big tanks,
theY-wing is definitely lower, but gets a ton of bonuses when paired with a Galactic Republic fleet that pushes it right up to the same level,
And the vulture droid is definitely a squishy glass cannon by design, but summons an entire other ship when it dies (which may be slightly weaker, but the combined health pool certainly makes it one of the most robust of the attacker ships.
If anything, the crewless ships are unbalanced for a massive early (and easily achieved) Return on Investment over their crewed counterparts, it is more a question of if they will be able to achieve long term balance with them as power creep rears it’s head.
Because a bad toon that pilots a good ship that is meta is more relevant than a bad toon that pilots a ship that gets beaten by pilotless meta ships. Seems fairly obvious.
So first off your example requires bad pilots, so it doesn't apply to all piloted ships. Also a ship being beatable in no way stops it being good or meta, so I'm going to say no, it isn't fairly obvious as those aren't mutually exclusive.
If you had said people would be more likely to invest in ships that they don't also have to work on a character for, so older fleets would be skipped over, then perhaps you'd have a point, except what will people do until they hit Geo TB? Without knowing which stage of the game you are in I can tell you not everyone is. Ergo, all piloted ships aren't made irrelevant by pilotless ones.
Have they released any pilots and their ships together? I'm asking. I think sith bomber and the other garbage ships were released after the chars but not sure, and pilots/ships that have always been trash like res pilot have, well, always been trash, and those ships were released after the chars iirc.
and wait, who's in your guild doesn't define how successful you are in arena? Maybe i've been in a guild so long I don't remember, but can you get the gear pieces for g13/relics other than in raids, not to mention Han GK etc?
The more strategy is involved...the more likely good players are to beat the AI. If combat is super simple and relies almost exclusively on gear/relic levels for strength numbers, then players will complain there's no skill involved.
1. Crewless ships
2. Crapton of otherwise useless pilots
3. Complete system overhaul
Crewless ships are imo better than a crapton of pilots and take less resources than a complete overhaul.
Crewless ships would make a lot more sense if every faction had equal representation. I agree that leveling, gearing, relic'ing pilots for Rebels, Empire, etc., is totally unfair when other factions don't have to do that. They get equal or more value for much less effort. What we need is a generic Tie-Fighter (empire had millions of them after all), a generic A/B/X/Y wing for Rebels, etc.... that balances the field a bit and then no matter your investment, it nullifies the "this is not fair" line.
Really looking forward towards ground vehicles and that stuff.
For other game modes, you'll end up needing more viable fleets, so focusing on a single crewless fleet is really only a short cut for arena. You can be competitive there with your relic GR/Rebel pilots all the same, still work on the crewless Separatist fleet and then reap the benefits in other game modes while still taking top ranks in arena.
Just started farming Y-Wing, but I've got the Relic HT. I'll tell you how things work out once I get Y-Wing up to at least 6*.
Shoulda been a separate game mode from the start. Tying pilots to ships was a huge mistake out the gate IMO.