Thors

[Yin Yang]

Lately Thors have been getting a little... out of hand. You may not agree with me but i think something needs to be changed.

[Unix]

I agree that there have been an excess amount of thors, as there once was an excess amount of lancs. There is a distinct difference between the two though. Lancs were essentially not able to be countered by any other means, other than cornering them into one spot and having a coffin there or having your own fleet of lancs to counter it. I think the nerf on ?attach for lancs was a bit drastic, however, it has cut down on mass lancs as being a viable tactic.

 

Thors on the other hand are easily countered and have penalties for trip thor builds. Trip thor requires two siege mounts which increases delay heavily, thorrers must also go to ammo depots, and the cost for thorring is relatively high in comparison to other consumables available in ammo depots. Thors are also drastically slowed down by antiwarp, even more so because of not being able to ship change. One player with antiwarp changes the thor landscape drastically. There's also some armors, such as wave and faraday that decrease the splash of thors, which is the key for thor damage.

 

I use a metaphasic lanc in base, and I was thorred at. I did not have much of any issue and I have increased bomb damage. My other two big ships, spider and levi both dont have many issues against thors, and only one has wave disperser.

[CDB-Man]

Thors are really only truly an effective threat if they are coordinated. Besides, if your lanc was smart, it would have AD ready for a situation like this. Also, Antiwarp would slow down the second wave anyways. For the enemy to coordinate 2 giant waves of thors to kill the lanc and its AD, not easy. And by then you would have another lanc ready, albeit with no energy due to the ?attach thing, but still, it should have AD anyways.

[Jareth]

Lately Thors have been getting a little... out of hand. You may not agree with me but i think something needs to be changed.

They are only out of hand because the thorrers are using them as normal weapons by spamming them without thinking. They are careless with them and don't care if they team kill. I saw several people thorring directly into the flag room today when we were pushing into it. Why would anybody use thors for that?

 

I think a price increase would be nice since the jackpot changed how much extra money people have sitting around. It won't fix the spam by the players with a lot of money, but it could help.

[Mistarbob]

We're seeing the same problem with thors that we've seen with just about everything else in HS: when you get enough people coordinating it, it becomes painfully overpowered. Bomblines were never a problem until large teams of leviathans made them impassable, and then they had to be almost completely phased out; a field by itself was no big deal, but even a handful of skilled players covering a large area with them won flag games almost by itself; repels weren't seen as a problem until everyone started making rush AD setups that let them rep 8 times; and more recently, summoner lancs weren't a problem until you had entire teams of them playing like it was DSB with antideath. Everything in this game gets exponentially better as you tack on more of it--even gunlines in base eventually get so powerful that cloakers can never leak through, allowing the rest of the team to focus on other things. The whole zone is mostly balanced around low/moderate population, and things tend to break when you get enough people working together.

 

However, unlike all of those other things I just mentioned, thor strategies have one crippling weakness: antiwarp. If the thor users are antiwarped, it will almost never be time- or cost-effective to thor the enemy team because they simply can't provide much DPS. This changes slightly when several players coordinate thors and rain them down on the enemy team en masse, but if they're antiwarped, this is a time-consuming setup that can be made useless by a few players repelling and blocking thors with big ships. It's not unreasonable to have to actually try to stop this tactic, either--you can't expect to fight coordination with disorganization. Speaking as the #1 abuser of thors, trust me when I say we could be just as obnoxious with coordinated fields; this is just the currently popular metagame.

 

In reality, the majority of players crying about thors just aren't doing enough to prevent them. You already have a few all-star players in the field of thor prevention who consistently go out of their way to protect their team from thors: yin-yang and death's embrace have antiwarp lancs that we simply can not kill with thor volleys no matter how hard we try, and the permanent free antiwarp forces us to do something else; players like cxc, urx, and several others keep semi-constant AW up and usually even block thors, making us thor users have to spend a lot of time thinking about where to thor so we don't end up killing our own team. Seeing any one of these players on the other team is usually enough to make us reconsider thoring, and since coordinated thorstorms that don't rely on warping are only possible with big teams, it is very unlikely that we'll get to enjoy many thor combos before some of those guys step in. In every single case that I've successfully thor'd the other team, it was entirely their fault for not antiwarping or repelling.

 

tl;dr: you have viable options already that completely shut down thor users like me; learn from the silent heroes who always force us to do something else instead of picking up your team's flags in a warbird with 150 energy left and then crying (this happened today and it was glorious)

 

EDIT- Another thought: 3-4 players synchronizing thors in a way that will make them actually hurt the enemy team is much more difficult and time-consuming than you might think. If your team can't make significant ground while several of the enemy's high-exp players aren't actively engaged, then there may be something else wrong.

Edited January 31, 2012 by Mistarbob

[Cheese]

increase penalties on siege to +20 bombdelay and +10 explodepixels

[Yin Yang]

Unix not everyone can build a ship to tank thors. Basing your ship to tank thors makes you vulnerable to other things. Mistarbob i see what you mean. Coordinating thor storms is strong, but will rarely kill the lanc, And AW does slow things down. But what bothers me is people doing what jareth said. Just non-stop random thors CONSTANTLY. I propose that things like Fields, Thors (and anything else that is way too over powered used in groups) should have cooldowns.

[Unix]

Yin, what I'm saying is you dont need to necessarily have a ship strong against thors. My lanc is actually weaker against thors because of increased bomb damage. I dont have any problems with thors. People need to learn to play better and keep their energies higher. Most people who spam thors do it because the enemy antiwarp isnt on. My spider doesnt have any particular affinity for or against thors, and it does perfectly fine in base against them as well.

 

Other than a well coordinated thor storm, there's really nothing to fear. Mass thors are one thing, they dont do anything and they probably wont kill the enemy, however, a mass lanc tactic requires little to no coordination to be effective, if there are 7 lancs, one of them is bound to have AD. That is a major difference between mass lancs and mass thors.

[Yin Yang]

With SpiderNL's new update lanc's can't do the lanc rush anymore. The ships you keep mentioning have over 2000 energy so of course they aren't going to have a problem with thors. But for rushers thors are a killer. I'm just suggesting (and again, you may or may not agree with me) that something should be changed about the thors (such as add a small cooldown). And CDB even if a lancaster does have ad it's not stopping the thors from coming and killing them again. Edited February 1, 2012 by Yin Yang

[Unix]

That's what antiwarp is for - It makes it so you can recover from the first wave - Rushers are going to get the brunt of everything, not just thors, but bombs as well.

[Cheese]

i lol how every person agrees with this except the people who only spam thors and dont bother even attempting to use a non-item more than zero times per fg