First shot at a Bucky build... now the second

Distilling what little we know.

By: George Argyropoulos

a/k/a Dragon_Bane   

As many know, there was a Preview Server this evening. It was interesting. I'll freely admit, I did not like the Hydra targets. I'm not sure what, exactly, it was that turned me off to them. I believe that rather than it being one major issue it was just the cumulative affect of several issues that just made it a serious drag to play. From ranges being wonky and 'off' from what I'm used to after 6 years to the extremely punitive nature of the targets to the utter busy-ness of the target... maybe it's the ADD, maybe it's... is that a buckminsterfullerene?!? Cool!!

I don't know that anyone wants me to sit and complain about what I didn't like about the Hydra target so I'm going to jump into what i gleaned for the Bucky. TSM (here) and Price (here) both streamed and played with the Hydra and Ren (here) recorded a bunch of targets with the Bucky. All this can be found on... wait for it... THE YouTube!!

The Bucky. I like this hull so far. It's fun. Even when you auto. So far that we have seen it also lends itself to a few variations on builds. I am going to break this up a bit because we did not see the S target for the Bucky and the targets we did see,

were

not

finalized!

UNTIL NOW - WE HAVE SEEN OUR ENEMY!!

N'est-ce Pas? That said, we can observe certain mechanics and make some educated guesses to try and get ready for the raid. I'm going to show the build I'm gambling on and the theory behind it as well as touch upon an option or two that may lead you to think about future options or other paths as well.

DISCLAIMER: I was primarily testing this hull on auto!!!!!

Why? because I'm a lazy pirate and my time has been rather limited lately. Actually severely limited lately. Did I mention I was lazy yet?

UPDATE: The raid has gone and past. Quite honestly, I am very disappointed in what and how things happened. That said, let's concentrate on the Bucky.

The fleet you are going to build is going to wholly depend on which Tier set you are going to hit. Why this is so, I do not understand, but I have reached out to Kixeye to see if this is going to continue and if not what changes will be made. I hope that after this mess they realize that early disclosure is going to be the only way to not fuck the next raid. Sooo... keep sending those tickets in for the Siege battery glitch costing you damage in every target you used them in and enjoy the article.

THERE IS A VIDEO OF THE S TARGET -ON AUTO- USING A DEMO SQUAD (in place of a 5th Bucky)  AT THE END OF THE ARTICLE

A SET BUILD :

Base Build:

(Huggy Link)

First, there are three different builds on five ships in this fleet. I did this to play with a few mechanics but primarily for the ability to get the Phalanxes and some of the Sprints out front quickly and have a secondary layer behind to add depth to the CM design. Since they shoot at two disparate projectiles, there is no 'blocking' one another thus negating the possibility of the one interfering in the delivery of the other.

The A set seemed to offer a well balanced damage portfolio. Fairly eve in it's distribution, there was no readily apparent damage bias in the target.

The Boon is built to fit and be the lead. The next three are the same and are your DPS ships which have some CM scattered throughout, and the last one is your CM ship. The reason for this addition was that upon review the bunched lobbed rockets number 8 at launch. The reload of the turret was greater than 4 seconds. With lots of Sprint CMs we can cover the entirety of one launch and if the targets change in the future, we have a reload of under a second so that with the 4 we could handle a stacked set of these turrets. Of note however, when testing I had tested with one Sprint. It shot down 2-3 rockets. This means that the projectile speed of the rockets was slow enough to allow the one single Sprint to fire both salvos, reload and fire off another one (maybe 2). Given that, we may be able to get away with only using 2-3, but the paranoid pirate in me is going to shy away from that for now.

This is the build I think would excel in the A sets. Boon or not. With that in mind, let us look at the S target and see how exactly this build was different.

S set:
(Huggy Link)

I am not convinced that this will not need a refit. I believe that given what we saw in these targets and that they were tuned down, this build may need in fact a second Charged R armor. since i do not have more than 5, we are at this settlement of a build. high ballistic resistances should compositely ignore turret fire of that type. This should be interesting.

Will we need that extra resistance? Or will we need more damage dealing ability? Unknown at this time. These builds are based on what we saw thus far. Given the throttling of the charged armors, it may be that this is a good stop-gap measure until we get more armors and can tune the builds a bit more. Good luck!!!

Questions edit: So I got a few questions, the main one being about the Morts. They have a great repair coefficient and since we are being kept in the dark about the targets, I opted for more resist since I'm adding a 5th boat. If it turns out that I don't need the resists that high or that I need more damage output, they aren't horrendous to swap out. Also, given the throttling of availability of the charged armors, it is an easy way to play with the resists until I can get more Rad charged if I need that resist that high. If it turns out that the Balli is more important and my damage output is good, I can swap the pando out for B's.

The last Bucky is built like this:

For why? To get the Phalanx range out beyond that of the Sprints so they fire first and give us a better chance of shooting the missile(s) down. With the slow projectile speed of the lobbed rockets in conjunction with the HVR on the build, we really don't need (at this time) any extra range on the Sprints. This works out well because we can then have a single hull with FLCM equipped so that the Phalanx has a range buff as well as an accuracy buff allowing us to maximize our countering ability against the radioactive missile in the target. Only time and testing will tell if this is worth losing the extra building damage. It may be that the loss ultimately hurts us if the buildings don't die quick enough to justify the change in special. If that turns out to be the case, this hull will then be changed to a copy of the first two.

Did I mention that these targets weren't final and we hadn't seen the S target for the Bucky yet?

Options? Of course. As Ren pointed out, well I think he pointed out.. I haven't seen the vid yet, but he mentioned it while chatting so I presume he made a point of it... anyway... as he mentioned, the fire field can be mitigated with Shielded Tactical System 4. Makes sense. They are nothing new. It's a fire field and does a lot of damage if you sit in them. The caveat to this option may be, of course, charged armor. We do expect the Charged R to make an appearance and if so, I think we'll find that it may mitigate a goodly amount of the damage. I also believe, based on testing, that this hull may be a repeat of the Hunter in that the concentration of damage mitigation will be lop-sided and make the use of 4 Charged R's a possibility. Why do i say this?

Testing with the HLNC used as a blank flag cut damage SIGNIFICANTLY. To the tune of almost half in some instances. Granted, in many tests I did not run a Sprint at all or I ran only 1 Sprint so this may or may not be an issue depending on how the Sprint ultimately functions in the final targets.

Did I mention that these targets weren't final and we hadn't seen the S target for the Bucky yet?

If you have an HLNC you may be able to eek out a bit better damage wise in the A sets, however, expect the same limitations in the S targets, i.e. don't expect to be able to use this hull in the S target. 

The armor selected, well, I loathe to put any more D5-R on because we all know I'm going to have to f*#$ing refit it off. I only put one Charged B... I mean C. Why is it C again? Yea, Charged C. I'm not sold on the need for more just yet. It seemed as though the damage for the most part was AoE type so evade did not seem a viable alternative. I'm sure over the next few days we will see some consolidation of information from the testing but I think the ultimate clarity will come with the first raid. I wish we had a little more insight given the time frame and the utter lack of shipyard time, but we do what we can, yea? Good luck Captains! 

Oh yea... Did I mention that these targets weren't final and we hadn't seen the S target for the Bucky yet? So, lots of guesses, no S target to test and less than a week to the raid. Who's got the rum?

One of the 85's I ran.I don't know if I have any more full runs of other targets. I'll look in the AM.

UPDATE : Running the S set in the raid, I found that the build needed tweaking. It worked well in the A set, however, the S set required a different build. I DO NOT know if this is final as there is so much insanity going on with this raid. I mention the changes in this video, but I am not 100% on a build until we get some info out of Kixeye.

Final run in the S target on Sunday. Not too shabby and the build wasn't close to done. Hope it helps y'all!!