Buccaneer's Trap - Observations and Build

A Lazy Pirate's Diary

By: George Argyropoulos

a/k/a Dragon_Bane   

Is it really a trap? Maybe if you don't have your fleet squared away, but for those that have their Bucky fleet done, you were in for a pleasant surprise- at least at the start of the raid.

Going in, the new target has some mechanical differences. Where you did not need a Phalanx last month, this month, you will need them.

The next thing that was very interesting is that Time to Kill (TtK) is an important aspect in these targets. I tested a few builds and noticed that as I played with the resistances,using weapons that added resistance, there was a clear tipping point where damage started going up as my main damage weapon count went down.

The build is very close to the one I put forward in last month's article. The trick was finding that fine line balance point where TtK was fast enough so I didn't take additional damage, but still had my resistances high enough to mitigate both damage types in the proper proportions that were dealt in the target. It looks something like this:

Errr... wrong Bucky, how about this:

Full Bucky Build

I did keep a pando mort on each hull. It helps 'dilute' the repair time a little as well as add a bit of radioactive resistance. It is also why I didn't stick the the B mort on the Boon. That choice did the exact opposite and made the repair time less optimized, so out with the B and in with the Pando.

Edit: I'm getting quite a few questions on the addition to the Pando and people wanting to know exactly why, so let me try and explain.

I initially had a Siege B mortar on the Boon and I pulled the Siege B off and put the Pando on because the repair modifier of the B was worse than the Hull's native repair modifier. What do I mean by that?

The Pando repairs 100hp/sec, the B 1.25hp/sec. The regular Bucky hull repairs at 1.25hp/sec so the Pando 'dilutes' the repair time (making the repair time better) overall to increase the hp/sec repair time.

On the Boon, the repair is 10.42hp/sec so the B would actually hurt the repair time, but the Pando doesn't, it still helps dilute it, just not as much so I swapped it.

Really, if I were edge tweaking further, I probably should use the Ballistic Resistor on the Boon to make up for the resistance disparity. Maybe next month. lol

The trap? The targets are consistently inconsistent. Or rather, are until you really start knocking the mechanics around a bit. While I would get 2 out of 3 hovering in the vicinity of 35 minutes of damage on auto, I'd also get that 1 out of 3 that came back with 1 hour 30 min of damage. I'm not 100% sure what is going on as the damage seems to be coming from the same instances of attack that do not cause nearly the same amount of damage in other engagements. A weird pattern that seemed to be holding as well is that the first engagement coming out of base seemed to be that 1 out of 3 and any map repair and then engagement seemed to be the 2 out of 3.

EDIT: That was around dinner time. Since that time I've seem my average creep up AND there seem to be 'super' missiles in the targets. In some instances when they hit, you take a decent shot of damage, and some instances... not so much until the fire field they produce expires - then you take significant damage if you are in the field when it expires.

Note to Kixeye: These are the exact types of inconsistencies that absolutely infuriate the player base. Just sayin'. I am not amused either.

Looking at what was happening made me decide to refit my 'anti' Buck so that the Phalanx's accuracy was more optimized. This change is reflected in the build above. It took that 1/3 out and made it more like 1 out of... wel, I don't know. As of this writing I haven't gotten the wonky uber damage runs... yet.

I also have a couple videos of the fleet in action. The first is the fleet running on its own with no crew, on auto of course in the middle of my refits. (If I could kindly ask people to subscribe I would appreciate it - YouTube is requiring 1,000 subscribers to allow the monetization, which helps me do this testing.)

The second video is of me running the target, on auto of course, using my favorite crew for this raid set- The Demo Squad. (Did I mention subscribing would help me a TON? Thanks!!)

What I found was that IF I didn't get whacked by a 'super' missile, I was under 30 min consistently, even though it did not look like the damage buff was really working. IF I got whacked by the 'super' missile, it was like the crew didn't exist. The same 1-1.5 hours damage as though I wasn't running a crew.

It requires further testing, and the wonkiness did appear to happen during a rolling hotfix for a glitch repair that unscrupulous pirates were using, so maybe that's it. I'll try and test a bit more again tomorrow afternoon. Maybe I can play tomorrow night some. :)

After running all this, I decided to do what I did last raid with the Hunters - run the fleet until the Flagship needed repairing, and then see how many I could pull off with just repairing the Boon. The answer?

Full fleet did 12 targets with a Demo for a full fleet damage of 2.5 hours. The Boon had 1 hour 20 minutes of damage.

After repairing just the Boon and running targets, this time with a 15% Steelhead, I squeezed out 9... well, I squeezed out 10 but the Boon died in the 10th one.

It seems that if you want to auto, this is one of the exceptions where it is better to NOT enter the target to force a population of the battle map.