Hello @YogiKlatt-CIG and team, Thank you for taking feedback and testing many different variables called for both internally and by the community. I've put together what I think is a pretty extensively tested list of how the changes between 3.22 LIVE MM and 3.22.1 ePTU MM have affected combat gameplay. Overall After playing many, many hours of 3.22 LIVE MM, I noticed an immediate increase in distance of fights in both duels and in squadron battles when switching to 3.22.1 ePTU. Fights begin further away, sometimes never closing, and even when they do close they return to distance rather quickly. Trigger discipline and positional styles are less rewarding, and many of the suggestions from the community I believe have had the opposite from intended effect -- including the return of "stutter stepping" and other variations of wiggle. BREAKDOWN 1. WEAPON CAPACITOR CHANGES -- I know faster weapon regen wasn't in the patch notes, but I can't help but notice what feels like a much faster Gladius recharge rate that is not only due to lower regen delay. If I'm mistaken, then consider this as feedback to lower the regen rate to make optimizing weapons use a decision factor and creating that risk of exhaustions, while keeping the lower regen delay to not punish pausing momentarily during firing. Fast capacitor regen has eliminated the sense of exhaustion, and has made trigger discipline unnecessary. It has also undone what adding spread to weapons seeks to do. In current Live MM, firing your capacitor beyond optimal range allows you to suppress shields, and stack minor chip damage on a target that may already be low health. However, pilots do this while weighing the consequence of emptying their mag at ranges they know are less effective against their assessment of whether finishing off a kill or keeping someone's shields down is worth it. With fast regen rate, players can completely recharge their weapons in a handful of seconds, so there is no reason to hold fire for optimal range, and there is no decision to be made about if using those shots less effectively is worth it, because they are back just a few seconds later. This makes throttle control less important, and strengthens kiting and non-committal fight styles especially when at a numbers advantage. It's worth noting that some asking for this change believed it would increase a practiced pilot's ability to fight larger but less practiced numbers, but the result is that the larger group now has to express less skill, and simply kite and saturate an area with virtually constant fire. Affected Situations - Increases Fight Start Range - Increasing effectiveness of passive, kiting styles - Penalizes trigger discipline - Removes decision point of continuing to fire at a disengaging target or save mag Possible? Solutions/Considerations - Returning to the Live MM feeling of exhaustion -- I feel like the feedback given about not having enough weapons to get multiple kills is the result of too high TTK in ships like the Buccaneer and Hornet (see below), combined with the fact that no players have had enough practice in MM to get very skilled in localizing all their damage to the nose for lower TTK, or truly master the new pace of combat. 2. INCREASING OPTIMAL TURN RATE WINDOW (RETURN OF 45s) -- The community ask for 45s was built around the idea that giving players more freedom with optimal turn rate would allow them more strafe options while maintaining turn rate, ultimately creating more interesting geometry. I think this is theoretically flawed, but I've also found flawed in practice. Now that the optimal turn radius spans from each corner of the screen to the other, the window of opportunity to get position on someone by pushing their yaw has shrunk dramatically. In 3.22.1 ePTU MM, even perfectly pushing someone's lowest yaw rotation rate can be countered by rolling only 22.5 degrees, as opposed to the 90 degree roll required in Live MM. It has also not give players more strafe options, because in decoupled flight players have always been able to create any combination of strafe inputs regardless of orientation or direction of rotation. In 3.22.1 ePTU MM, we have the same number of strafe options, but a smaller window of opportunity that is easily countered, making position very expensive to go for but extremely easy to deny. The practical result, compounded by the weapon regen changes described above, has been more nose to nose time, and many players choosing not to attempt positional gameplay at all and simply fight at ~300m - 700m range. Affected Situations - Large disparity between high cost and low reward of pushing for position - Largely eliminated the gameplay of forcing people into sub-optimal rotation rate while maintaining your own - Reduced fight geometry and increased nose to nose time Possible? Solutions/Considerations - If optimal pitch is here to stay, whatever the reasons, then that's just the way it has to be. Increasing the optimal rotation range to give 45s back was a great thing to try to give the community a time to grieve and give them their final farewell, but having 50% of the screen be optimal means every player at every skill level is achieving the optimal rotation rate at nearly all times with very little effort. Being able to create rotation rate differences during a fight is necessary for positional combat. 3. INCREASED JERK ON STRAFES (faster effect of acceleration) -- This wasn't in the patch notes, but I heard and it feels like accelerations ramp in more quickly than in Live MM. If this is not the case, consider this feedback about weapon velocities decreasing (too much). My guess is this was implemented to give people back a bit of the "evasiveness" feeling they were missing. In practice, I found that it has reduced the feeling and reward of intentional movements, and shifted reward to random, sporadic movement. I saw quite a bit of "stutter stepping" -- simply holding a lateral strafe and boost strafing the opposite lateral for a fraction of a second before returning to the same lateral strafe. I was also able to win fights by holding roughly 500m, holding down the trigger, and randomly throwing my up, down, right, left strafes with boost taps. I won't say that I saw others doing it (even if that might be a lie) but I was absolutely able to wiggle to achieve a very low effort fight advantage over people who were using boost and very intentional movements trying to close on me. This wiggle was even effective in the Vanguard, by using low effort methods to create an artificial increase in weapon spread for incoming damage. This was compounded again by the weapon capacitor regen issue above. Affected Situations - Higher reward for random, sporadic movement - Ability to use wiggle movements to artificially increase spread and reduce incoming damage and force fixed assist misses - Increased fight ranges Possible? Solutions/Considerations - Trying reduced weapon velocities without the increase in strafe jerk - I don't at all envy the team trying to come up with the perfect balance of factors to give feelings of evasiveness, while fighting the wiggle, while balancing these elements in the grande scope of the game. I do feel like a lot of the feedback from players wanting to feel more evasive may have been from not realizing just how little damage they were actually taking from shot fired at them from long, ineffective range. 4. BOOST ROTATION EFFECT BASED ON CAPACITOR ASSIGNMENT AND BOOST BURN BENEFIT ONLY FOR INTERCEPTORS -- If I understand the concept correctly, this is supposed to have players choosing between having shield hardening, a higher weapon total capacity, and being able to out-turn their opponent. As it stands, the bonus does not feel strong enough to be worth the trade off. As a result, I've seen very few players assign to engines, and if they do it's only for a moment to increase their rotation while aiming momentarily, similarly how we tap boost to get the rate increase in Live MM, and then just go back to shields or weapons. I have found it to be very micro-managey but even then bestows little reward. My feedback on this might just be muddled with the effect from the return of 45s. Affected Situations - Fights now further away (compounded by other reasons) - Micro-manage toggling to boost and back for momentary increases in rotation rate Possible? Solutions/Considerations - Boost burn slow returned to all ships, to more closely mimic the effect bestowed by capacitor to shields. - Interceptors can be given larger boost tanks instead, accomplishing the same effect for their role while giving more meaning to boost in all ships 5. REDUCED BUCCANEER AND HORNET HP -- I think the greatest reason for the oddly long feeling TTK on these ships is how their critical zones are relatively small and obscured compared to other ships. The hornet has the tail and the blocky wings on the side, and a smaller cockpit compared to the total size of the ship. The same goes for the Buccaneer, with it's narrow hull compared to the hitboxes of the wings around it. With spread, these ships TTKs feel much higher than expected based on looking at their HP, because they have "armor" in the form of additional pieces soaking up a higher percentage of incoming damage than the percentage that is spread around the Gladius or Vanguard. Affected Situations - Hornet and Bucc feel as though they have vastly greater staying power for their size and role when compared to other ships Possible? Solutions/Considerations - Obviously hit boxes and ship design are not up for debate here, so lowering the HP of non-critical pieces of the Hornet will reduce the "arms as armor" effect they have - Tweaking the Buccaneer hull HP lower, while maintaining the wing HP as destroying its wing incapacitates the ship and effectively eliminating it from the fight, unlike the Hornet's wings Thank you for considering :slightly_smiling_face: