I wanted to make this post because there has been talk of CIG listening too closely to experienced PvP pilots/orgs in regards to Ion feedback. I believe I can speak for a very large portion of the PvP community when I say that we never supported such a large nerf to the alpha damage of the repeater. On the contrary, the cannon was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise overly-homogenized repeater meta and it felt very rewarding to use. The "fix" to the "Ion issue" goes much deeper than simply the power of the cannon. The Ion was able to take on experienced light fighter pilots because it could backstrafe to keep them in front. Does this mean that the solution to this would have been to nerf the Ion's retro acceleration? Not at all, this just points to a core flaw in the thruster balancing of light fighters: Main thruster power of light fighters is simply too weak, and this goes well beyond any balancing issues with the Ion. If you cannot push past and wrap behind a bigger target with a slow rotational speed, then balancing based on rotational speed begins to break down. There's also a matter of desync. When a fight gets up to a high enough speed in a single direction, nose-to-nose combat breaks down. You cannot evade because you are no longer sure of the true direction your target is pointed. This remains true of any fighter but it especially exacerbated the Ion issue. In conclusion, buffs to main thrust on light fighters, a fix to the positional/rotational desync, and perhaps also a tiny nerf to the alpha damage may have been enough to bring Ion analytics in line with CIG's expectations. Neutering the cannon entirely into a repeater was likely entirely unnecessary and I'm personally sad to see the cannon go.