Fighter Balance Issues in 4.7 Core Problem: TTK increase + armor deflection made fights long, awkward and decreased variety The TTK went up a lot in 4.7, and combined with armor deflection, a lot of fighter loadouts just don't work anymore. There were already plenty of suboptimal, off-meta options before, but now we have reached a point where many loadouts are genuinely unusable. You are pushed into a smaller set of ships and weapons. My point of view is not that I want fighters to just win vs. everything. I also don't mind that certain weapons might be less effective against bigger targets. But the current patch has some real issues that need addressing. Armor & Deflection Armor deflection makes a lot of guns straight up useless against certain targets. Flying up to someone and doing literally zero damage feels awful — there is no counterplay to that. This also leads to stalemates where two ships in a similar size class simply can't damage each other. You just sit there, realize nothing is happening, and eventually disengage without the fight ever concluding. Increased Armor and Shield HP values drag out fights significantly. A lot of fighters got their armor increased by 2-3x while shields went up by 30%. Weapon damage did not go up to counteract this. Longer drawn out fights also means that you are more likely to run out of capacitors and boost which further increases the TTK outside of the raw HP values. The Buccaneer is the obvious winner of all these changes. It already had a shield removed in the past to add some risk to the archetype, but even without that extra shield it's become very tanky again comparatively — it got a ~130% armor buff and ~35% shield buff compared to 4.6. The Scorpius being a heavy interceptor is another odd case. You need to adjust your loadout just to deal with its armor deflection (Wolf doesn't cut it), but it gets all the speed of an interceptor while being as tanky as most heavies. It has more than enough firepower to punch up too. So you end up with a ship that's fast, tanky, and hits hard. The end result: everything takes longer to kill, we have fewer viable options, and heavies still feel bad to fly, but now everything else feels like a 4.6 heavy in terms of HP pool. Combine that with interceptors being able to get in and out of fights whenever they want, and they become the only real choice. Weapon Viability S3 Mantis gatlings can't hit fighters now. Wolf ballistics still can — so the Wolf is basically the only viable ballistic fighter left, and you can't use those bespoke guns on any other ship. S3 CF repeaters can't deal with heavies. Wolf ballistics can't either. You're pushed into slower, harder hitting weapons like NDBs — but anything below that threshold isn't just suboptimal, it's completely unusable. Not even as an off-meta option. S4 CFs would cut it, but that further limits your ship options to the few that have those hardpoints available. Armor deflection being tied to alpha damage creates a long-term balancing problem Alpha damage scales with weapon size, but weapon size and weapon type were not cleanly considered in the original ship designs. The Wolf has S4 hardpoints so it has higher innate alpha, but its S4 hardpoints are always going to be repeaters or gatlings, meaning they will never compare to S3 cannons on alpha. Tuning armor thresholds around alpha values ends up locking entire weapon types out not because of an actual choice about those weapons, but because of how they happen to sit on the alpha scale. This means weapon viability can't really be solved with a balance pass alone. As long as armor is gated by alpha, any tuning adjustments will keep running into the same wall. Certain weapon types and ship hulls are naturally disadvantaged by the system itself, not just by their numbers. Think Hawk vs Gladius vs Wolf, or F8C vs Guardian, ships that should do similar jobs but have vastly different loadout options available. No Armor Feedback There's no visual indicator for armor HP. Armor is a huge chunk of total survivability now, but you have no way to tell how close someone is to dying. You're just shooting and hoping. This was a problem before and now it's amplified. Same point also goes the other way. You yourself have no real way of knowing how much HP (Armor) you have left. You could lose all your armor but still show blue hull, meaning you are heavily damaged with no way of knowing it. This makes decision making very vague. PU-Specific Issues Soft-death is buggy: Some ships go invincible after being disabled (Sabre), others pop rather quickly at times. It just all feels like a bug and less like a proper design choice. TTK × desync: The higher TTK already feels too long in AC. In the PU with server lag, very low client fps, fights drag out way longer and start feeling exhausting and drawn out for no particular reason. Forced into slower projectiles: Fighting heavies like the Guardian or Scorpius now requires a different weapon set, which naturally pushes you towards weapons like NDBs. But these have slower projectile speed. Slow projectiles + bad hitreg in laggy PU fights is a miserable combo, and the balance is pushing you straight into it. Other faster options just aren't good enough.