Recently played a singleplayer round as Advent against the TEC with impossible difficulty. Entered into a medium fleet battle where I was up against a level 6 Marza with missile barrage against two of my Raptures. My first Rapture begins getting focused (1200 shields and dropping), so I use Vengeance (90% damage reflection for 40 seconds on the target friendly vessel) on it from the second Rapture and order it to pull back from the front lines.
The Marza launches its missile barrage, where nearly every single incoming missile directly impacts the Rapture. This is where things spiral out of control:
- 3 seconds after the movement order: My Rapture has health of (0/~300/3710/3710) being (shield/armor/hull/crippled hull) out of a total of (4420/910/3710/3710).
- 5 seconds after the movement order: The first missile from the barrage hits.
- 6 seconds after the movement order: First volley impacts the Rapture (0/0/1224/3710).
- 7 seconds after the movement order: Second volley impacts the Rapture (0/0/0/2535).
- 8 seconds after the movement order: Third volley impacts and the Rapture explodes.
Going through the replay at 0.25x speed confirms the volleys were what did the bulk of the damage, not the rest of the fleet. This means that one volley of missiles did roughly 2400 points of damage, with each volley impacting about once a second (so 2400dps). So even if my Rapture was at full health, we're talking a complete wipe after 5.3 seconds, or 5-6 volleys. I'll let you do the math as to what vessels can survive if every volley were to hit it. The best part: the Marza took zero reflected damage (it's shields dropped by about 30 points, so inconsequential).
Takeaways:
- The Vengeance ability clearly does not reflect all damage.
- Missile Barrage is dealing considerably more damage than stated.
Perhaps it's a bug and the 90% reflected damage is just ingested onto the friendly target instead of the enemy; don't know. But either way, I'm going to voice a complaint I've had with Sins Rebellion for years: Missile Barrage needs to be nerfed if not eliminated entirely. And with Sins 2, it appears to have gotten worse.
If I can dish out that much damage with only a level 6 capital ship (which is significantly easier to obtain in Sins 2 than it was in Rebellion), why would I ever build anything other the Marza? Why would I play as any faction other than TEC? With one unit, I can one-tap a capital ship, starbase, or titan, I can do similar damage to entire fleets of smaller vessels, and I can bombard planets faster than almost any other unit in the game. All three fundamental dynamics of combat are covered perfectly with just this one vessel.
In Rebellion, most multiplayer games were forfeit when one team got a level 6 Marza. At least in Rebellion it would take some time to get the thing to level 6; now artifacts make leveling so much faster.
Maybe I'm the odd man out, but I've wanted a nerf of the Marza for years now to help balance everything out. A strategy game is no fun when every game can be won by playing as the same faction with the same super ship every. single. time.
