Equalizer Random observation, PD in this form has an effect to discourage focused fire. This is the opposite of all existing defenses (shields & armor) where it is almost always best to aim all weapons at one spot on the enemy ship.
While having PD shoot down lasers is weird having some sort of defense that makes focused fire not always the best choice may be a good thing.
I think there are pros and cons to having an anti- focus fire weapon.
On one hand, AOE flak makes ship design more interesting (especially if flak arc gets narrower), since you want to angle your flak to aim really close to your ship to maximize the AOE. It also might lead to cool opportunities for ship piloting, where you target a few of your weapons really near the flak to distract their fire, and focus the rest of your weapons on a different point where the flak screen isn't. And it makes flak feel different from just a big shield generator.
But, on the other hand, if flak gets too strong vs focus fire then all weapons become like missiles, where you can completely shut them down 100% of the time. That would definitely be a bad thing. AOE and random spread also makes flak weaker vs missiles (which are slow-firing, and not often affected by the AOE), even though they should be stronger vs missiles.
So maybe, it would work to tone down the AOE and significantly shrink the firing arc, and also boost the projectile speed and accuracy. That way flak would be reliable at killing a single projectile (a missile), and still have moderate AOE to encourage creative flak placement.
samepage The shield-bypassing however, is where the missiles become OP. With the damage buff in this prototype, two lucky shots from missiles are enough to destroy the PDs behind the shields, leaving the ship defenseless.
I think that it's planned for missile explosions to get changes. Especially with a big nuke missile coming out, it would be weird if the explosions completely bypassed shields like they do now. Instead, the explosion would need to work more like a big railgun where it can wipe out 1 or multiple shields but gets weakened by each.
samepage Suggestions: Just remove the missile's AOE when they hit the shields (except the EMP missile). In this version missiles have a solid DPS of 2,400/sec against shields
I don't think this would work very well. With a single small missile there's no problem (it's just a way of heavily reducing total damage if a missile hits a shield), but with a very powerful missile or a very weak shield you run into issues where the missile should kill the shield and damage parts behind it, but instead it wastes it's entire nuclear explosion on a 1hp shield. This would also give missiles around half as much anti-shield dps per cost than other weapons.
One idea would be to have shields fully protect parts behind them from damage, at the cost of taking the full damage that was meant for those parts (concentrated in the shield instead of spread out over the AOE). That might make missiles too strong vs shields though - right now on live a single missile can deal around 9000 AOE damage, which means they could 2-shot a shield if shields blocked 100% of it. This is similar dps per cost as other weapons, but it might feel weird.
I think it also might make sense to make missile explosions consistent with reactor/factory explosions, where they damage all players. If a missile accidentally hits an ally ship it will just be destroyed without detonating (so no damage), but if you ram into an enemy and fire nukes/HE/EMP you'll take heavy damage. This might be controversial so I'm curious what you think.
samepage The lack of proper defense against missiles is what causing the problem.
Isn't this supposed to be pd/flak? But on live it's a terrible defense because it's only useful vs missiles, so it's a waste of $ unless you're fighting a missile ship.