what is the piercing effect for?

[Criss]

From the stats, punch has an armor modifier of -0,5. I would take from that, that it does half damage to armor. But I have found, that that seems not to be the case, just look at both pictures I posted. Both show no obvious difference in penetration, neither in normal or hardened hull.

Are those the stats from the systems menu or somewhere else?

 

[marcus87]

from the weapons tap in the game

There it says armorEfficency, I take it does mean only half damage to armor.

 

[Questmark]

Yeah I am seeing no visible difference atm between pierce and punch through

 

[Criss]

Try with missiles. I have different results with them


Skip to 6 minutes exactly to see punch through and 8 minutes for piercing.

Both tests have the same numbers of modules

 

[marcus87]

Yes, but I want cannons for my turrets :D I found the cannon-pulse-punchthrough cool. Slow, heavy, bam ... bam :D

EDIT:

boah wait a minute, are you the guy who makes these eve videos? Hell of a work there good work really great work :D

 

[Criss]

Yes, but I want cannons for my turrets :D I found the cannon-pulse-punchthrough cool. Slow, heavy, bam ... bam :D

EDIT:

boah wait a minute, are you the guy who makes these eve videos? Hell of a work there good work really great work :D

Lol yeah that's me thanks. Idk right now it seems missiles and cannons treat the effects differently though. I want to do more testing later with larger systems and all combos eventually. Should be interesting. That was the first time I took a look at them so its neat that we get some variation, or at least with missiles for now. Will test more later!

 

[Lancake]

http://bugs.star-made.org/issues/987

Apparently it's not a bug but it's intended. This is probably not permanent though. That asks the question: how is pierce overpowered? I was always under the impression punch through had way more stopping power than piercing.

 

[marcus87]

Now it is clearly better. It does the same damage to hull and has no disadvantage with shields.

 

[Lancake]

Just to clarify here, at 100% effect:
Piercing : No shield damage
Punch-through: Less effective against armor (mostly hull blocks).

You can always check the blockbehaviorconfig for more information, located in starmade -> data -> config.

 

[marcus87]

I tested it, see the pictures I posted above. Hardened Hull as weel as normal hull there is no difference in armorpenetration between piercing and punch through

 

[NeonSturm]

With >10 layers of armour old piercing was more or less useless.

With <10 layers of armour it could have been OP, but if you can't kill a hull with 50% damage, why should you be able to kill 25% HP of a system block with 2* halfed damage?

I am confused by all these bugs around pierce and punch-through... Wasn't piercing intended to only hit 6/7 blocks in a row?

 

[SilentRider_14]

You are forgetting that the hp values of most blocks were changed. The hp of weapon and vital systems was reduced to around 25 to 15 maybe 10 hp.

400 dmg in one weapon hit could destroy 2-3 system blocks even while leaving Hardened Hull intact. A good range for weapon construction would have been possibly 60 dmg to 796 dmg, any weaker and you may not destroy a block with 15 or more hp, any stronger and it would waste excess dmg on hardened hull.

Never used them myself as punch and pierce didn't seem to work well with either the new or old damage beams. Pierce's problem was it was either possibly OP/Usefull (rare) or worthless when compared to punch-through in most situations. Empty hallways could theoretically possibly defeat pierce while punch-through would just continue on until all dmg was expended.

Not been testing the stats of new punch-though and pierce yet I expect still buggy probably just continue using old punch-through builds ( no beams though).

 

[Lancake]

Pierce used to go 5/6 blocks max deep, unrelated to damage. If you imagine hardened hull, which has 200Hp and 50% armor, you have a max of 400 Effective HP each block. Pierce would spread out damage a little more but it doesn't matter for any bigger sized weapon system where you can easily get above 2000 damage.

However, pierce was a nice addition for beam weapons, you could cut away easily with a beam + cannon + pierce combination since damage spread out over a lot of blocks (very useful with larger beam arrays).
Now...if that is the reason why it is considered OP I have to point out that cannon + cannon + punch through is way better in terms of hull eating. Thanks to punch-through you can make monster weapons that are capable of penetrating 400 hardened hull blocks in a row (This is not a cry to balance them, they are already well balanced, it's to point out how different it is from pierce).

By leaving out pierce, the chance of beams being used as a main weapon since it was one of the few effects that worked well with them.