Scrambler versus Point Defense

Is it just me, or do the point defenses on cruisers seem pointless compared to scamblers? I know scramblers use a lot of power, but they seem much more effective to me.

Yeah, that’s my impression to. They’re like point defense, but with better range, faster cooldown and they don’t sometimes fail to do their job for some reason.

Scramblers shoot everything, it seems, but the PD focuses upon the actual warhead. I think that if you take note of how often it is damaged, you’ll notice that most the warheads have been killed.

I also think the mechanism of the scrammbler is better.

A missile flying about, hitting nothing is wasting the launchers time, as they can only have 1 in the air (Vaccum?) at a time.

So a PD destroys a missile, and the launcher fires a new one away.
The scramber makes it miss, and fly about, and launcher has to wait for it to die.

What’s really inconsistent is the PD. Sometimes it quickly tags multiple missiles in a row, and sometimes it just sits there and ignores missiles until they’ve passed the ship already. I’m not sure I fully understand it.

The scrambler has a different (and better) behavior set than PD does, It certainly fires faster than it’s advertised 1300 interval.

Once a given missile has been attacked in some way, the other PD/scramblers seem to ignore it. This seems to suggest that an ineffective PD attempting to shoot missiles down could actually be harmful to your fleet. The PD fail rate is much lower against slow missiles, but nobody really uses those outside of multiwarheads.

I’m having difficulty with finding a halfway effective PD solution for frigates outside of crowding them under cruiser scramblers.