“Cruiser quantum blaster shield penetration increased from 40 to 48”
So the question is, Why? As I understand it if the penetration is greater then the resistance damage is applied. Since the highest shield resistance is 27 the quantum blaster was already doing full damage, any additional change is simply gratuitous. Or am I missing something?
I believe penetration and resistance do not only account for if a weapon does damage or not, but also how much it does - higher resistance means less damage.
No, I believe Thunder understands it correctly.
Where are the patch notes, btw? Maybe I’m retarded, but I can’t find them.
you can also find them in readme.txt, at the bottom, in the game dir
Blasters still don’t seem terribly impressive.
It’d be nice if LacklusterChariot were correct. Instead of having all the numbers for penetration and resistance being cut and dried, have the relative value between them influence how much or if damage happens.
I believe the change increases the amount of damage the weapon does to shields, when penetration is greater than resistance.
That is, the shield hitpoints do not have the listed ‘damage’ deducted, but instead the ‘penetration’ is deducted. So penetration that is gratuitously higher than resistance will bring down shields even faster than when it is only marginally higher.
If this is true, then the effect is very small.
I tested by facing off two pairs of cruisers. One had an engine, power, multiphasic (st 275, res 9, recharge 7), 2 targer booster II, fusion beam. The other was the same with a Shield II instead (st 255, res 24, recharge 7.)
Since the fusion beam has penetration 24, the if pen has a significant effect on damage to shields, then the multiphasic ship should really lose it’s shield FIRST, despite having marginally higher strength. In practice, it’s a bit random (because of the occaisional misses) but the Shield II ships tended to lose their shields first - which implies to me that their higher resistance wasn’t helping.
In the ship stats screen, the damage absorbed stat seemed to vary a fair bit, and was never even close to 100%, even though I was stopping most battles with shields still up on one side… That suggests to me that some of the damage is being discarded, but the actual timing of the shields going down does suggest to me that higher shield pen is having an undetectably small effect. Maybe a bug?
EDIT: To know for sure, you’d want to do some modding… A sheild module with a strength of 1000, regen 0, resistance 0. One with resistance 500. Then mod a weapon to have pen 500, tracking 1000, damage 10, high fire rate. The high tracking and low damage per shot relative to the shield strength should flatten out the effect of the hit chance. If high pen over resistance does ANYTHING, this’d show it… Maybe I’ll try this later, if I feel like learning to mod for even more Gratuitious Testing 
It’s possible also that Cliffski is planning a Gigacruiser with 40+ shield resists.
Could be. It just wouldn’t be much of a ‘weapon balancing’ at this point, with no shields over 27 resistance.