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(If you want my gameplay takes, skip to the lower section)

The Tragedy of the Stinger

I love the Stinger. I'm a sucker for alien designs, and a ship that breathes and has a heartbeat? Sign me right up.

Before release I had hopes that it'd come with a full Vanduul loadout of the Wrath, Warlords, and Whips to make it a unique plasma-oriented heavy fighter. The actual component spread on release left a lot to be desired, but I still loved it too much to pass up.

After some experimentation I started running a spread of Revenants/Breaknecks and Sawbucks, and that proved super effective. The Wrath cannon would clear light fighter shields in just a few hits while the sheer volume of ballistics made short work of anything I got my sights on.

Sure, it flew like a potato compared to other heavy fighters, but at least in PvE or large ship hunting that was fine.

Then came the armor patches, and while it became tankier the ballistics loadout became much less useful. Swapped to an Omni loadout and it still worked well enough to take out in PvE and have fun. The extra tankiness felt good and let me shrug off a bit of pesky light fighter wingmen fire when handling bounties, which was much needed for a ship that really can't dodge incoming fire.

Still, with each coming patch I find myself using it less and less.

As of the upcoming 4.8 stats, tho, unfortunately I can't really justify taking it out. The loss of armor means it deflects a whopping 11 weapons, all of which are some of the weakest S1s, plus a few low-alpha gatlings. It can't even deflect all S1 Laser Repeaters.

While this makes it possible for me to return to a ballistics loadout on it, the problem is that it's back to being too slow to dodge fire and too fragile to tank fire. If I want to throw a bunch of dakka towards an enemy while flying a slower, large target I'll pretty much always be better off in a Corsair. Conversely, for 90% of bounties, I'm back to the best choice being one of my light fighters.

I plan to hold off on sending it to buyback until the patch goes to live just to give final balance tweaks a chance, but realistically I think this ship is going to end up being shelved due to being just far too undertuned for what it is. Could I still make it work for PvE? Sure, probably. But am I crossing a threshold of diminishing returns where it just doesn't feel great to fly? Yes.

Larger Gameplay Comments about Heavy Fighters

It's not really a secret that heavy fighters have spent a long time in a weird middle ground. Most of them aren't tanky enough to feel "heavy" but also not agile enough to feel like "fighters". The best ones are usually on the lighter side, having higher agility, but those of us who fly them regularly are generally accepting suboptimal performance for a lot of tasks. The Stinger was arguably one of the best examples of this because of its clumsy flight for its class.

I'm totally okay with suboptimal ships. Not everything needs to be meta. If I needed everything to be optimal, I wouldn't use a Defender as my main light fighter or have bought the Stinger to be my main heavy fighter.

That said, there is a line where "suboptimal" starts to edge into "actively working against the player". At least in my opinion, I thought the higher armor stats were a step in the right direction. Dropping those stats without retuning weapon damage stats is an odd choice, but I'm hoping they intend to do that in the future and just kinda put the cart before the horse, so to speak.

I'm also not advocating for heavier ships like the Corsair to get nerfed, since the last thing we need is multicrew ships feeling even less optimal.

Rather, I think as CIG looks at ship roles (which they've recently indicated they're doing), we need to see a real identity for heavy fighters as short range high DPS sluggers. With the Kraken and refueling both coming to gameplay soon-ish, we're going to see both carriers and fuel-support loops as an option. When that happens, I'd like to see the range of ALL fighters decreased, leaning into them being something that is launched directly from a larger ship to set up for a specific engagement.

As the exchange for this, I'd like to see heavy fighters really and truly get the benefits of being heavy. As it stands most of them fly like they're heavy, but as soon as they start taking hits they don't necessarily feel like they're heavy.

I wanna have a Mike Tyson on a short leash. Some absolute beast that you know is bad news when it rolls up, but needs a hand getting to that fight in the first place. To me that feels like the niche they need to lean into, because the other option of tuning up the agility would encroach on the role of Medium Fighters (which I see as switch-hitting patrol vessels).

.....

Perhaps I'm misguided, and this is just my two cents. I'm still largely happy with seeing active progress on the game and balance being constantly re-examined, just slightly worried to see what I felt was a good (albeit undercooked) move with armor to be rolled back to most armor gates being nearly irrelevant now.

(Credit goes to for this idea. Thought it was so good it needed a post made about it.)

Short Solution: Make Ship Claims work like Player Death.

Long Explanation:

When you die in an Armistice Zone, you don't lose anything so you aren't penalized for an elevator glitch or the like. The same should be true for ships -- if you claim your ship while in an Armistice Zone, it should have zero claim timer or cost.

How do you keep this from being exploited?

#1 -- Place a timer on the ship after retrieval. There needs to be a 15 minute timer after retrieval where the free claim applies, which is voided immediately if you leave an Armistice Zone. This gives enough time to allow for someone to respawn and get back to an ASOP terminal if they died to a ship glitch, but keeps a limit to avoid excessively exploiting the Free Claim (if your summoned ship is glitched, you usually know in the first few minutes).

#2 -- Immediately tag the ship for deletion when claimed within an Armistice Zone. This means that the instant you hit that claim button, it pops out of existence.

#3 -- Components are not lootable during that 15 minute timer. They can be edited with the new load out menu, but not physically removed. This also helps prevent duping and exploiting the Free Claim system.

These solutions would assuage the worst of the ship retrieval glitches while preserving the claim costs system as well as helping limit duping, at least duping for free.

Honorary Mention:

Make combat contracts give pay that's worth a damn, or make missiles/torps not cost more than the average contract payout.

It's stupid and has been an issue for... years? Nearly every time I use missiles these days I take a financial loss on my contract. I can afford this rn because of the hilariously fucked economy, but before the economy destabilized I pretty much just never fired payloads of any sort because the rearm wasn't worth the cost.

Edit since some folks apparently hate missiles more than they enjoy reading: The missiles comment is just a side note (hence the "Honorary Mention" but). I'm advocating for a maybe 10-15% cost adjustment in ordinances. I personally use my Defender to solo clear VHRTs. I don't need missiles, and I'm not advocating for spamming Polaris torps at LRTs. I'm just saying that I have taken my Talon Shrike out one single time for some PvP and otherwise never use it because it's a missile ship in game that gives zero incentive to actually fire ordinance except for PvP.