Maybe you could go one step further and have a "secondary fire" on weapon group 2. Maybe the Inferno could also have something similar with high RoF and low RoF.
Both variants are definitely beautiful. Masterful, as you put it yourself. Hopefully, in a few years time, we'll be able to actually have massive-enough space battles in which to use it (~200 players?). Then we'll see how it gets balanced in the end. In my opinion, having a ship that can nail down (i.e. disable) an Idris-sized capital ship in a single pass is game-breaking, as the 30-40 people trying to team-play in such Idris have very little option of defending themselves in time. Anyway, we'll see. Nice video, as usual. Very well put. Keep up the good work!
@@MrBlackjimrogan Well, it's not in one shot, but in one "pass". And it's not destroy, but seriously damage or even almost disable, depending on the skill of both the pilot of the Ares and the crew of the Idris. Moreover, we don't really know whether the Idris we now have in game (Arlington et al) are fully equipped and working as intended.
@Jaume Sabater ah ok i see, i havent been able to play for a while as im waiting on a gfx card upgrade, but im sure they have said yhe npc idris is pretty weak compared to the full player owned one as various systems are not working yet with the ai one
I wouldn't be too worried... Nothing that you see now will be the same when the game goes live. A ship such as the Idris won't be damaged to a point where you need worry. It's going to take several passes and if your fighters are doing their job, that will be difficult for them to accomplish without facing damage themselves. Ship fights will be long and drawn out. In the words of the Dev's themselves, you'll be able to limp away from a fight before you just go 'kabloom'.... Look at it like this, we're all playing with paper planes right now. When it's all said and done every ship will have a higher level of survivability and military grade ships with armor will be especially sturdy. You will absolutely need to bring the right tool for the job. Bringing something like a light fighter to an Idris fight will be foolish as the weapons will more than likely bounce off of the hull and get absorbed by the Idris shields. At best, you'll be able to 'hopefully' knock out the Idris shield generators if you can get close enough and stay in one piece. This is the future of SC.
The ares was great until CIG realized it was too effective against light fighters. I feel bad for the inferno getting caught up in the Ion nerf and made even less effective than it already was
@@44R0Ndin +1000, impossible to kill a light fighter with other than a light fighter (unless you have one or several gunners and it might still not be enough depending on the ship)
I really wonder about those changes, I don't think in proper PvP with decent pilots it was ever a problem. For PvE it was hugely effective because the AI was being stupid, so I guess they had to do something while we wait for AI that can deal with an Ares properly. Most of the game being PvE and especially one the most lucrative money earning loops, farming AI bounties is something the old Ion was amazingly OP at. If the NPC bounties would actually fly competently a single Ares would be in deep trouble with 3-4 fighters harrying it while the main target (usually in a bigger ship) runs away.
@@EeroafHeurlin everytime it's all about artificially nerfing ships (buffed initially, for sales) to take upon missing gameplay aspects that would otherwise nerf the money farming the way the current nerfing actually do 🙄
I'd love to see a video where you break down each ship manufacturers design language. All in one video for easy side by side comparison. Great stuff as always!
That’s a great idea, we might need to wait a little for manufacturers like Consolidated Outland to have a larger sample size, only having the Nomad in their new style at this point
They were great until the rebalance. Nuked mine for a more useful ship until they can fix them. IMO the Warden is still superior. The Ares are beautiful designes.
One shot light fighters? Devastating damage? That was b4 the heavy nerfing, ehm I meant "balancing". It doesn't feel like a capital class weapon anymore. It's more like capital size crap now. I like your videos Morphologis. You do a nice work, thank you. The words you used in this video though, describe the Ares before the nerfing. Its current status is far from that. I know what I am saying, I flew both in both versions and I own an Ion at least atm. These ships got an alpha damage reduce of over 60% if I remember well.
I was genuinely excited to own one of these until they screwed up the ion cannon. I understand a need for balance, but there are ships out there that should be feared. There are ships that you shouldn’t be able to stand a chance against unless you are ready. I feel that the ares were one of these ships. I didn’t understand the nerf because I never lost a battle against an ares when I was in a light fighter even before the nerf, so now when I see an ares I know for a fact I will come out of the battle unharmed before it can even reach our fleets larger ships. I hope someday they revert these changes.
Not at all, it's not as inaccurate as it might seem. I've found it to actually be incredibly accurate, I think what you're experiencing is how they turned off bullet nudge with its fixed weapon. Every other fixed weapon in the game behaves slightly like a gimbaled weapon where it actually soft locks the target when close enough to the pip. The footage of me taking down CIG's ship team was taken post-nerf.
I find it hit or miss but i think the missing issue is due to server and ping health rather than ship performance. sometimes its hard to tell how good some of the weapons are due to the servers not knowing exactly everything is which is not good when the weapons rely on very accurate shots. i find the ion to still be an absolute beast even post nerf. its really good in higher tier bounty hunting missions due to npcs not really flying evasively
@@Accuracy158 The size difference between the prowler and Ares is insignificant; the price point of a ship is not relevant to it's role nor actual performance in combat, everyone knows this. The point is these two very different ships NOT intended for high alpha damage, one not even built for combat at all, can outclass a ship marketed for high alpha. That isn't to say that there can't be ships with higher alpha than the Ion(lookin' at you Idris); just don't market it or falsely claim it has high alpha when the numbers are closer to the low alpha of a Vanguard.
Love that your gameplay literally looks like generated video used for promoting the game or even better sometimes, it’s so impressive, keep up the awesome work!
I can’t tell if this script was written before the nerf or if you are speaking from the original marketing materials. Since the ION’s gun was nerfed it neither has the long range or high alpha expected of a cannon. The ship is beautiful though.
Will never stop loving your vids Morph, I love how you go in depth about the narrative of the ship design in that it's not just about throwing ships in a game but creating a whole different and believable world.
Great Video Morph! Well done as always. As for the Ion, it's my most heart-breaking ship. I understand that CIG had to nerf it because it was OP when it was released, but I just disagree with the way they nerfed it. The only reason I don't melt it is because of something John Crew said a couple of years ago: "Until all of the systems/mechanics are in place, the players won't truly understand what we are doing..." To me this means that at some point in the future we will be able to manually bring the Ion back to a similar state it was in at launch by swapping out components that we currently don't have any access to. I think CIG is trying to figure out the classes of each ship in this order from best to worse - S,A,B,C,D,E,F I believe they release a ship in what they think is S-class, gather data. Then nerf it all the way down to F class, gather more data. And in the future they will use this data to classify things we don't currently have access to, such as thrusters, and armor. They will even use this data to tweak all of the things we already have such as power plants, shields and weapons. Again all of this goes back to their mantra "Easy to play - Difficult to master". They want us to spend the time to figure out how to tweak a ship to get the performance we want out of it, but they also want the ships to be useful even if we're too lazy to do anything except hop in and fly.
That or CIG will figure out that the people that were complaining were the bad pilots that flew in straight predictable lines that literally a monkey with a rock could snipe out of the sky. The Ares Ion was and still should be capable of one-shot killing light fighters. It's like the answer to "how do I block a Raging Demon attack from Akuma in Street Fighter?" The answer is that the move is unblockable, you'll always get hit. The way to "block" it is to "be somewhere it's not". Same with the Ares Ion. Don't get stuck in the crosshairs, don't fly in straight lines, be a PILOT and not a Driver.
@@44R0Ndin This. Also they need to up the engagement ranges and accuracy of both ships. I have about 0.1 seconds where the inferno's gun actually matters during a joust. It would literally be more effective if I put plasma blades on my wings and attempted to melee the ships.
The only reasons I kept mine was because I CCU-chained one for just $70 and because the bonus paint from the Inferno concept sale could also be applied to the Ion. But I definitely understand where you're coming from and I REALLY hope that CIG will realize that they made a HUGE mistake. The ship worked perfectly fine when they set it to the 38RPM high accuracy high damage as it was listed in the brochure when they sold it. Those ridiculous nerfs were completely uncalled for and were the prime definition of "kneejerking" because they nerfed it after the saw some pro player in an Ion oneshotting noobs in light fighters during a video/stream.
So what I'm getting from this is that if I enjoy flying the A-10 Warthog in DCS, I'll probably enjoy the Ares Starfighter with the rotary ballistic weapon. After all, a capital ship is the closest thing I can think of to a stationary target when you talk about targets in space in an advanced technology future. And just like the A-10, it flies like a pig. Or maybe closer to the Space Shuttle, but that might be overstating things since the Space Shuttle is more of a particularly aerodynamic brick than it is an actual aircraft due to the sacrifices needed to make it able to take the heat of reentry.
It's a bit different from the Hawg; the A-10 could turn pretty well when it has the energy, whereas the Ares is manageable but not ideal even in the best of circumstances. But on the other hand, the Ares has a wicked main engine for forward thrust and can outrun Vanguards in a straight line. I think a couple other things stand out that make flying an Inferno different from an A-10C II Tank Killer. firstly, having that first detente on the trigger in DCS is actually great, where you can spin up the weapon and fire it the instant you need it. this makes the GAU-8/A much more usable than the SF7B (which lacks first detente) found on the Inferno. secondly, while both could be considered to carry a lot of ordnance/munitions in their universes, the A-10C's munitions are far more effective (thinking of the APKWS, Maverick, and Paveways/JDAMs). Star Citizen's missile mechanics are still somewhat underdeveloped, and its rocket and bomb mechanics are there but extremely niche (right now it's impossible to mount the Jericho rockets onto the Ares, whereas there are currently no racks in the game to mount the Thunderball bomb) What the Ares will give you, compared to an A-10C from DCS, would be greater speed and ability to travel between areas for sorties plus more trigger time on the gun, though less ergonomics and precision.
Ion was 1 shotting light fighters exactly as the brochure stated. CIG then said, yeah, that is too meta, lets nerf it so it has no range, and no accuracy, and no alpha. Now it fits our sales brochure more closely. The pitch and yaw are very close to a connie which has 1.25x the damage output as the ion when equipped with s5 laser cannons and s4 laser cannons. It also gets a s3 shield. With the new s2 shields getting 2 faces, that makes the connie about 3.5x longer lasting shield wise from the front. So connie is just about as maneuverable against fighters. Has significant DPS advantage, and has way more shielding. Definitely not meta though. Also andro is $240 vs $250 for ion. Connie can carry cargo, snub, and rover. Also an extra 4 people. CIG balances as well as a drunk on a unicycle.
Yeah, I really hope that once CIG has SQ42 ready for launch that they will actually put people on the balance team that know what they are doing and not just randomly change things. The only guy I like is Yogiklatt because you can get through to him and he understood that the Ares was simply on another level than a Gladius. The other guy though appears to be very arrogant and is probably the reason why the Ares received such kneejerk changes. It worked perfectly fine in a3.15.1 when it was still at 38rpm with high alpha and "Fixed Assist" enabled (as it should because "Fixed Assist" was a global mechanic that was implemented to create controlled parity and to make fixed weapons viable for all ships). They should have never disabled that mechanic imo because it ruined the ship and made it unviable.
Nice video, I still miss proper cannons after the combat rebalance we really don’t have any slow firing high alpha guns everything is just a different skinned auto cannon / repeater no real choice between DPS and alpha damage and it caters a lot to light fighters with heavy fights not able to stay on target long enough using current weapons to have a some what equal playing field. I got really excited with having a nice cannon where taking time to ensure a hit matted I wish the Ion could have been nerfed a different way. Now it’s just a laser version if the inferno.
CIG pulled a shameless bait-and-switch with the Ares Ion. At 3.15 the ship performed as pitched in the concept sale and during 3.15 PTU testing, long range, low ROF, high accuracy, high alpha damage. At 3.16 CIG decided to throw a big "screw you" to all of us who bought it for real money after having tested it for a whole patch by nerfing it to oblivion. Since we vote with our wallets I was lucky enough to claim a refund but many were unable to as the 3.16 patch released right as the 30-day refund window was closing. Same thing happened with the Redeemer albeit a bit less pronounced. Shame on you CIG. At this point anything that beats the current Gladius energy repeater meta will be nerfed. How did it come to this?
this "big screw you" is called balancing, which the alpha and PTU especially are for. The only thing they did is remove the slight auto-aim/bullet nudge so hitting small targets requires more effort than aiming in the general direction. Concepts never end up as they were originally invisioned because, well suprise, they were concepts. They make pretty clear that all features and specs are not final and are subject to change, aside from the fact that you are playing an alpha version in which nothing is ever final.
The ship launched broken and overpowered in PvP, it became the meta because it could so easily 1 shot players. Whether or not you personally believe that should be the case, it's not fun for the person being shot in their light fighter. And what about all those other players who paid real money for their arrows, sabers, gladius etc? Shouldn't they too have a chance at having fun in their supposed dog-fighting focused ships? The Ares was always advertised as a capital ship killer, not the meta kill everything ship. Also, CIG has already posted publicly about the balance of the ION not being in a state they're happy with, they didn't have time before the holidays to take a more nuanced approach. I'd fully expect the high alpha accurate shot to come back, but they need to balance it in a way where it doesn't become the defacto dogfighting king. You should also know that CIG was monitoring the statistics closely after the release of the ION to see if it was too powerful, they knew what they were doing when they did the quick rebalance.
@@Morphologis I mean if you are going to get in front of a size 7 cannon in a light fighter, you should expect to get oneshot. They should have left the gun alone and nerfed the Ares' maneuverability. That would have fixed the issue completely. It is a Capital Ship Killer with a gun that is barely better than a Connie build.
There are issues with the ion, personnly i think nerfing its agility to what it was in the early days of the ptu would have been better than nerfing the weapon into a repeater than it being a sniper. That said any pilot trying to joust vs the starfighter was asking for a bad day. Having flown both the ion and light fighters vs each other, once an light fighter gets close to an ion, the light fighter will win unless it gets unlucky with desync. Taking into accout the progress track - ship introduced on ptu, was a bit less maneuverable than the mercury.. it then had the current nerf applied and removed, there is a dev response talking about why the nerf was removed. The ship then recieved and agility buff. But heres a question that should be asked, why are lightfighters the end all and be all of balance, if anything it should be medium. For equivelency light fps armor should not handle better against sniper rounds than medium or heavy armor, so why is this case in space? Im hoping all of this gets resolved finally when ship armor comes in, but im not holding my breath.
Great rundown Morph, I concept purchased the Inferno and could not be happier. Looking forward to Xenothreat in the PU and laying some hot metal pain to the Javelin's and Hammerhead's. Cheers 🍻
That shot at 10:59 of the retaliator doing that backwards dive in the gas cloud was pure art. loved that one. just met you in the verse the other day in aus server! very nice work here! -Megolito
I really wish the gun was spinal mounted through the center of mass, with the cockpit slung underneath it. With it offset like that, I'm just picturing how the recoil would yaw you to the side every time you fired.
oh god, here come the crybabies who think a dps increase is a nerf just because they cant hit small fighters any more... They literally just removed aim assist/bullet nudging and increased the ROF because it was NOT in line with design intent... The ship literally does more damage, you are just bad so you think the ship is *shrug*
@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 I don't see where this is a nerf either. The higher RoF alone means this ship is actually more effective against smaller targets than before, even if you require more than one hit now (boohoo). Lowering the RoF but increasing the alpha might have been the better option to kind of push it towards its intended anti-capital role though, but then the crybabies would have lost their shit completely.
@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 i don't consider myself a a crybaby, too old for that. I don't go after LF with my Ion. Please just invest few seconds in reading the intended use of the Ion: long range fighter. Now try to shoot at a HH at more than 800m, and you'll see a very significant part of your shots not doing any damage. Long range? really? alpha damage? No. Fortunately this ship will change (or not) and then I will melt mine. Finally LF users have been the ones complaining; if they are able to move they would not be hit by Ion pilots. Have a good game - enough drama on reddit and spectrum. I am surprised that Morphologis didn't mention the more thanvery poor precision of this ship into this review.
@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 If anyone is a crybaby, it's the people who whined to CIG about getting oneshot by a size 7 cannon while flying a light fighter. It SHOULD oneshot someone if they get in front of it. That's the same as complaining about an Abrams oneshotting a pickup truck. If you get in the way of a big ass gun, it should be common sense that your ass is now glass. I don't see why that is so hard to understand.
@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 um, no, they added RNG spread as well, ontop of all of that shit you already mentioned, that makes it the only ship in the game to have all that done to it. It was sold as a long range slow firing precision weapon with high damage. Now it's a short range repeater with crap accuracy at 1k even on large targets, not to mention everything else they did to the ship (missiles, missing shield, etc) compared to what it was sold as I love how the white knights show up and the first thing out of their mouth is insults toward the people that were all bait and switched by CIG and now have a very different ship then what they bought. It's essentially the cutty black all over again, although when they fucked the black they at least turned it into something useful even if it wasn't what it was sold as, the ion is just now a slightly worse version of a properly kitted Vanguard anymore.
My ORG did a NineTails even several weeks ago... we had around 14 ships, 2x Redeemers, 3x Vanguards, 2x Ares and around 7x Light Fighters... we had a hostile Ares Inferno appear. As he started to attack my ORG mates, we gave the order for the ENTIRE org to shift their target priority to the hostile Ares. Not a single person could damage his hull... his shields would drop and he would just simple max his SCM and fly away. Now this wouldn't have been an issue if we had 2, maybe 3 light fighters... we had FULLY manned Redeemers (one full ballistics) and Vanguards, essentially a 20 players verse 1, attacking this hostile Ares.... nobody could damage him yet he had the ability to slowly pluck away our ships. Either he was cheating or these ships are seriously broken...
had to be cheating or most likely just shit server performance, they are slower than those LF's and only 100m/s faster than a vanguard, easily compensated with weapons fire. Most likely just shit server performance though, I've yet to find an actual cheater so far
I wish they would put a charge up or wind up on the ares ion cannon. i liked it slow and punchy but i get it was overpowered. if it had a wind-up time where you had to maintain the pip aim during, then it would take more skill to hit small quick crafts.
Nice work! I know there's a lot of drama about the Ion, but I still have a great time in it! And thanks for showing the inventory slots, I had no idea they were there! Woohoo!
great video! i was hoping you’d show the doris explosion at the end, so that was a pleasant surprise. i own an inferno, and that ship has been integral to grinding money for other ships as i can complete ert bounties by myself.
I mean they advertised one thing and changed it to something completely different after the sale was over and people spent money one it. Any other product and that would probably be grounds for a false advertisement lawsuit.
I got rid of mine. I hated having to constantly re-arm the inferno and the ion change made it too far away from the sniper role I was looking for. I suppose they were always going to be misused; in retrospect, I don't think any single seat attack craft should ever have had that much firepower. They are ubiquitous in the game now and regularly trivialize engagements.
Yup. Cig mounting a capital class gun on a single seater was as stupid a choice as it sounds. It would be like mounting a WWII battleship long range gun on a spitfire ...then crying out... balance is hard! Lol
Great design commentary, you know far more than I do on that for sure. At the end when commenting on the performance there was a point that as of 3.16 you got wrong. the range on the Ion is 2800m, if you sit 3-5km off your target you wont hit. the pip hasn't been fixed since the nerf changes.
The army makes a materials sniper rifle that can disable an armored truck at 500 meters with 5 shots. Wait! That’s not fair! It also disables ATV’s in one shot! Ya, that’s not fair. Let’s nerf the bullet and smooth the barrel… Great video though Morph. Sorry for the small rant.
The design of the Ares is definitely 10/10. The execution though, is just embarrassing. I own both ships but after the 3.16 changes I found more enjoyment in a Vanguard Sentinel or a 600i. I understand the concerns but if a ship only has a single gameplay loop available, you should at least feel comfortable doing said gameplay loop. Multipurpose ships seem to excel over the Ares even in its intended role.
That's fair, but is probably also based on the game's current state. Single purpose ships are more designed for the game once it's more or less complete and players are using their capabilities with others. For example, a single Ares is kind of meh, but 10 of them could be a terror to any enemy Large or Capital ships. We've got a similar situation with ships like the Starfarer that don't even have their main purpose in the game yet (collecting, refining, transporting, and distributing fuel to friendly ships). Ships that have such a narrow focus are designed for specialization and to be flown in groups as part of a fleet, not to be used solo. Cutty blacks or Lancers are great ships for solo players or groups of 1-3 because they can do a little of everything, but they can't do somethings (like take down Capital ships) and a lot of things they CAN do they can't do super well. But when you're trying to do a bit of everything and don't need to take down enemy Capital ships, refuel your Colonial fleet, etc, then they work fine. This is me saying that specialized ships make sense...once the game is complete. While it's incomplete, multipurpose ships are more likely to be at least passable at SOME of the stuff that's complete, making them seem far more useful. The only specialized ships that "feel" good right now are the ones that are specialized in a gameplay loop that's more or less complete, such as the Prospector.
Really? After getting countlessly destroyed by these big gun ships I highly regret not picking one up, these feel like anti-everything that makes most fighters obsolete.
Because EMP, shield changes and "meta", distortion weapons/dmg actually works for a change and the sentinel has big EMP + plenty of DPS so it can take down a shield face quite quickly and then EMP to disable most components in almost any ship (maybe sometimes needs two EMP or following up with a burst from distortion cannons) and then the target is just a sitting duck waiting to be killed (or if in atmo, plummeting to it's hot date with the ground). There also have been (unsubstantiated) reports of the EMP one-shot disabling medium fighters with full shields which would indicate some kind of bug either in the shield or the EMP where it bypasses the shield since it should not even fully down the shield with one hit (some 3-5% should remain).
The ares is easy to beat (forcing them to QT away if not destroying them) with a light or medium fighter in normal dogfight, anything heavier will probably struggle to get into favorable position (above/below). If they boost away, decouple, turn around and continue using retrothrusters to accelerate backwards they're very hard to catch because 1. You can't just fly straight at them or you're easy pickings 2. over large distance they have the advantage because they don't need to rotate nearly as much to keep you in their sights and their guns have much longer range so you can't even shoot back... They're "anti everything" only in PvE because the AI is both "stupid" and flies straight at them (easy target) and in general does not have enough server resources to properly fly to get positional advantage if they survive the closing in.
10/10 for the art team on the Ares. 2/10 on whoever the hell was in charge of its execution. The only reason I even give it 2 points is because the ship manages to turn on.
Heheh, your Audible ad made me chuckle. I'm a truck driver and just stopped for the night... guess what I had playing on my truck stereo for the last 10 hours? That's right. The Expanse through my Audible account. I just started book 4 today. Makes those miles over the road just disappear. Lotta books I still need to listen to in my back log come to think of it. As for the Starfighter, cool little ship but I'm more of a Multi-Crew kind of pilot.
Crusader's design language is wonderful, and after the Ares I'm hoping for a Vanguard equivalent from them. You might need a crowbar to get me out of it if they do that.
"Ion provides a big alpha strike" Post-nerf it sure doesn't lol. Maybe if they decide to undo their screw-up bait and switch, but unlikely from CIG who are just focused on mainly breaking funding records at this point.
I really feel like the weapon storage should be either in the cockpit or just beside it. Jumping out and getting ambushed on the ground means you'll be doing it with only a pistol. It is cool seeing these new ships and expanded doctrine here with these heavy fighters (bombers?) dedicated to an anti-capital role. Makes me think of B-Wings or Y-Wings or something.
I love the ship (I mean who wouldn't love a space Warthog?), my only change has always been adding a small S1/S2 mount as sort of a Co-Axial/backup gun. Some to have if there is an issue with the single main gun, but nothing too crazy to make it now the king of dog fights. Important for the Inferno as a chance for defense when low/out of ammo and for the Ion to help line up a shot, but could also be an alternative damage type if wanted. I'm just not a fan of any dedicated combat ship having only a single gun.
exposing the engine could be for cooling if it is a very large engine and they decided to save space by not installing a huuge cooler, its like air cooled, but its vaccum of space cooled instead. and those winglets you mention look like things that will be functional for combat in the future
Just gonna say the reader for the expanse series is fantastic. Same goes for the Wheel of Time actually. Top notch stuff. It just so happens I have audiobooks from both series
I'm loving what cig are doing with their ship types. It's clear they thought things through. You have capital ships. Big, imposing, cost a fortune but they are great for projecting power. Get 2 fleets near each other and they will tear each other to pieces. So instead you send forth bombers and gunships like the redeemer ares and retaliator to threaten the capital ships. The capitals can't get out of the way of the fighter whilst the smaller ships dance around the PDCs on the capital's. So you deploy heavy fighters with enough firepower to bring down these larger small ships. You need the increased guns to effectively defeat the gunships whilst being more manuverable to dodge their return fire. So they counter by sending light fighters to harrass and keep the heavies pre occupied so the heavy hitters can so their job and by this point that's as low as it goes and they deploy their own light fighters. I see mediums as a multirole fighter capable of acting as both a heavy and a light for when either need arises. Also stealth for recon.
Great video. We just need to talk real quick about the uninterested COVAS the crusader ships have. Their ships, especially the starlifter, have such majestic looks, they didn't deserve that monotone COVAS.
I think the inferno will be really useful as the supporting wing for a carrier. you can easily land and restock your ammo but the dps will be valuable in eliminating enemy capital ships before yours takes too much damage
What are your thoughts on the ion nerf? I was really looking forward to having an extremely long range sniper, and I think that the reasoning that it was too powerful against light fighters doesn't really make sense considering how powerful light fighters are in the meta
light fighters are used to flying straight at a target and using their small size to not get hit. The Ares being a "sniper" had the accuracy to hit the light fighters. Bad light fighter pilots spammed multiple sites saying the Ares was OP. The bad light fighters would play right into the strength of the Ares, which is huge forward facing damage, that was highly accurate. Good light fighters changed their doctrine and would use terrain against a Ares, and get behind them to eat away the Ares shield and armor. The Ares at that point has to run, it is it's only option.
I don't even play Star Citizen and I can already tell you the problem is the light fighter pilots not the light fighters themselves or the Ares itself. The problem isn't that it's too good against light fighters. The problem is that the light fighters are constantly flying in straight, predictable lines, making it trivial to line up shots on them. Rule 1 of "I've already been seen by someone with weapons that wants to do me harm": Be evasive!! Rule 2. Open the distance. Rule 3. Only once you've covered rules 1 and 2, consider circling back around to open fire on them yourself. Light fighters SHOULD get swatted out of the sky by capital-scale weaponry, just look what a WWII era Flak 88 did if it hit a fighter aircraft. In that case, it puts said fighter aircraft instantly out of the fight and struggling to survive, if it didn't outright kill the pilot when the shot connected. And just like in WWII, the tactics remain the same: Don't fly in a straight line at the same altitude! Be evasive!! What they should be doing is NOT STANDING STILL OR FLYING IN STRAIGHT LINES! In other words, if you're taking fire from unguided weaponry in a light fighter, you've already made likely several mistakes. I'm certain that those light fighters have more than enough of a superiority of speed and agility to make it next-to-impossible to actually line up that one-hit-kill shot, doubly so since the capital class weaponry on the Ares is fixed-mounted and not on a turret. It's like piloting an Eagle in Elite: Dangerous. Yes, you're one of the fastest and most agile ships in the game. However, you have the damage endurance of a gnat. One second of fire from anything bigger than a class 4 hardpoint should melt your shields, and another second should finish off the ship. That's just how it is when flying the Eagle. What do you get in return? You get the speed and agility to be able to stay firmly planted in the rear arc of any ship that can mount weapons bigger than a size 3 hardpoint, right where they have trouble returning fire on you. Which is exactly where you SHOULD be, and if you're NOT there, you should be disengaging. It's all about using the proper tactics.
@@44R0Ndin yeah I don't think that there's something wrong inherently with light fighters I just think there's a majority of players that favors them too much and it makes the meta naturally form around them, so everyone who doesn't prefer them just kinda gets sidelined
Well the ranges right now are a little weird, they're going through rebalancing and some of the, don't make much sense. At the moment, size 7s outrange most of the guns on the idris except the front turret and the size 10 railgun. My hope is that the ship itself rather than the weapon can determine range.
I think that the best use for these is going to be ship defense. Deploy one, two, or even three of these from a capitol ship for defense against other Ares who are on the attack, or against other anti-capitol ships like the Retaliator. Ships like the Retaliator seem like exactly what this is meant to go after, since against a full on capitol ship these are just going to amount to 'another turret' basically.
In a fleet, ships like these are best utilized to n an airstrike role. Get your opponent to expose his larger ships, pull away the fighter screen with your own, and call in a flight of ion or inferno to strafe the target in a single pass. The flight then jumps away and rearms before being called in again from a different angle. The last thing you want is for these ships to linger in the battlespace to be picked off by enemy fighters.
Love your vids Morphololololooogist! You can thank Cpt Shack for that lol. Love the quality and detail you put into your videos and I know you got other talented peeps helping you too so give them beautiful people some props too! Keep it up my man! Been following this game since we first got the Bengal carrier trailer back in the day. Whenever I do decide to build a PC and join Armco this game will most likely be half way finished.
Newer player, looking at review videos of various ships that I plan to progress into, and this is one of those ships that has my interest. I'm just wondering why there wasn't any mention of the ship's S5 torpedoes? I would have thought those S5 would be great for capitol ships, and dropping the racks down to S4 or S3 would be suitable for using this ship like a heavy fighter. Are the missiles/torpedoes so bad that people don't see the need to mention them?
This ship reminds me SO much of the Python from Elite Dangerous. Both ships have a decent profile head-on but extremely big profile from the top or bottom, they both turn like boats, and they both pack a punch!
hey morph, i don't think that stay in fight longer is the reason to make Ion more suited for fluent situation than inferno... i mean, we are talking about small ships.... ares is still ares, it can be killed with ease,i think ion should be used for stealth and assasination, rather than engaging target blatently, because no matter how long you can shoot your cannon, your ship can only stay in the fight as long as your hull can stand. By the time you empties that 3000 rounds + missles and still can't kill the target, you are likely to be out matched, and you only have 2 choices in this situation, do more damage before you blow up, or flea. so it doesn't matter for inferno to have limited ammunation. with this in mind, it seems that inferno should be the one that is used for situation where you don't know where is the target, how much fire power you will need, and what kind of engagement you will encounter. because inferno can do a little of everything, plus it can do massive amount damage in a short time compared to ion. So even if the opponent is very strong, killing a squadron of ares within few minute, inferno still can do impressive damage to the oppenent, where ion will be completely out matched. Not even say that ion gets punished harder than inferno for missing shots... but ion, its percision and high amount of single shot alpha damage, is very good for situation where you know your opponent, and you can control the form of engagement, then ion can stay in safe enviroment and sniping your target. even their appearences gave this away. Ion is meant for doing clean jobs, where inferno is meant for doing dirty jobs
Beautiful review of a beautiful ship. Honestly shooting at capitals i don’t even need a pip to hit them. I can hit them without locking target at 500m.
I hope CIG are actually able to implement this internal components thing. Because I see there being multiple old ships that will have an advantage because they don't have certain parts that can be blown off
For me, my review is this: Aries Ion Patch 3.15: 10/10 - The sniper ship anti-craft killer it was billed and marketed as, with killing power across the board. Felt snappy and fast (too fast honestly) and its maneuverability was incredible. The ship was a bit OP, but the reason it was OP was not the size 7 gun, but how good the ship was able to manuver, and how fast the Ion was. Aries Ion Patch 3.16 4/10 - Its dead Jim! Nerfed into the ground, they ruined the gun, and killed even the concept of the ship entirely, which was a slow firing high alpha damage sniper rifle. Maneuverability is still about the same, but with how nerfed the gun is it just isn't going to be competitive against nearly any ship. Straight up ruined it. So yeah, unless they start going back to how the ship was in 3.15, do not buy this ship, they essentially nuke nerfed it into being useless.
How to defend against an Ares Ion up to 3.15: Get Gud. No seriously, do better than you're doing, because clearly you died and they didn't, and that's not how that should go when it's light fighter versus heavy fighter. I mean, aren't light fighters supposed to, I don't know, be really good at turning and have really good engines? You have A LOT of Mobility and enough Firepower to get the job done, without much Armor. The Ares Ion has enough mobility to get its own job done, but enough Firepower to give anything a bad day. So, my tip is to use the dang flight controls that you have in your hands, instead of just flying straight at your target. Maybe take some cues from IRL aerial dogfighting, notice how they're basically never flying in a straight line? That's on purpose, it makes it a lot harder for the enemy to get a lock on you. If you're flying in a straight line, a monkey with a rock could hit you. And what's an ion cannon but a thing that throws extremely hot rock vapor?
I was expecting the Ion to have mechanics similar to the energy sniper rifle, short presses for rapid shots and a charged shot those tougher targets
I was thinking just a charged shot would be great, but being able to vary the damage by holding the trigger would be fantastic too.
@@Morphologis Everyone would have likely been 100% fine with that as a solution.
To add for balancing you could have it so the more charged the shot the lower the accuracy.
@@maxfrankovich6254 if it was with the previous version with fixed aim assist why not, now it would jsut be not very usefull at long range
Maybe you could go one step further and have a "secondary fire" on weapon group 2.
Maybe the Inferno could also have something similar with high RoF and low RoF.
Both variants are definitely beautiful. Masterful, as you put it yourself. Hopefully, in a few years time, we'll be able to actually have massive-enough space battles in which to use it (~200 players?). Then we'll see how it gets balanced in the end. In my opinion, having a ship that can nail down (i.e. disable) an Idris-sized capital ship in a single pass is game-breaking, as the 30-40 people trying to team-play in such Idris have very little option of defending themselves in time. Anyway, we'll see. Nice video, as usual. Very well put. Keep up the good work!
It would be ridiculous to have a fighter take down an idris in 1 shot. Bo way this is working as intended
@@MrBlackjimrogan Well, it's not in one shot, but in one "pass". And it's not destroy, but seriously damage or even almost disable, depending on the skill of both the pilot of the Ares and the crew of the Idris.
Moreover, we don't really know whether the Idris we now have in game (Arlington et al) are fully equipped and working as intended.
@Jaume Sabater ah ok i see, i havent been able to play for a while as im waiting on a gfx card upgrade, but im sure they have said yhe npc idris is pretty weak compared to the full player owned one as various systems are not working yet with the ai one
@Jaume Sabater and as an idris owner. Yeah i want it to last more than a few seconds of combat..
I wouldn't be too worried... Nothing that you see now will be the same when the game goes live. A ship such as the Idris won't be damaged to a point where you need worry. It's going to take several passes and if your fighters are doing their job, that will be difficult for them to accomplish without facing damage themselves. Ship fights will be long and drawn out. In the words of the Dev's themselves, you'll be able to limp away from a fight before you just go 'kabloom'.... Look at it like this, we're all playing with paper planes right now. When it's all said and done every ship will have a higher level of survivability and military grade ships with armor will be especially sturdy. You will absolutely need to bring the right tool for the job. Bringing something like a light fighter to an Idris fight will be foolish as the weapons will more than likely bounce off of the hull and get absorbed by the Idris shields. At best, you'll be able to 'hopefully' knock out the Idris shield generators if you can get close enough and stay in one piece. This is the future of SC.
Love the pace and thought of this video, great job Morph! I feel like I know how this ship works now, and I've never actually sat in one.
The ares was great until CIG realized it was too effective against light fighters. I feel bad for the inferno getting caught up in the Ion nerf and made even less effective than it already was
It's not too effective against light fighters, light fighter PILOTS are lazy and fly in extremely predictable straight lines.
@@44R0Ndin legit had it so often with my ion that gladis that could lowkey fly circles around u just went jousting
@@44R0Ndin +1000, impossible to kill a light fighter with other than a light fighter (unless you have one or several gunners and it might still not be enough depending on the ship)
I really wonder about those changes, I don't think in proper PvP with decent pilots it was ever a problem. For PvE it was hugely effective because the AI was being stupid, so I guess they had to do something while we wait for AI that can deal with an Ares properly. Most of the game being PvE and especially one the most lucrative money earning loops, farming AI bounties is something the old Ion was amazingly OP at. If the NPC bounties would actually fly competently a single Ares would be in deep trouble with 3-4 fighters harrying it while the main target (usually in a bigger ship) runs away.
@@EeroafHeurlin everytime it's all about artificially nerfing ships (buffed initially, for sales) to take upon missing gameplay aspects that would otherwise nerf the money farming the way the current nerfing actually do 🙄
I'd love to see a video where you break down each ship manufacturers design language. All in one video for easy side by side comparison.
Great stuff as always!
That’s a great idea, we might need to wait a little for manufacturers like Consolidated Outland to have a larger sample size, only having the Nomad in their new style at this point
Did you say 3-5 Kilometer range?!
If you can hit anything at 600m youre doing good with Ion.
Oh how i wish she had 5 km range
8:26 LOL, these are my sentiments as well, except it would be something like: "The ENTIRE design away from the concept ship."
They were great until the rebalance. Nuked mine for a more useful ship until they can fix them. IMO the Warden is still superior. The Ares are beautiful designes.
At this point I am just holding on to it until something I like more comes along so I can melt and buy it or upgrade into it.
One shot light fighters? Devastating damage? That was b4 the heavy nerfing, ehm I meant "balancing". It doesn't feel like a capital class weapon anymore. It's more like capital size crap now. I like your videos Morphologis. You do a nice work, thank you. The words you used in this video though, describe the Ares before the nerfing. Its current status is far from that. I know what I am saying, I flew both in both versions and I own an Ion at least atm. These ships got an alpha damage reduce of over 60% if I remember well.
I was genuinely excited to own one of these until they screwed up the ion cannon. I understand a need for balance, but there are ships out there that should be feared. There are ships that you shouldn’t be able to stand a chance against unless you are ready. I feel that the ares were one of these ships. I didn’t understand the nerf because I never lost a battle against an ares when I was in a light fighter even before the nerf, so now when I see an ares I know for a fact I will come out of the battle unharmed before it can even reach our fleets larger ships. I hope someday they revert these changes.
Nice vid, but sounds like a pre-nerf impression. Right now the range is about 500m before you miss every shot.
Not at all, it's not as inaccurate as it might seem. I've found it to actually be incredibly accurate, I think what you're experiencing is how they turned off bullet nudge with its fixed weapon. Every other fixed weapon in the game behaves slightly like a gimbaled weapon where it actually soft locks the target when close enough to the pip. The footage of me taking down CIG's ship team was taken post-nerf.
I'll have to try again, test it more in depth 🙂
Still, missing the canon feel of the ion all the same.
I find it hit or miss but i think the missing issue is due to server and ping health rather than ship performance. sometimes its hard to tell how good some of the weapons are due to the servers not knowing exactly everything is which is not good when the weapons rely on very accurate shots. i find the ion to still be an absolute beast even post nerf. its really good in higher tier bounty hunting missions due to npcs not really flying evasively
@@Morphologis Makes me wonder if they may have been going quite easy on you to sell more of these.
@@Neogentronyx Or they just suck and had it nerfed accordingly :P
Both the Prowler and 600i can boast higher alpha than the Ares Ion, currently. It does not have high alpha.
I'm not sure I would consider those ships comparable in terms of size and price point. It's kind of picking two very different much larger ships.
@@Accuracy158 The size difference between the prowler and Ares is insignificant; the price point of a ship is not relevant to it's role nor actual performance in combat, everyone knows this.
The point is these two very different ships NOT intended for high alpha damage, one not even built for combat at all, can outclass a ship marketed for high alpha.
That isn't to say that there can't be ships with higher alpha than the Ion(lookin' at you Idris); just don't market it or falsely claim it has high alpha when the numbers are closer to the low alpha of a Vanguard.
Well crafted, and really enjoyed the formation flying with both Ares. Wonderful work Morphologis
Love that your gameplay literally looks like generated video used for promoting the game or even better sometimes, it’s so impressive, keep up the awesome work!
had the same feeling!!! promoting useless scrap !!!
I can’t tell if this script was written before the nerf or if you are speaking from the original marketing materials. Since the ION’s gun was nerfed it neither has the long range or high alpha expected of a cannon. The ship is beautiful though.
I was thinking exactly this
Will never stop loving your vids Morph, I love how you go in depth about the narrative of the ship design in that it's not just about throwing ships in a game but creating a whole different and believable world.
Great Video Morph! Well done as always. As for the Ion, it's my most heart-breaking ship. I understand that CIG had to nerf it because it was OP when it was released, but I just disagree with the way they nerfed it. The only reason I don't melt it is because of something John Crew said a couple of years ago: "Until all of the systems/mechanics are in place, the players won't truly understand what we are doing..." To me this means that at some point in the future we will be able to manually bring the Ion back to a similar state it was in at launch by swapping out components that we currently don't have any access to.
I think CIG is trying to figure out the classes of each ship in this order from best to worse - S,A,B,C,D,E,F I believe they release a ship in what they think is S-class, gather data. Then nerf it all the way down to F class, gather more data. And in the future they will use this data to classify things we don't currently have access to, such as thrusters, and armor. They will even use this data to tweak all of the things we already have such as power plants, shields and weapons. Again all of this goes back to their mantra "Easy to play - Difficult to master". They want us to spend the time to figure out how to tweak a ship to get the performance we want out of it, but they also want the ships to be useful even if we're too lazy to do anything except hop in and fly.
That or CIG will figure out that the people that were complaining were the bad pilots that flew in straight predictable lines that literally a monkey with a rock could snipe out of the sky.
The Ares Ion was and still should be capable of one-shot killing light fighters. It's like the answer to "how do I block a Raging Demon attack from Akuma in Street Fighter?" The answer is that the move is unblockable, you'll always get hit. The way to "block" it is to "be somewhere it's not". Same with the Ares Ion. Don't get stuck in the crosshairs, don't fly in straight lines, be a PILOT and not a Driver.
@@44R0Ndin This. Also they need to up the engagement ranges and accuracy of both ships. I have about 0.1 seconds where the inferno's gun actually matters during a joust. It would literally be more effective if I put plasma blades on my wings and attempted to melee the ships.
After the nerf I got rid of mine. I was so pissed what they did with my Ion. I loved that ship but they did it so wrong I melted it that day
The only reasons I kept mine was because I CCU-chained one for just $70 and because the bonus paint from the Inferno concept sale could also be applied to the Ion. But I definitely understand where you're coming from and I REALLY hope that CIG will realize that they made a HUGE mistake. The ship worked perfectly fine when they set it to the 38RPM high accuracy high damage as it was listed in the brochure when they sold it. Those ridiculous nerfs were completely uncalled for and were the prime definition of "kneejerking" because they nerfed it after the saw some pro player in an Ion oneshotting noobs in light fighters during a video/stream.
So what I'm getting from this is that if I enjoy flying the A-10 Warthog in DCS, I'll probably enjoy the Ares Starfighter with the rotary ballistic weapon.
After all, a capital ship is the closest thing I can think of to a stationary target when you talk about targets in space in an advanced technology future.
And just like the A-10, it flies like a pig. Or maybe closer to the Space Shuttle, but that might be overstating things since the Space Shuttle is more of a particularly aerodynamic brick than it is an actual aircraft due to the sacrifices needed to make it able to take the heat of reentry.
It's a bit different from the Hawg; the A-10 could turn pretty well when it has the energy, whereas the Ares is manageable but not ideal even in the best of circumstances. But on the other hand, the Ares has a wicked main engine for forward thrust and can outrun Vanguards in a straight line.
I think a couple other things stand out that make flying an Inferno different from an A-10C II Tank Killer. firstly, having that first detente on the trigger in DCS is actually great, where you can spin up the weapon and fire it the instant you need it. this makes the GAU-8/A much more usable than the SF7B (which lacks first detente) found on the Inferno. secondly, while both could be considered to carry a lot of ordnance/munitions in their universes, the A-10C's munitions are far more effective (thinking of the APKWS, Maverick, and Paveways/JDAMs). Star Citizen's missile mechanics are still somewhat underdeveloped, and its rocket and bomb mechanics are there but extremely niche (right now it's impossible to mount the Jericho rockets onto the Ares, whereas there are currently no racks in the game to mount the Thunderball bomb)
What the Ares will give you, compared to an A-10C from DCS, would be greater speed and ability to travel between areas for sorties plus more trigger time on the gun, though less ergonomics and precision.
Use your range... yeah not anymore... the nerf hammer destroyed any precision! #verysadface
Ion was 1 shotting light fighters exactly as the brochure stated. CIG then said, yeah, that is too meta, lets nerf it so it has no range, and no accuracy, and no alpha. Now it fits our sales brochure more closely.
The pitch and yaw are very close to a connie which has 1.25x the damage output as the ion when equipped with s5 laser cannons and s4 laser cannons. It also gets a s3 shield. With the new s2 shields getting 2 faces, that makes the connie about 3.5x longer lasting shield wise from the front. So connie is just about as maneuverable against fighters. Has significant DPS advantage, and has way more shielding. Definitely not meta though. Also andro is $240 vs $250 for ion. Connie can carry cargo, snub, and rover. Also an extra 4 people. CIG balances as well as a drunk on a unicycle.
Yeah, I really hope that once CIG has SQ42 ready for launch that they will actually put people on the balance team that know what they are doing and not just randomly change things. The only guy I like is Yogiklatt because you can get through to him and he understood that the Ares was simply on another level than a Gladius. The other guy though appears to be very arrogant and is probably the reason why the Ares received such kneejerk changes. It worked perfectly fine in a3.15.1 when it was still at 38rpm with high alpha and "Fixed Assist" enabled (as it should because "Fixed Assist" was a global mechanic that was implemented to create controlled parity and to make fixed weapons viable for all ships). They should have never disabled that mechanic imo because it ruined the ship and made it unviable.
Nice video, I still miss proper cannons after the combat rebalance we really don’t have any slow firing high alpha guns everything is just a different skinned auto cannon / repeater no real choice between DPS and alpha damage and it caters a lot to light fighters with heavy fights not able to stay on target long enough using current weapons to have a some what equal playing field. I got really excited with having a nice cannon where taking time to ensure a hit matted I wish the Ion could have been nerfed a different way. Now it’s just a laser version if the inferno.
CIG pulled a shameless bait-and-switch with the Ares Ion. At 3.15 the ship performed as pitched in the concept sale and during 3.15 PTU testing, long range, low ROF, high accuracy, high alpha damage. At 3.16 CIG decided to throw a big "screw you" to all of us who bought it for real money after having tested it for a whole patch by nerfing it to oblivion. Since we vote with our wallets I was lucky enough to claim a refund but many were unable to as the 3.16 patch released right as the 30-day refund window was closing. Same thing happened with the Redeemer albeit a bit less pronounced. Shame on you CIG. At this point anything that beats the current Gladius energy repeater meta will be nerfed. How did it come to this?
this "big screw you" is called balancing, which the alpha and PTU especially are for. The only thing they did is remove the slight auto-aim/bullet nudge so hitting small targets requires more effort than aiming in the general direction. Concepts never end up as they were originally invisioned because, well suprise, they were concepts. They make pretty clear that all features and specs are not final and are subject to change, aside from the fact that you are playing an alpha version in which nothing is ever final.
I agree with BizzMRK I recommend getting off you're high horse balance comes over lore and CONCEPTS I will remind CONCEPTS XD
The ship launched broken and overpowered in PvP, it became the meta because it could so easily 1 shot players. Whether or not you personally believe that should be the case, it's not fun for the person being shot in their light fighter. And what about all those other players who paid real money for their arrows, sabers, gladius etc? Shouldn't they too have a chance at having fun in their supposed dog-fighting focused ships?
The Ares was always advertised as a capital ship killer, not the meta kill everything ship. Also, CIG has already posted publicly about the balance of the ION not being in a state they're happy with, they didn't have time before the holidays to take a more nuanced approach. I'd fully expect the high alpha accurate shot to come back, but they need to balance it in a way where it doesn't become the defacto dogfighting king. You should also know that CIG was monitoring the statistics closely after the release of the ION to see if it was too powerful, they knew what they were doing when they did the quick rebalance.
@@Morphologis I mean if you are going to get in front of a size 7 cannon in a light fighter, you should expect to get oneshot. They should have left the gun alone and nerfed the Ares' maneuverability. That would have fixed the issue completely. It is a Capital Ship Killer with a gun that is barely better than a Connie build.
There are issues with the ion, personnly i think nerfing its agility to what it was in the early days of the ptu would have been better than nerfing the weapon into a repeater than it being a sniper. That said any pilot trying to joust vs the starfighter was asking for a bad day. Having flown both the ion and light fighters vs each other, once an light fighter gets close to an ion, the light fighter will win unless it gets unlucky with desync. Taking into accout the progress track - ship introduced on ptu, was a bit less maneuverable than the mercury.. it then had the current nerf applied and removed, there is a dev response talking about why the nerf was removed. The ship then recieved and agility buff.
But heres a question that should be asked, why are lightfighters the end all and be all of balance, if anything it should be medium. For equivelency light fps armor should not handle better against sniper rounds than medium or heavy armor, so why is this case in space?
Im hoping all of this gets resolved finally when ship armor comes in, but im not holding my breath.
to bad they nerfed the heck out of the ion and made it basicly useless
Great rundown Morph, I concept purchased the Inferno and could not be happier. Looking forward to Xenothreat in the PU and laying some hot metal pain to the Javelin's and Hammerhead's.
Cheers 🍻
That shot at 10:59 of the retaliator doing that backwards dive in the gas cloud was pure art. loved that one. just met you in the verse the other day in aus server! very nice work here!
-Megolito
I really wish the gun was spinal mounted through the center of mass, with the cockpit slung underneath it. With it offset like that, I'm just picturing how the recoil would yaw you to the side every time you fired.
The Ion delivers a big alpha strike accurately." Tell me you made this in 3.15.1 without telling me you made this in 3.15.1.
I loved the Ion until it got nerfed with a nuke from orbit, I wish the wings folded, they're massive.
oh god, here come the crybabies who think a dps increase is a nerf just because they cant hit small fighters any more... They literally just removed aim assist/bullet nudging and increased the ROF because it was NOT in line with design intent... The ship literally does more damage, you are just bad so you think the ship is *shrug*
@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 I don't see where this is a nerf either. The higher RoF alone means this ship is actually more effective against smaller targets than before, even if you require more than one hit now (boohoo). Lowering the RoF but increasing the alpha might have been the better option to kind of push it towards its intended anti-capital role though, but then the crybabies would have lost their shit completely.
@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 i don't consider myself a a crybaby, too old for that. I don't go after LF with my Ion. Please just invest few seconds in reading the intended use of the Ion: long range fighter. Now try to shoot at a HH at more than 800m, and you'll see a very significant part of your shots not doing any damage. Long range? really? alpha damage? No. Fortunately this ship will change (or not) and then I will melt mine.
Finally LF users have been the ones complaining; if they are able to move they would not be hit by Ion pilots.
Have a good game - enough drama on reddit and spectrum. I am surprised that Morphologis didn't mention the more thanvery poor precision of this ship into this review.
@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 If anyone is a crybaby, it's the people who whined to CIG about getting oneshot by a size 7 cannon while flying a light fighter. It SHOULD oneshot someone if they get in front of it. That's the same as complaining about an Abrams oneshotting a pickup truck. If you get in the way of a big ass gun, it should be common sense that your ass is now glass. I don't see why that is so hard to understand.
@@wolfieperrinaybara9333 um, no, they added RNG spread as well, ontop of all of that shit you already mentioned, that makes it the only ship in the game to have all that done to it. It was sold as a long range slow firing precision weapon with high damage. Now it's a short range repeater with crap accuracy at 1k even on large targets, not to mention everything else they did to the ship (missiles, missing shield, etc) compared to what it was sold as
I love how the white knights show up and the first thing out of their mouth is insults toward the people that were all bait and switched by CIG and now have a very different ship then what they bought. It's essentially the cutty black all over again, although when they fucked the black they at least turned it into something useful even if it wasn't what it was sold as, the ion is just now a slightly worse version of a properly kitted Vanguard anymore.
My ORG did a NineTails even several weeks ago... we had around 14 ships, 2x Redeemers, 3x Vanguards, 2x Ares and around 7x Light Fighters... we had a hostile Ares Inferno appear. As he started to attack my ORG mates, we gave the order for the ENTIRE org to shift their target priority to the hostile Ares.
Not a single person could damage his hull... his shields would drop and he would just simple max his SCM and fly away. Now this wouldn't have been an issue if we had 2, maybe 3 light fighters... we had FULLY manned Redeemers (one full ballistics) and Vanguards, essentially a 20 players verse 1, attacking this hostile Ares.... nobody could damage him yet he had the ability to slowly pluck away our ships. Either he was cheating or these ships are seriously broken...
had to be cheating or most likely just shit server performance, they are slower than those LF's and only 100m/s faster than a vanguard, easily compensated with weapons fire. Most likely just shit server performance though, I've yet to find an actual cheater so far
@@chomp7927 wouldn't shit server performance affect both parties involved in the fight?
Traded my Ion in.. may come back to it later but the nerf really killed it.
Those embarqued cameras like at the end are just _so_ _damn_ _epic_ ! we need more of this as illustrations in your videos xD
Fantastic camera work!
I wish they would put a charge up or wind up on the ares ion cannon. i liked it slow and punchy but i get it was overpowered. if it had a wind-up time where you had to maintain the pip aim during, then it would take more skill to hit small quick crafts.
Nah. It's the fault of the light fighters for flying in straight lines.
Nice work! I know there's a lot of drama about the Ion, but I still have a great time in it! And thanks for showing the inventory slots, I had no idea they were there! Woohoo!
She's a blast in her element that's for sure
great video! i was hoping you’d show the doris explosion at the end, so that was a pleasant surprise. i own an inferno, and that ship has been integral to grinding money for other ships as i can complete ert bounties by myself.
well they fucked up badly with this ship that people are stil mad at it
I mean they advertised one thing and changed it to something completely different after the sale was over and people spent money one it. Any other product and that would probably be grounds for a false advertisement lawsuit.
@@GodDragonLich all are unhappy with the change they did the most easy one and stupid, there were other way to do that
@@failomas1443 100%
I got rid of mine. I hated having to constantly re-arm the inferno and the ion change made it too far away from the sniper role I was looking for. I suppose they were always going to be misused; in retrospect, I don't think any single seat attack craft should ever have had that much firepower. They are ubiquitous in the game now and regularly trivialize engagements.
Yup. Cig mounting a capital class gun on a single seater was as stupid a choice as it sounds. It would be like mounting a WWII battleship long range gun on a spitfire ...then crying out... balance is hard! Lol
Love those theatrical shots. The chefs kiss.
Great design commentary, you know far more than I do on that for sure.
At the end when commenting on the performance there was a point that as of 3.16 you got wrong. the range on the Ion is 2800m, if you sit 3-5km off your target you wont hit. the pip hasn't been fixed since the nerf changes.
I love everything about this ship except for the one part--it doesn't have a small walkable cabin
The army makes a materials sniper rifle that can disable an armored truck at 500 meters with 5 shots. Wait! That’s not fair! It also disables ATV’s in one shot! Ya, that’s not fair. Let’s nerf the bullet and smooth the barrel… Great video though Morph. Sorry for the small rant.
The production value of this video and its style is absolutely outstanding. This should be done for every ship.
10/10
Yet another amazing video from Morphologis. Hoping for one on the raft ….after glitches get fixed. Thank you Morph for all the hard work.
The design of the Ares is definitely 10/10. The execution though, is just embarrassing. I own both ships but after the 3.16 changes I found more enjoyment in a Vanguard Sentinel or a 600i. I understand the concerns but if a ship only has a single gameplay loop available, you should at least feel comfortable doing said gameplay loop. Multipurpose ships seem to excel over the Ares even in its intended role.
That's fair, but is probably also based on the game's current state.
Single purpose ships are more designed for the game once it's more or less complete and players are using their capabilities with others. For example, a single Ares is kind of meh, but 10 of them could be a terror to any enemy Large or Capital ships. We've got a similar situation with ships like the Starfarer that don't even have their main purpose in the game yet (collecting, refining, transporting, and distributing fuel to friendly ships). Ships that have such a narrow focus are designed for specialization and to be flown in groups as part of a fleet, not to be used solo.
Cutty blacks or Lancers are great ships for solo players or groups of 1-3 because they can do a little of everything, but they can't do somethings (like take down Capital ships) and a lot of things they CAN do they can't do super well. But when you're trying to do a bit of everything and don't need to take down enemy Capital ships, refuel your Colonial fleet, etc, then they work fine.
This is me saying that specialized ships make sense...once the game is complete. While it's incomplete, multipurpose ships are more likely to be at least passable at SOME of the stuff that's complete, making them seem far more useful. The only specialized ships that "feel" good right now are the ones that are specialized in a gameplay loop that's more or less complete, such as the Prospector.
Really? After getting countlessly destroyed by these big gun ships I highly regret not picking one up, these feel like anti-everything that makes most fighters obsolete.
Why the sentinel? Just curious I love my Warden wondering if I made a mistake
Because EMP, shield changes and "meta", distortion weapons/dmg actually works for a change and the sentinel has big EMP + plenty of DPS so it can take down a shield face quite quickly and then EMP to disable most components in almost any ship (maybe sometimes needs two EMP or following up with a burst from distortion cannons) and then the target is just a sitting duck waiting to be killed (or if in atmo, plummeting to it's hot date with the ground).
There also have been (unsubstantiated) reports of the EMP one-shot disabling medium fighters with full shields which would indicate some kind of bug either in the shield or the EMP where it bypasses the shield since it should not even fully down the shield with one hit (some 3-5% should remain).
The ares is easy to beat (forcing them to QT away if not destroying them) with a light or medium fighter in normal dogfight, anything heavier will probably struggle to get into favorable position (above/below). If they boost away, decouple, turn around and continue using retrothrusters to accelerate backwards they're very hard to catch because 1. You can't just fly straight at them or you're easy pickings 2. over large distance they have the advantage because they don't need to rotate nearly as much to keep you in their sights and their guns have much longer range so you can't even shoot back... They're "anti everything" only in PvE because the AI is both "stupid" and flies straight at them (easy target) and in general does not have enough server resources to properly fly to get positional advantage if they survive the closing in.
10/10 for the art team on the Ares. 2/10 on whoever the hell was in charge of its execution. The only reason I even give it 2 points is because the ship manages to turn on.
Still wish they didn't nerf the ion so much... Is supposed to hit hard for far away....
Great video, I'd love to see him review the different ship manufacturers, and discuss their different philosophies when it comes to ship design.
Heheh, your Audible ad made me chuckle. I'm a truck driver and just stopped for the night... guess what I had playing on my truck stereo for the last 10 hours? That's right. The Expanse through my Audible account. I just started book 4 today. Makes those miles over the road just disappear. Lotta books I still need to listen to in my back log come to think of it.
As for the Starfighter, cool little ship but I'm more of a Multi-Crew kind of pilot.
Crusader's design language is wonderful, and after the Ares I'm hoping for a Vanguard equivalent from them. You might need a crowbar to get me out of it if they do that.
1:59 +1000 for Wheel of Time!! :D
Correction; ion repeater ;)
Correction ;...... It's called the Ares starNERF
Feels like you made this video to help CIG out of the big hole they recently dug for themselves.
100%
IT WAS YOUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!! YOU caused the Ion nerf! Did you really have to piss off Jon Crewe?
No I killed him after the nerf :P
@@Morphologis oh.
They must really suck then.
"Ion provides a big alpha strike" Post-nerf it sure doesn't lol. Maybe if they decide to undo their screw-up bait and switch, but unlikely from CIG who are just focused on mainly breaking funding records at this point.
Leviathan Falls was so amazing! What a phenomenal end to a masterpiece series!!!
I really feel like the weapon storage should be either in the cockpit or just beside it. Jumping out and getting ambushed on the ground means you'll be doing it with only a pistol.
It is cool seeing these new ships and expanded doctrine here with these heavy fighters (bombers?) dedicated to an anti-capital role. Makes me think of B-Wings or Y-Wings or something.
sexy background music and general sound design along with your eclectic camera movement my man!
Your cinematography skills in these videos still amaze me
You can sum up the Ares with four words From Power To Pathetic
I love the ship (I mean who wouldn't love a space Warthog?), my only change has always been adding a small S1/S2 mount as sort of a Co-Axial/backup gun. Some to have if there is an issue with the single main gun, but nothing too crazy to make it now the king of dog fights. Important for the Inferno as a chance for defense when low/out of ammo and for the Ion to help line up a shot, but could also be an alternative damage type if wanted. I'm just not a fan of any dedicated combat ship having only a single gun.
exposing the engine could be for cooling if it is a very large engine and they decided to save space by not installing a huuge cooler, its like air cooled, but its vaccum of space cooled instead. and those winglets you mention look like things that will be functional for combat in the future
Crusader Nerfed Starfighter ... the size 7 feels more like a size 5, if even.
Just gonna say the reader for the expanse series is fantastic. Same goes for the Wheel of Time actually. Top notch stuff. It just so happens I have audiobooks from both series
If I ever become a fleet commander, I’m getting some of these and naming them broadswords, they just look so similar to the ship from halo
I am crazily in love with this ship.
These videos are so relaxing. I appreciate you for doing these!
Loved this one man I did not know I had a gun rack and trunk in my Aires lol, thanks man.
I'm loving what cig are doing with their ship types. It's clear they thought things through.
You have capital ships. Big, imposing, cost a fortune but they are great for projecting power. Get 2 fleets near each other and they will tear each other to pieces. So instead you send forth bombers and gunships like the redeemer ares and retaliator to threaten the capital ships. The capitals can't get out of the way of the fighter whilst the smaller ships dance around the PDCs on the capital's.
So you deploy heavy fighters with enough firepower to bring down these larger small ships. You need the increased guns to effectively defeat the gunships whilst being more manuverable to dodge their return fire. So they counter by sending light fighters to harrass and keep the heavies pre occupied so the heavy hitters can so their job and by this point that's as low as it goes and they deploy their own light fighters.
I see mediums as a multirole fighter capable of acting as both a heavy and a light for when either need arises. Also stealth for recon.
Great video. We just need to talk real quick about the uninterested COVAS the crusader ships have. Their ships, especially the starlifter, have such majestic looks, they didn't deserve that monotone COVAS.
The intro music is so menacing! Subscribed.
I think the inferno will be really useful as the supporting wing for a carrier. you can easily land and restock your ammo but the dps will be valuable in eliminating enemy capital ships before yours takes too much damage
What are your thoughts on the ion nerf? I was really looking forward to having an extremely long range sniper, and I think that the reasoning that it was too powerful against light fighters doesn't really make sense considering how powerful light fighters are in the meta
light fighters are used to flying straight at a target and using their small size to not get hit. The Ares being a "sniper" had the accuracy to hit the light fighters. Bad light fighter pilots spammed multiple sites saying the Ares was OP. The bad light fighters would play right into the strength of the Ares, which is huge forward facing damage, that was highly accurate. Good light fighters changed their doctrine and would use terrain against a Ares, and get behind them to eat away the Ares shield and armor. The Ares at that point has to run, it is it's only option.
I don't even play Star Citizen and I can already tell you the problem is the light fighter pilots not the light fighters themselves or the Ares itself.
The problem isn't that it's too good against light fighters. The problem is that the light fighters are constantly flying in straight, predictable lines, making it trivial to line up shots on them.
Rule 1 of "I've already been seen by someone with weapons that wants to do me harm": Be evasive!!
Rule 2. Open the distance.
Rule 3. Only once you've covered rules 1 and 2, consider circling back around to open fire on them yourself.
Light fighters SHOULD get swatted out of the sky by capital-scale weaponry, just look what a WWII era Flak 88 did if it hit a fighter aircraft.
In that case, it puts said fighter aircraft instantly out of the fight and struggling to survive, if it didn't outright kill the pilot when the shot connected.
And just like in WWII, the tactics remain the same: Don't fly in a straight line at the same altitude! Be evasive!!
What they should be doing is NOT STANDING STILL OR FLYING IN STRAIGHT LINES!
In other words, if you're taking fire from unguided weaponry in a light fighter, you've already made likely several mistakes.
I'm certain that those light fighters have more than enough of a superiority of speed and agility to make it next-to-impossible to actually line up that one-hit-kill shot, doubly so since the capital class weaponry on the Ares is fixed-mounted and not on a turret.
It's like piloting an Eagle in Elite: Dangerous. Yes, you're one of the fastest and most agile ships in the game. However, you have the damage endurance of a gnat. One second of fire from anything bigger than a class 4 hardpoint should melt your shields, and another second should finish off the ship. That's just how it is when flying the Eagle.
What do you get in return? You get the speed and agility to be able to stay firmly planted in the rear arc of any ship that can mount weapons bigger than a size 3 hardpoint, right where they have trouble returning fire on you. Which is exactly where you SHOULD be, and if you're NOT there, you should be disengaging. It's all about using the proper tactics.
@@44R0Ndin yeah I don't think that there's something wrong inherently with light fighters I just think there's a majority of players that favors them too much and it makes the meta naturally form around them, so everyone who doesn't prefer them just kinda gets sidelined
Can it still snipe capital ships with big cross sections? Yes. So what nerf!
@@neonspark707 I do not consider 2800m as a sniping range.
What range does it have, this fighter should stay back dozens of km to not get destroyed by all the PDCs of a battleship?
Well the ranges right now are a little weird, they're going through rebalancing and some of the, don't make much sense. At the moment, size 7s outrange most of the guns on the idris except the front turret and the size 10 railgun. My hope is that the ship itself rather than the weapon can determine range.
Nice video but... Outdated info on weapon's range and accuracy!
Great video morph ! Keep this up, you're doing incredible as always !
Awesome Vid as always!!!
and... Why am I not surprised that you read The Expanse? I love the books and have them on audible, too!
Just finished leviathan falls on audible as well. It's seriously great.
Your insanse at this Morphologis.
Just the amount of details you can get down on a video is just Noice.
But yeah, keep up the great work man!
Awesome to see some star citizen content getting recognized enough for sponsors
Ion cannon....that became a repeater.
I think that the best use for these is going to be ship defense. Deploy one, two, or even three of these from a capitol ship for defense against other Ares who are on the attack, or against other anti-capitol ships like the Retaliator. Ships like the Retaliator seem like exactly what this is meant to go after, since against a full on capitol ship these are just going to amount to 'another turret' basically.
9:08 "keep at around a 3-5km range" As an EVE player this is a really cool factor to see in SC :D
In a fleet, ships like these are best utilized to n an airstrike role. Get your opponent to expose his larger ships, pull away the fighter screen with your own, and call in a flight of ion or inferno to strafe the target in a single pass. The flight then jumps away and rearms before being called in again from a different angle. The last thing you want is for these ships to linger in the battlespace to be picked off by enemy fighters.
Wheel of time, love your work - so happy I subbed!
That is crazy! I have the Inferno and never knew it had a storage compartment. 🤯
Love your vids Morphololololooogist! You can thank Cpt Shack for that lol.
Love the quality and detail you put into your videos and I know you got other talented peeps helping you too so give them beautiful people some props too! Keep it up my man! Been following this game since we first got the Bengal carrier trailer back in the day. Whenever I do decide to build a PC and join Armco this game will most likely be half way finished.
Newer player, looking at review videos of various ships that I plan to progress into, and this is one of those ships that has my interest. I'm just wondering why there wasn't any mention of the ship's S5 torpedoes? I would have thought those S5 would be great for capitol ships, and dropping the racks down to S4 or S3 would be suitable for using this ship like a heavy fighter. Are the missiles/torpedoes so bad that people don't see the need to mention them?
This ship reminds me SO much of the Python from Elite Dangerous. Both ships have a decent profile head-on but extremely big profile from the top or bottom, they both turn like boats, and they both pack a punch!
Haaha ion “cannon” i wish *cries in energy repeater*
hey morph, i don't think that stay in fight longer is the reason to make Ion more suited for fluent situation than inferno...
i mean, we are talking about small ships.... ares is still ares, it can be killed with ease,i think ion should be used for stealth and assasination, rather than engaging target blatently, because no matter how long you can shoot your cannon, your ship can only stay in the fight as long as your hull can stand. By the time you empties that 3000 rounds + missles and still can't kill the target, you are likely to be out matched, and you only have 2 choices in this situation, do more damage before you blow up, or flea. so it doesn't matter for inferno to have limited ammunation.
with this in mind, it seems that inferno should be the one that is used for situation where you don't know where is the target, how much fire power you will need, and what kind of engagement you will encounter. because inferno can do a little of everything, plus it can do massive amount damage in a short time compared to ion. So even if the opponent is very strong, killing a squadron of ares within few minute, inferno still can do impressive damage to the oppenent, where ion will be completely out matched. Not even say that ion gets punished harder than inferno for missing shots...
but ion, its percision and high amount of single shot alpha damage, is very good for situation where you know your opponent, and you can control the form of engagement, then ion can stay in safe enviroment and sniping your target.
even their appearences gave this away. Ion is meant for doing clean jobs, where inferno is meant for doing dirty jobs
interestinggggg... so maybe you DO have a special server you are able to connect to, for these perfect frames and clips you show.
Beautiful review of a beautiful ship.
Honestly shooting at capitals i don’t even need a pip to hit them. I can hit them without locking target at 500m.
Morphologis; good job - nice to see you playing to your strengths!
*Size 7 capital class weapons surely provided massive sales to CIG*
*Too bad the Inferno size 7 Gatling shoots like a Size 4*
I hope CIG are actually able to implement this internal components thing. Because I see there being multiple old ships that will have an advantage because they don't have certain parts that can be blown off
Love your videos! Well done reviews. Thank you!
"like john crewe.. who ran away"
hahaha thank you for the laugh
For me, my review is this:
Aries Ion Patch 3.15: 10/10 - The sniper ship anti-craft killer it was billed and marketed as, with killing power across the board. Felt snappy and fast (too fast honestly) and its maneuverability was incredible. The ship was a bit OP, but the reason it was OP was not the size 7 gun, but how good the ship was able to manuver, and how fast the Ion was.
Aries Ion Patch 3.16 4/10 - Its dead Jim! Nerfed into the ground, they ruined the gun, and killed even the concept of the ship entirely, which was a slow firing high alpha damage sniper rifle. Maneuverability is still about the same, but with how nerfed the gun is it just isn't going to be competitive against nearly any ship. Straight up ruined it.
So yeah, unless they start going back to how the ship was in 3.15, do not buy this ship, they essentially nuke nerfed it into being useless.
How to defend against an Ares Ion up to 3.15:
Get Gud. No seriously, do better than you're doing, because clearly you died and they didn't, and that's not how that should go when it's light fighter versus heavy fighter.
I mean, aren't light fighters supposed to, I don't know, be really good at turning and have really good engines? You have A LOT of Mobility and enough Firepower to get the job done, without much Armor.
The Ares Ion has enough mobility to get its own job done, but enough Firepower to give anything a bad day.
So, my tip is to use the dang flight controls that you have in your hands, instead of just flying straight at your target. Maybe take some cues from IRL aerial dogfighting, notice how they're basically never flying in a straight line? That's on purpose, it makes it a lot harder for the enemy to get a lock on you.
If you're flying in a straight line, a monkey with a rock could hit you. And what's an ion cannon but a thing that throws extremely hot rock vapor?