Video: A5F Hadrian is amazing.

I can't be the first person to discover this, but it seems so powerful that I figure it might be broken. That's why I'm putting it in this forum, actually. If I compare it to anything else I've played, it just seems leagues beyond.

So I put together a 7 minute video, beating Gladiator Mode on the hardest difficulty The Union without using an active Sage ability. Normally that's a serious challenge, but this makes it fairly relaxing.

Keep your eye on the red bar on the bottom-left of opponents - when that fills up, their heat overloads and they're stunned for 3 seconds. It's ridiculous how well the lasers abuse this, aside from their wildly high damage output.

When the Moba mode comes, it seems like something like this might act as the Carry, and others would build to support.



Key points of the build:
In Fixed Cannon, take Mercurial Cannon, Thermal Cannon, Vamp Beam. In Adv. Heatsink, take Molten Exhaust Cannon and Combuster. You can hold down all four laser keys to fire them together.
From there, pick up every significant +damage, +cooldown and the +40% heat to lasers improvement that you can. Include the A.T.S. in Adv. Weapons Bay, and Solitaire in Arsenal Veterancy. Pretty simple, but very mean.
Everything else is pretty much up to you.

I did something quite similiar but without the vamp beam and this might seem odd but without a heat sink. You don't really need a heatsink because of your thermal cannon I found out so I decided to get the thermal shield and the weaponized exhaust.

You can also make the build fire insanely fast if you use the swift soul thread and the tactical weapons booster. This in combination with the sight macro which gives a 10% damage boost and can be used every 12,75 seconds with the amplifier thread gives you plenty of extra firepower.

Once you get going you can overheat stygil in 1 second or less.

But I have to agree the A5F Hadrian is probably one of the best ships in the game.

I'm glad everyone's seeing the depth in this game now (which IS insane, btw).

What you'll realize is that the AI is very bad at MinMaxing, which allows you to play at difficulties which gives the AI tons of advantages, without losing.

Take another build I had. Its survivability centers solely around the Contiunuity veterancy and a LOT of regen and healing... and its DPS hinges on forked path and Triple ATS (causing enemies to receive 100% extra damage). Dual Heavy cannon does the rest.
Forked path creates copies that have less HP and deal less damage. But their healing is unaffected, and they all have continuity, so equipping these abilities and focusing the build around them exploits the potential of the forked path catalyst to the MAX.

I also have an F5 Mercury build built solely around disabling ships. You can see me fly it in the Video of Team Forum Spammers taking down Multiplayer, on youtube.

I have tons of other neat little Niche builds, all of them focusing around a little quirk or two that make them extremely powerful... but also giving them a weakness or two, who knows. 

Triple A.T.S. sounds amazing! That's an awesome idea. And yeah, I don't use a heat sink either, now that I think of it, Murky. Most Adv Heatsink items add to overheat capacity, which I feel is most important for it anyway.

I do worry about ships this powerful though. It hits a point where I'm not sure I can come up with anything else that feels nearly as competitive. I'm sure there are counters to it, but geez!

I've been trying to make the F5R Odin work, for example, but it's rough. My best shutdown builds and damage builds each seem to pale in comparison. The ability to dodge is fantastic, yeah, but otherwise the difference is just huge. Could still be missing something for sure, though.

Its mostly kept in check by the fact that this setup is quite easy to overheat. As a closed system it can go on forever without any problem but throw in any extra heat and you can easily overheat yourself.

Seeing that we're posting builds in general in this thread another very effective build I've found is using the A5 Strata Gunship as a rocket flinging fortress.

Combined with turtle shielding and steadfast shielding and thermal shield regen modules you become quite hard too kill already.

Then using Siphoning warheads to make you heal 15% of the damage you deal with rockets you can become even more sturdy. From that point on you can easily survive on the pool difficulty while remaining stationary. You can also use both thermal and charged warheads to stunlock enemies to oblivion, if you team-up and use two of these turtles you can easily stunlock most enemies.

I also tried making a build based around using the smart gatling gun in combination with shield scrambler. But I didn't find a ship that I liked using it with.

The rest isn't as vital to the build and can be personalized as suits you. But in general you want to keep to the theme of spamming missiles and increasing survivability.

Murky42 wrote:I also tried making a build based around using the smart gatling gun in combination with shield scrambler. But I didn't find a ship that I liked using it with.

I'd tell you a good one, but I gotta keep ahead of the game, ya know? Right now, half of it's customization, the other half piloting. You need both to be good, because of the amount of options you have.

I have a Gatling Scrambler build. Mhm. But it's not the DPS ability of that build, oh no.

Well the point of that kind of build obviously isn't DPS its just reaching the point where they can no longer regen their shields effectively and then striking. Or even better if they have low shield regen simply strafing around them while they slowly die. Problem is most ships have enough regen to survive that and then you need to start dealing extra damage. Because you need to keep the gemini beacons to keep firing you can't really use them which leaves most suitable ships with relatively low firepower.

Seeing that its a build only really suitable for 1v1 AKA gladiator mode it starts to lose appeal. Especially seeing that in gladiator its a thousand times easier and more effective as well to just blast the everloving crap out of your foe using the A5F Hadrian or bombarding them with rockets in a strata gunship. Because of that I couldn't really think of an effective build. I'm afraid that playing the entire game using the arsenal class has left me addicted to firepower.

Anyway I can't play online anyway due to my shoddy internet connection. So don't leave me hanging and show me what you came up with in a PM because you have made me curious.