The biggest buff Carronade could get is fixing the talent tree and balancing the relative importance of speed in the game. Speed is absolutely critical for survivability, and since Carronade shares a tree with Overboost, Nitro, and global speed/agility perks players have to choose between survivability and powering up the Carronade. There are an insane number of Carronade talents, too: a whopping 17. Of these, two levels require you to choose between two different Carronade talents and nine levels require you to make choose between Carronade and Overboost, Nitro, or speed/agility. No other crew tree has decisions anywhere close to this difficult.
This makes the Carronade very difficult to justify leveling up. More broadly, there is a problem with global perks (e.g. all ships gain x) being concentrated on certain trees. This results in weapons from those skill trees being less used. Among the items close in number of trainings are Grenade (16), Flare (14), Rocket (13), Repair Box (12), Standard Shield (12, 7 of which benefit Big Shield too), and Mine (11). Their trainings never compete against themselves - Isak level 5 and 9 don't really count because they're the difference between straight grenade damage and grenade damage percentage, the latter of which become clearly more powerful talents after Grenade base damage exceeds 200.
Crucially, and in contrast with Carronade, you don't often have to choose between these items' talents and critically important talents. Examples of tough decisions include Burnice 26 (Flare 5% damage vs. global 5% agility), Isak 24 (5% turret vs. +1 grenade range), Feelix 27 (global 75 health vs. -10% Repair Bolt cooldown), Feelix 16 (global 3% health vs. repair bolt remove frost), Feelix 9 (+50 global health vs. 5% healing), Feelix 6 (+50 global health vs. -10 Duct Tape cooldown vs. +1 Repair Box range), Feelix 3 (+50 global health vs. 1-% Repair Pulse). These decisions matter, but not in the way Overboost, Nitro, and speed/agility matter.
Notably, Bhurt only has two global skills (both +50 HP all ships) and Mortimer, Sinklair, and Dr. Buzzkill have none whatsoever (the point damage boosts on Buzzkill's tree being a slight exception to this). It's not a coincidence that a lot of the most highly used and powerful weapons (Sniper Cannon, Flare Cannon, Explosive Cannon, Railgun, Mine, Big Torpedo, Ballpark Mortar, Big Berta) come from skill trees of crew members where specific weapon vs. global choices don't have to be made. It would significantly buff the weapons on Isak, Swift, and Burnice's skill trees if some of these global perks were reassigned to different crew members.
I was actually planning on posting this as a separate topic, and will do so shortly, but since it affects the Carronade very heavily, I'm writing it here, too.
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