Defender ,, gear lupe and rudder!!!!!

Call in Ludder, no call it Rube, no call it....


Flubber .... yeah. Thats what Defenders have been missing.

Flubber!

Soon we can fly all over the map like Giant Led Zeppelins of Doom

@The Grim Repair @Miika

Flying Defenders are on the next update... am I right?

 

I'm gonna say it again, both the gear lube and rudder are fantastic and do their jobs wonderfully. They're simply outmatched by the turbo and shields because they're ridiculously OP and basically mandatory. Buff all base hp and speed for all ships and nerf those items and the blue items will be balanced.

 

As much sense as it makes sense to combine Rudder and Gear Lube so that it becomes a SINGLE usable item, I've been reading threads about this and suggestions on "future updates requests" on the forums since the beginning of time and Rovio doesn't appear to want to do anything to change it. Not sure if they have ever commented on these threads about rudder and gear lube.
Rudder and Gear Lube will never become items people want to use until they find a way to improve them. Maybe in BattleBay version 3.0 they will surprise us.

 

smh nobody is listening to me lol have you ever tried a strong gear lube or rudder? Either one makes you feel so much more fluid, but the lack of a shield makes you die in like 1 shot. That says nothing to anyone?

 

As I've said in the past, no amount of buffing gear lube or rudder (2 totally useful items) will bring them into the meta when using one means you'll either die in 1 shot or move slower than a frosted defender.

 

My Defender is mk5.

 

No worries, check & edit your previous post, you touted yourself as MK6.

 

Maybe it just works for me, but i certainly don't die in 1 shot. I have freakin' 7000 HP, plus a bandage restoring 67 HP every 5 seconds.

I just got my first Legendary - Big Torp. I swivel around, do 2094 damage with torp and 1500 with crit sniper and a Quick Cannon loaded and ready to deal out 400 damage every 5 seconds. Tell me who dies faster.

I just don't get it when people will pontificate all day, completely refusing to listen to actual facts.

Believe whatever you want. I have run lots of setups and carefully logged my results. The numbers don't lie. I'm not saying everyone should do it. I'm just saying that it works for me.

jimboto

 

Ah. mistyped. mis-touted. My bad.

 

Please take the following with a small grain of salt. you could spin the math a lot of different ways than I have but. this is a bit more of the story that lead me to actually USE gear lube.

This is all based on my mk5 (not mk6 my bad) Defender which has 4 slots and 5 slot points. (I'm gonna leave off specifics of weapons and perks for brevity's sake)

Option 1 - Max out Turbos and Shields
Level 40 Rare Large Shield - 1566 HP
Level 40 Rare Small Shield - 994 HP
Level 40 Rare Turbo - 60.4%
Level 24 (or higher) Rare Turbo - 40.4% or higher
(this maxes out Defender speed at 1.38, any higher turbo/perks/training will not result in a faster ship)

Gear Score: 6929
Health: 8221
Speed: 1.38 (max)
Turret Agility: 24.2


Option 2 - Work in some lube...
Level 40 Rare Large Shield - 1566 HP
Level 40 Rare Turbo - 60.4%
Level 24 (or higher) Rare Turbo - 40.4% or higher
Level 40 Rare Gear Lube - +67%

Gear Score: 6969
Health: 7027
Speed: 1.38 (max)
Turret Agility: 38.9

So. According to Gear Score (which I am not necessarily defending the logic of, but which, in this case I agree with) The Lubed Defender has a 40 point advantage on the Turbo - Shield load out.

---------


The key, i think lies in more than just the numbers. does a ship with 8000 HP last longer than a ship with 7000 HP, and, most importantly..., does the difference in time translate into the ability to turn the tide of a game...

When I started playing Defender, I did like any good noob would and said. "Hell yes! Finally room for all the armor I own!" Only to be slapped by the cold backhand of reality as I was shocked to learn how slow the damn thing was and, even though I had a butt-load of HP, i was still swarmed and left as a burning pool of oil within seconds. This, often because my teammates would easily outpace me and leave me, like a fat, aged and, wounded Mammoth, ready to be devoured by the red and yellow wolves. As my HP drained faster than the first beer at a frat party, I would ploddingly, and hopelessly pan my turret, hoping to do even a little damage before I died.

So I said "screw that. No wonder so few players play Defender!"

The first thing I looked at was to Turbo or not to turbo, figuring, if I can only keep up with the herd, maybe they'll eat the young mammoths instead of me.

This was OK, but even maxed out, the Defender isn't outrunning anything but another Defender.

So... I tested using what was then, a relatively low level Bandage. "hey, i figured 48 HP every 5 seconds over a 5 minute game... that's 2,880 HP! I'm a freaking idiot for not realizing this sooner... Who the hell needs shields?"

Only a few problems with that theory:

As famously quoted by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy"

Point 1:
It turns out that the 1/2 to full minute of any game in a slow boat is spent either lying in wait, or moving about "strategically" That leaves say... 4 minutes of actual combat.

Point 2:
Games rarely last the full 5 minutes... Crap... how long do they last? I started timing my battles and, it turns out that most games last about 3.5 minutes.

So 3.5 minutes minus the first, not-combative minute leaves 2.5 minutes of active engagement. Total potential health re-generation 1,440... hell, that's not much better than a small shield... (If I could only find a way to get damaged earlier in the game, the damn Bandage could REALLY perform...) < that was a joke >

Point 3:
As I was testing my low level Bandage, and becoming increasingly less in love with my newest theory, I noticed a point far more infuriating than the first two. It doesn't take a long time to die in a slow boat.
While in a battle, whenever I first took damage I would start a stopwatch. My intention was to determine how much ACTUAL damage a Bandage healed during a battle. Funny thing is... I almost never got the chance to stop the stopwatch once the bandage had restored my health... because I was DEAD...
So... I started timing how long it took to die once first struck.

Now. this is the most subjective part. I certainly don't always die within seconds of first taking damage, but, in a Defender, stopping the damage usually means that you, or a teammate have killed your opponent, not that you have cleverly sped away.

I found that unless an opponent doing damage was neutralized within 30 seconds to 1 minute, my Defender was dead... That gave my Bandage time to heal between 288 and 576 points of damage. That's one hit with a standard cannon.

The moral "I" took from this story is don't be bullied, BE THE BULLY!

Feel free to read my previous post to hear the creation story of "Angus the Angry" but I found that with one Big Shield and GEAR LUBE plus, either two turbos, or one turbo and a much BETTER Bandage. I could destroy near-range targets with a significantly higher degree of efficiency and reliability than I could "Armoring up"

Works for me...

jimboto

 

TL;DR I'm not talking about just the defender. Of course, defender has enough base hp and blue slots to be able to use these items. Any other ship with less than 3 item slots will rarely be spotted using anything but a turbo and shield. Using anything else results in massive infamy drop. Fixer may be an exception to this as well since they have the ability to heal themselves to counter the lack of hp, but any other ship becomes a sitting duck or an easy target. Is it not obvious that these items are overpowered? More than 95% of players use them. I love both the gear lube and rudder, but our tiny base hp and speed stats dictate that we'll be destroyed too quickly without the top 3 items. It's time to balance the blue items so that anyone can use whichever one suits their playstyle rather than only having a few to choose from.

Think about the guys that can only equip 1 or 2 blue items. They're the ones that have it bad.

 

I took the time to thoroughly read your response. If you had read mine you might have enjoyed it, as it was intended to be humorous as well as informative.

No argument whatsoever. I find rudder to be far less effective than Gear Lube. And I readily admit that in my experience, I have found Gear Lube to be measurably advantageous in this one, very narrow, niche use case. I fully admit that it might not be useful at higher tiers of play, or with a different load out of weapons. but I have heard of 5K players using it just as I have described.

Hope that wasn't too long of a response...

 

@PastelPiku is right. With a strong gear lube you can quite easily beating speeders or a strong rudder you can easily roaming in the enemy side with speeder or dodge torpedos and mortars with other ships. They are not useless items. Only reason thar people doesn't use them because health of ships are too low without a shield and you are easy target without turbo. Enforcers and fixers has limited blue slots but other ships can put a lube or rudder to their other slots but they prefer to be more durable. I bet most of player haven't even tried of these. They aren't waste for your setup just turbo and big shield is too good for them.

 

Lol my bad, dude, I was just hella sleepy because I had just woken up and the moment I saw "Defender" I was like, nope, my argument doesn't apply to defenders with their many slots so this won't be important.

I just read it and it was actually a great post. Thanks for getting on my case about it, it was worth the read

However, I think the rudder is more misunderstood than underpowered. The thing that made me want to use a rudder on my speeder was watching P0rthos play with a rudder on his defender. I was like, woah!! The amount of things I could theoretically pull of if I could turn my ship faster is insane! No more awkwardly getting caught out in bad situations, now you can weave out of a bad situation as efficiently as you can get into one. This in turn let's you act more often without having to doubt your ability to come out alive, or even untouched. The problem is that the amount of health it can save you is usually not enough to really save you. My argument in reality is that we simply do not have enough hp to be able to give up something as good as a shield or bandage, and we are simply too slow without turbos, to be able to fully utilize such an item with such utility.

 

At the very least they'd be more used if you could put those shield perks on them. Heck, it'd be nice if they just removed the global hp perks and made the shield perks global. The defense ones, too. And remove the defense cap, it takes a lot to have max defense over a ton of hp or, in this case, firepower.

 

I know this is super late, but you really don't need gear lube AND rudder. A good rudder will both give you maneuverability and help to track those annoying yellow boats.

 

Yea, either turn your boat fast or turn your turret faster, using both is overkill (and unnecessary, nobody can get around you that quickly, and I have max agility)

 

Yeah, if anything lube is easily the most worthless item in the game. The only problem with combining them is, how would you do that? What to do with all the lubes lying around?

 

Naw man, it's a great item to combat close range fighters, especially rudder users. Their unpopularity goes hand in hand. Rudder is not popular because hp is too important. Gear lube is not popular because nobody uses rudders, + the first reason. Gear lube having those 2 reasons instead of 1 makes it seem like a worse item, when in reality they're pretty balanced with each other.

 

The biggest problem is that when you choose a rudder, you're essentially paving the road to start playing in a more close combat sort of way, something that works extremely well with a rudder. It's counter-intuitive to give up speed (turbo) so you can get into close range in the first place, or hp (shields, bandage) so you can get into these risky situations. Until you can use at least 1 of each of these 3 categories, speed, hp, and agility, using a rudder is extremely risky and hardly ever worth it. I speak from experience.