Making defense and frost viable

So there's talk about buffing defense, so let's do that. Let's make the defense perks better and give ships more base defense. Maybe we can even give shields base defense. Max defense right now is 100 but even 100 doesn't do much at NM league. There's no need for there to be a cap, instead we should think of ways for low damage weapons to deal with higher defense stats.

Carronade has very low base damage and is powerful because of its large amount of projectiles. One way the carronade can adapt to a defense buff is to replace some of the carronade damage talents for armor penetration (by % so high armor is still strong but not impervious to it).

Fire will retain its armor penetration properties, so there's no problem there.

How can frost come into the picture? What if hitting a frosted target penetrates all defense and still breaks the frost. This way shooting frosted targets will still deal more damage and be worth breaking the frost, but will also give a little more of an oomph to frost torp, especially if defense is buffed.

Spoiler: Crazy Idea #1

I also thought what if torpedoes were able to crit? Hear me out with this one. When a torpedo directly hits its target (not the splash) there is a 10% chance they take an extra 30% damage over 7 seconds as "flood damage". This chance is doubled if the target is frosted. Talents can increase this to 25% (50% frosted). If OP the splash damage could be reduced a bit to compensate.

Edit: Flooding should not stack. The strongest flooding will remove the weaker one.

Generally high damaging weapons should still be able to fair against high defense opponents, while lower damage alternatives such as the std cannon and a sniper that didn't crit would struggle a bit (these weapons could use some more weaknesses, tbh, so this is good).

Spoiler: Crazy Idea #2

What if all crits penetrate defense?

- The Saviours

 

Snipers crit often, if defense is painful. Also torps would get too op, if such a damage increase is added. Everything else is fine.

 

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, the torp idea was a bit out there, but I definitely am pushing mostly for the new frost mechanic and defense buff.