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So the big balance patch arrived and on the whole it's reasonably good. In advance wasn't too impressed with some of the proposed changes to weapon damage modules (ballistic controls, gyrostabilizers, heatsinks, etc.) because I have spent a lot of skill points getting the relevant weapons skills to Expert 5 in order to maximise the active time - which was being significantly nerfed in terms of the activation bonus and a much larger cooldown period. Netease promised to counter this with better 'inactive' stats, but I still felt that that would punish those who had actually specialised into the relevant skills.

Anyway, have started testing various fits and today want to highlight my Sniper PVE ratting fit for T10 Anoms. This is (almost) a 100% glass cannon fit which utilises 6 Ballistic Control units. This gives the ship 2,900 cold DPS, which is higher than the pre-patch cold damage - but not that significantly (about 300 DPS).

Pre-patch when I cycled my ballistics I could maintain around 3,900 DPS for most of the Anom. That figure has now dropped to 3,700 with two hot ballistics. By cycling two at a time it is actually possible to sustain that level of DPS for the vast majority of a T10 Anom (despite the long cool down timer).

That is technically slightly lower than I was achieving before the balance patch, but in reality I am clearing the T10's slightly faster (averaging around 16/17 mins compared to 20ish minutes previously). This may be because some of the changes to ship speeds and missiles have helped boost the application of missile damage.

In any case, my conclusion is that the balance patch has not significantly damaged ratting income indeed the faster clear times plus the new Concord 'bonus' bounty awards have improved income - for me anyway.