The Art of Balancing Power Priorities - a PVP Guide
13 Oct 2020Geralt DeWitt
Hey Ed, how is it going?You want to learn something about power priorities? Especially for a fight against another commander? Let me tell you what you need to know...
Prio 1 – Power <40% - the essentials while weapons are deployed:
Here you need to know, that your power plant output reduces to 40%, whenever your power plant has a malfunction or is completely destroyed. When this happens, you know you’re in big trouble. All modules, which fit into this <40% interval, will still work in this (worst) case. You have to decide, what you need:
- Thrusters, Sensors and the power distributor are a must have and will give you the chance to evade, boost and fight back.
- Defensive Utilities like chaff and heat sinks will help you to mitigate incoming damage.
- Some of your weapons to fight back. Your enemy might get greedy and will be taken by suprise.
So Eddy, from here on, we will set the prios from 5 to 2.
Prio 5 – Power >100% - one module you don’t need
To aim for a power usage of over 100% sounds weird first, but this will provide an advantage, but more to that later. Here you need to set at least ONE module, that can get offline while a fight, but would exceed your power, when you switch it to prio 4:
- cargo hatch. You can collect the remains of your enemies later
- or FSD interdictor, guardian FSD booster, fuel scoop, ...
Prio 4 – <100% - shield boosters
Remember our power usage of >100%. Here comes to clue. We set our shield boosters to prio 4. In some cases, you want your shields back asap. Deactivating every single booster costs time, which can be reduced by just switching our one prio 5 module to 4. Now all prio 4 boosters will shut down with one click. When your shield is back, you can reactivate your boosters with all their resistances by switching your previous prio 5 module back from prio 4 to 5.
Prio 3 – Everything else
Prio 1 are our essentials while fighting. Prio 4 and 5 will be used for our fast shield recharge trick. For a start everything else can be set to prio 3 in this step.
Prio 2 – Power <40% - the non agressive essentials while weapons are retracted
Let us first keep the scenario into our mind, that our power plant is at 0% integrity and our power output reduces to 40%. Our prio 1 modules still work and we can fight back, but maybe high or low wake out of the situation is not the worst idea. So we will retract our weapons and the power used for prio 1 weapons becomes free, so we can switch some prio 3 modules to prio 2 until we hit the 40% power threshold. Proposed modules are:
- FSD, which comes online quickly and may save us from seeing the rebuy screen.
- Life support, to make the travel back to a starport for repairs as comfortable as possible. You can set life support also to prio 1, if you feel more comfortable with it, but with a D module you have 7,5min before you run out of air, so I would recommend to set it to prio 2 or even higher.
- Your shields, if you have enough power and the time to recover it.
- Defensive Utilities like chaff and heat sinks which did not fit into your prio 1 category.
You want some examples, kid, where I set my power prios regarding this guide? Here we go:
Prisma FDL
bi-weave FDL
Now fly out into the black and show the other commanders, what you have learned.
See you space...