Phoenix

Is the Phoenix good at the moment? Did the HP buff suit the unit or did it hurt its "personality"?

What would it be like if the increase in HP was exchanged for a larger bombed area? How about 40% for example?

Sure, the damage it does to a tightly packed enemy is pretty good (attacks on a realistic AFK army spread seem to do around 1000-1500 damage). It's just so bad at actually killing anything.

A single Phoenix can basically only kill Fleas (yep, a group of Glaives on the move will survive and be healthy again ten seconds later) and in practice you aren't going to get enough of them to kill anything with over 1000 hp.

It's biggest issue is that it's countered via a single quick command. It would probably be a lot better in a game where it wasn't very easy to tell your units to scatter. Against an aware opponent? You're going to do very little damage (some of which will get repaired).
It's second biggest issue is that it only works effectively against small early game units. In a lobsterpot small units don't survive very long any way and in a 1v1 you've got better things to make by the time you've got the metal for a second factory: For instance, Ravens will make cost in one or two attack runs and a Thunderbird can kill armies whereas even in the ideal situation (a bunch of fairly clustered Slings left attacking some porc) it will take two runs for a Phoenix to make cost (or so my recent checks indicate).

I think Phoenix should cost a lot less. Certainly less than Raven and probably around 250 metal.

Phoenix does have awful scaling though, as most of its damage on singular unit will most likely be from the 10 second burn time (150 damage). The bombs themselves have so low damage and AoE and are so spread out that they are mostly just to tag units to ignite them.

3 Phoenixes can barely kill 3 reavers from a huge stack of reavers, which is better than trying to do same with 3 ravens as most of them will be nearly dead or at least half dead after the initial bombings.

Still, if we are looking for Phoenix reworks, here is some ideas:

Idea 1:Make it scale better. decrease the burn time and move the dame from it to the actual bombs.
However, for this to actually work, there needs to be either of the following changes as well:
1.Increase the AoE of the bomb explosions to ensure that they actually hit multiple enough units to make the 450 damage or so payload do more damage to groups of enemies compared to just using Ravens to bomb the target.
2.Increase the total damage of the bombing, but make the bombs spread so much more that trying to bomb singular units would waste most of the damage. Basically the Tremor treatment. Would have a high risk of turning into better Raven/Likho against all late game unit balls.


Idea 2: Make it scale less (my preferred). Most of the damage is moven to the afterburn instead. As a result, a Phoenix hitting and igniting raiders like Bandit would ensure it would burn down eventually, while being mostly harmless against tougher units.
The bad side is that bringing multiple phoenix would only help you if it lets you tag more units to burn them, though it would still be useful to have one coming and going to ignite stacks of units before the fire goes out to keep them burning.

Phoenix is doing good, in team games it solves the problem of airfac having nothing to do early game except spam Swift and snipe comms/factories. Torching a blob of raiders or skirms is impactful air play.

The potential problem with higher flying aircraft is that you might need to zoom out way more than usual just to see them. I agree that planes could use being more different from gunships though.

Isn't it annoying to have your units randomly miss aircraft?

Look at what is on the ground and think about whether they will kill the Raven before it hits. The same happens with AA against all units or raiders against defenses. How is this significantly different from any other type of hit and run attack?

quote: The unit looks and feels so awful, and before dive was implemented it was the most mechanically graceful unit in Zero-k.

I disagree, and you are talking about a completely different unit since the game has changed so much. Was no-dive Raven ever technically in ZK? There were essentially two versions of Raven 10+ years ago:

• Prior to this version was the current Raven that simply did not dive. It could be dodged by walking in a circle, unless the player using the Raven manually landed it on the enemy unit, essentially doing what dive automates.
• Prior to that was more standard bomb-dropping Raven. It could be dodged by moving so had to be manually targeted at comms (probably, my memory is a bit hazy). It also failed to fire if it did not have a long enough period of uninterrupted flight leading up to the target. Imagine a Pheonix with a single bomb that has to hit.

Insta hit enemies shred ravens in deep dive. Felons shred them. Venoms area stun them, units with slow just laugh at ravens who is slowed trying to reach target and cant and then is killed. Especially bolas is good at such trolling.
And still most annoying aa thing (after artemis of course) is little humble farady who alone with one nearby stardust can stop entire mass ravens trying to get Firepluk silo or com.
However i wil be fair and notice that hover aa flail is shit almost again every aircrat in game. Missile dmg is pretty large but dis eterenity long launching time is awful thing. Nothing like crashers.