How have these changes made it less effective? If anything, Railgun has become more effective. The average damage has increased. Critical damage is more then half the health of a medium hull and ignores protection modules. LCR can reliably one-shot heavy hulls with DD.

I don't disagree. I really hope Railgun is nerfed soon, because it is completely absurd in its current state.

You are disappointed with the fact that augments have been added, but you want them to continue to be problematic.

Irrelevant (although I'm sure there are some free players who received it after opening only a few containers). The point is that there is no direct purchase of the item taking place, the item is not exclusively available for real money, and players are not given ownership of the item, only a license to use it.

After you buy a car, you own the car. After you buy a digital item, you don't own that item. You instead buy a license to use it. And you didn't "buy" that augment. You bought a container from which you unboxed that augment. Someone else could have received that augment from a container they got for free.

Not sure why something should remain unchanged just because people spent money on it.

Why should you be able to control stun? It's an incredibly powerful status effect that should have never been added in the first place.

You are joking me . . . Stun Rounds for Railgun did more damage than stock AND inflicted OP status effect on top of that . . . you see nothing wrong with that?

Longer reload time doesn't stop those augments from being OP.

Yeah it will get a nerf after like 6 months once the devs have "collected data" that shows that it is indeed OP, even though that was obvious from the values from the start.

The module is hard to obtain, and players who decide to use it will have to sacrifice another module.

You simply may not have noticed it, since critical damage for Hammer and Ricochet is the same as normal damage; the difference is that it ignores protection modules. The developers want to add status effect augments for more turrets - not just change EMP Salvo or Railgun augments. Critical damage is a way of addressing the protection module problem (multiple 50% protection modules effectively make a turret useless) - each turret now has a chance to ignore protection modules on a given shot. I suppose this is a matter of personal opinion, but I believe that discrete damage is clearer and more predictable than continuous damage spreads. Critical damage is a way of retaining some of the variability of damage spreads without abandoning the discrete damage mechanic.

Yes, Smoky will have a unique mechanism - the one it already has, involving variable critical chance. For Mk7+ yes the average crit rate will be around 20%. For lower modifications I'll have to do some calculations to work it out, but I estimate that it will be significantly lower. Other turrets will have a fixed critical chance - 10% chance of a critical on every shot, and thus 10% average chance.

Smoky's critical chance varies with each shot. It starts out negative, and then increases with every hit until it reaches its maximum value. So for example with Mk7+ Smoky, the first shot has a -50% chance (effectively 0%) to score a critical, the second -10%, third 40%, and then the fourth and all subsequent shots have a 50% chance. That's what the "maximum critical chance" refers to. Once a critical hit is scored, the chance goes back down to -50%. The average critical rate takes into account the varying critical chances for each shot and refers to how often on average Smoky will score a critical. After the update, Smoky Mk7+ will still have a maximum chance of 50% as it does now. It will remain unchanged. However, lower Mks will have their maximum critical chance decreased. As a result, they will score fewer critical hits on average.

Incendiary can be negated by HI even now . . . so what would change?

Nothing will change for Mk7+ Smoky. The patch notes say that the maximum critical chance will be 50%, which is exactly the same as it is now. Maximum critical chance and average critical chance are different. You are referring to average critical chance (aka critical rate). Lower modifications of Smoky will have a reduced average critical rate because their maximum critical chance has been reduced.

That 20% figure is the average critical hit rate. The actual critical chance for a given shot varies, and is capped at 50%.

What? You will deal 1600 damage approximately every other shot. And it will ignore protection modules. This is a massive buff to Railgun.

This Railgun favoritism is infuriating. All other turrets get critical damage that is equal to standard damage, with a low critical hit rate, but Railgun gets an incredible damage boost and very high crit rate. Expect Railgun Hornet to be the most common combo for a few weeks (months?) until it is nerfed way later than it should have been.

Test server values are massively inflated. Actual critical damage will probably be similar to standard damage - it will just ignore protection modules. So if a target has no protection modules, the overall damage dealt will be more or less the same regardless of whether a shot is a critical or not.

I mean . . . critical hits won't offer any extra damage if your opponent doesn't have a protection module against your turret. And double armour, Titan's dome, Defender, etc will still offer protection. I'd say it's far from leaving a kill up to chance. Smoky's critical hit offers unconditional extra damage, so it's not really the same.

I'm really looking forwards to critical damage.

The massive damage values on the test server are just there for testing - to make it obvious that a hit was a critical hit. I predict that the actual critical damage will be the same as standard damage or within the current damage ranges for turrets. Every turret will now simply have a chance to ignore protection modules on a given shot. As stated in the v-log, average damage output will remain the same as before.

Test server values are just there for testing. If it were a joke, why would the developers go through the effort of actually creating a whole new system?