Thanks for the quick update!
Slight nerfs to stun charge and beacon are appreciated, buffs to rocket and shield are neat and welcome too.
Thank you for the protector/shield interaction bugfix, it's great.
Materializer
I'd like to give furhter feedback on the materializer after playing with the newly megabuffed long version yesterday: It's still terrible. In theory, there's now a reason to use all three, trading strength for a lower cooldown. In practice, it doesn't work. But it is a step in the right direction.
While the cooldown difference is significant, it is imo not enough. 80s (strong) cooldown is barely enough to prevent a double resurection in a fight, but the long materializer is unable to use its much lower (45s) cooldown because of how insanely dangerous it is to use. You typically have to wait until the fight has moved a bit (~15s) so you can start resurecting discretely and safely, and that time is lost for the person you are trying to resurect. By the time you waited and resurected someone, 30s+ have passed, and the fate of said fight is pretty much sealed already. You won't be using a 2nd materializer in the same fight either way, so equipping the strong variant is better in every way.
The strong variant is also much simpler to use, since it is shorter than a damage inverter (screw this combo with 0 counterplay, honestly, it's unhealthy). Especially on sable, there's no real way to prevent it from resurecting someone.
What I'd really like to see is the amount of health given to the materialized person change depending on the strength of the mat used too. Strong materializers could use the old 25% health system where you could spawn kill the newly resurected person if the engineer recklessly resurrects someone in the middle of a fight. Normal and longs could give more health.
If this isn't possible, maybe a further slight cooldown increase on the strong variant is needed, as as decreasing the long version's uptime would ruin its identity.
Something like:
Strong : (8s mat) 80s cd -> 100s cd
Normal : (11s mat) 60s cd -> 60s cd
Long : (16s mat) 45s cd -> 30s cd
Would make using the strong and easy variant have a significant cooldown cost, and reward sucessfully pulling off a long mat with next to 0 cooldown.
Pure damage items
Since you are reworking ancient items base stats, I'd like to remind that offence only items are almost always used exclusively in their "strong" versions, never the agile ones.
For pure damage items, the only thing that matters is maximizing "how much dps does this give", and "how much burst can my ship output at once". Because the game has been balanced so that all ancient variants have the same DPS, the only thing changed by the choice of ancient variant is the burst damage, and strong is always strictly better.
This affects : Blaster, Rockets, Thermoblasts, Sniper blasters, Orbital strikes, Attack charges, sticky bombs and Long minelayers
It's even worse for the regular blaster, where the strong variant allows weaving other items during the cooldown at no dps loss, making it far superior to the other two options.
I'd like to see more in depth changes. Rapid snipers having more range, rapid blasters having a better crit rate,
strong orbital strikes taking more time to detonate, rapid bombs having 100% minimum damage... These are just ideas, but could really shake up a stale ship building meta.
At least, it'd be nice to see the damage of agile variants slightly buffed (10% would suffice) to give incentive to build differently than full strong everywhere.
