Repair hammers as they are right now are undeniably garbage in literally all regards.
They cost nearly twice as much as shipwrights and take ages to repair any lategame ketch.
Why would ANYBODY uses these things? They’re expensive and agonizingly slow.
Instead I think hammers should repair a percentage of the ship’s maximum hull with cost to match the amount being repaired.
For example: A regular repair hammer could repair 2.5% of a ship’s hull per hit with a minimum of 25 and a bronze repair hammer could repair 5% of a ship’s hull per hit with a minimum of 50 so it NEVER takes more than 20 repairs to fix a ship with a bronze hammer unless its being damaged while you’re repairing it.
A 200 hp rowboat would still be fixed in 4 hits from a bronze repair hammer healing it 50 hp each go since 5% of its max hp falls below the minimum of 50 and would only cost 6 galleons per repair while a 5000 hp ketch would heal 250 per swing and cost 30 galleons per repair to match the amount being repaired.
It’d still be expensive as hell and non-viable in most situations, but it’d atleast feel like an option for higher hp ships to use, even if it would rapidly drain all of your money.
It’s supposed to be used as an emergency support tool, not as your main way of repairing your ship. It’s a way of getting your ship to a sustainable amount of health out in the open seas, at a higher cost than repairing it at a shipwright. The idea for it healing a percentage of your ship’s hp would make repair hammers utterly useless early game and overpowered for even bigger ships coming in the future (imagine you have a 30k hp galleon later on, that means you’re healing 750hp per second with the most basic repair hammer)
this makes total sense, the only thing that could be a problem is being able to do that a bunch mid-fight causing a lot of annoyance if the other ship has a bunch of health. To fix that problem you could potentially make them a bit slower and have a cooldown if you’re in combat. Another solution you could use is giving them a cap, that gets better for each hammer (I.E. normal repair hammer can give a max of 250-500 at once and bronze could give a max of 500-750).
Because people already use it in combat. Especially when you have someone else with you, they may step off the cannons and repair your ship as a last resort. If it was percentage based repairs, ships would be repaired almost as fast as NPC ship auto-heal
personally i prefer hammers being slow but as cost effective as shipwrights
but that suggestion is definitely better than what we got currently, cuz 12k base hp sure is extreme when you can only repair 50 per second with the current best hammer
Only problem I see is that if they don’t work in combat or they work too well defensive ships will just be sitting ducks or combat will just be boring respectively.
Main problem i see with this is release of dark see, it is ment to be hard endgame content. Havin ability to rapair your ship from 0 to 100 in 20 s might be overkill. Besaids keeping your ship healthy in bronze see in not that hard with loost cargo and aboundence of shipwrights, with should be main ways to heall it and hamer being last resort.
Personally I don’t agree. As others have said hammers are supposed to not be cheap, Shipwrights are what you should use, and there with be the future silver and gold hammers which will be much better.