First of all, I'm speaking purely about the random spawn skelly ships, NOT the skelly ship battles that appear in the corners of the map.
Long story short, last night I got absolutely annihilated almost immediately by a skelly ship while solo slooping. Bearing in mind this was one that spawned on me, I didn't make the decision to fight one. One hit to the anchor followed by an absolute obliteration of cannonballs made it impossible for me to do anything in retaliation. Now, please don't take this as a salty 'I got sunk so clearly it's too difficult' post, however I do think with the expanded ship damage, that a skeleton ship vs sloop is extremely difficult now, easily more difficult than a Kraken or Meg.
I really enjoyed the skeleton ships before the update, to the point where I'd go out of my way just to fight one. They were challenging enough to be fun but not so hard that they became frustrating. Now, I avoid them at all costs. However my suggestion isn't technically to change anything about the skeleton ships, but other ways to make it slightly less difficult for sloopers such as myself.
Skeleton sloops are a thing now. Perhaps, instead of skelly galleons spawning on player sloops, a skelly sloop pops up instead. I haven't fought any since the update but I imagine they'll be a good challenge considering the new ship damage, but certainly doable, and a hell of a lot easier than fighting a galleon on your own.
Sloopers still have the option to take on skelly galleons from the ones that randomly sail about for an extra hard challenge, but the ones that actually spawn on you will be sloops, making them a much more fair fight.
Now, I don't want to see any "SoLo SlOoP iS hArD mOdE". I'm aware of that. I embrace that. But Rare have already scaled the difficulty for the Kraken and Megalodon encounters, obviously to make them beatable by sloops, so why wouldn't they do the same for Skelly Ships?
