dmg retaliation: Vengeance targets the unit recieving the most damage (as i was made to believe) just like how reverie and detonate pick caps when available etc.
Now when your assaulting a star-base head on with desciples , a halcyon and rapture its actually going to go down fast if your going retaliate 130%/200% of the damage its inflicting on your specific ships.
Its always safe to rush a starbase without upgrades with this strategy..they go boom within seconds.
Souns interesting, but are you sure this actually works well? The starbase can be attacking 4/5 of your ships per bank and can likely bring 2 banks to bear on your fleet. You can only cast Vengeance on one ship due to the long cooldown. So you are reflecting only something like 10-12.5% of the damage the starbase is throwing at you.
Also since vengeance damage goes through armor/shield mitigation, even at 200% reflection a starbase is only likely to actually suffer about 47% of the damage it deals(assuming 65% shield mitigation & 8 armor). Which means Vengeance will only cause the Starbase to suffer about 4.7-5.9% of the damage the starbase is dealing to your fleet.
Put another way, if the starbase has weapons 2 upgrade(best case scenario for damage reflected) it can probably be expected to have something like 120 DPS per bank. Assuming the ship you cast 200% vengeance on has something like 50% shield mitigation & 2 armor, the actual damage the starbase will deal to it's self per second is 54 DPS(after the starbase's mitigation about 12.69 DPS). That doesn't sound like much of a solution to dealing with hard targets like starbases to me, especially being that the starbase with be dealing about 20x as much damage to your fleet the whole time.
Moreover, maxing Vengeance would require not putting points in vertigo or Concentration Aura, both of which seem to be far more broadly useful to me.
If I'm missing something, by all means point it out, but it feels to me like even just looking at the Rapture's abilities Concentration Aura would be better for attacking a starbase then Vengeance(that same 54 DPS can be obtained from max rank concentration aura with about 10 squads of bombers and could be used from outside the starbase's weapons range).