Ships & Modules

Unmodified sig will just make people yell more. I should always have tradeoffs for something that has become as OP as passive shield tanking, and making people unable to impact the damage reduction amount is a bad thing in a game that is supposed to be about choices.

That is a good idea.

Wouldn't it make more sense to look into it and consider how it'll change things BEFORE rolling out the changes? If theres a chance of it cocking something up, better to hold off and have a bit of a think about it rather than rushing ahead then having to go back and re-fix something in 12 months time.

I will happily say that dreads shouldn't be able to hit small stuff as well, which is something that I *have* been saying for some time now. The best counter to someone jumping a fleet of subcaps into my home wormhole should not be a bunch of webbing lokis and dreads.

A sig radius bump while in siege/triage wouldn't be a nerf at all from the the current mechanics, it would mostly preserve the status quo among the capitals. The nerf would be restricted to a dread's ability to alpha subcaps off the field, which is nothing but a good thing. It would also require subcap support for using dreads in PVE, which is also a very good thing.

you can't paint things in siege

Using modified sig radius is just forcing you into more and more changes you don't want to make: simply do it based on unmodified, slap an appropriate rate damage diminishes, and call it a day, leaving balancing shield tanks and MWDS for another day

I don't think you understood my earlier points, and the math backs me up: using modified means you blap armor battleships and dictors. I couldn't care less if shields affected it because it's a relatively minor difference. You need to actually do the math and realize it's not shields that matter, it's target painters (and in the case of dictors, MWDs). Using modified sig because it balances shields is a dumb way to balance shields, and causes significant problems for the small amounts of nerfing shields you get.

First of all, please don't use unmodified sig. There are penalties to sig in the game for a reason, even if it isn't as big a penalty as it possibly should be. There still should be some effect to it. Also keep in mind that with squared-over-squared damage scaling (like it is proposed at the moment) the effect would be bigger than in all other cases. Yes, it's still kind of a niche as far as penalties go, but it should still be a penalty nonetheless.

As for the potential/feared Dreads-not-hitting-caps problem:
Has anyone considered adding a role "bonus" to titans increasing the sig res of their guns by say 50%? 100%? This would be a pretty easy adjustment to make I assume?
I would still keep the now proposed changes, but dial them back a little. This would allow for at least some differentiation between dreads and titans. With an additional small sig bump to carriers/dreads themselves the loopholes of dreads not hitting caps should be closed, but titans still wouldn't blap anything subcap.

and the balance is restored again +1

Just bump the sig radii of all capitals up. Easy solution to the problem of sig-tanking caps.

I hate hate hate hate HATE the idea of damage scaling (seriously I can't overstate how much of a turnoff it is), but as long as this is a temporary fix I guess doing ~*something*~ is better than leaving the situation as-is for a few more months.

In the long term though, consider doing the whole "multiple flavors of XL gun" thing-- some that do low damage with lower sigs and better tracking, some that do massive damage with **** sig / tracking. Let dreads and titans fit for a particular role (doing the DPS of a couple of BS to subcaps or doing capital-level DPS to other caps / structures).

e: re: diversifying capital guns-- I really don't see why this hasn't been done already. Most other turret sizes have multiple gun types available (for example, medium ACs come in dual-180mm, 220mm, and 425mm flavors) that vary in damage output and tracking capabilities. Why not give dread / titan pilots a similar set of fitting options? Obviously the differences between flavors would have to be much greater than the differences between medium ACs, but it fits the general pattern that's already been established for smaller guns.

As far as I see there is only one dread that really hits things up-close and personal - Moros. I fly a perfect tracking-wise Revelation with 2 tracking computers and 2 tracking enhancer + a middle booster for tracking, and I pretty much fail to hit anything closer than 15 km until it's webbed to hell (~25-15 m/sec) and painted with 4-6 painters so it's signature rockets through 1000m. And even when I can hit something solidly only after 20-25 km when angular velocity can really drop to low values. It's required to bring at least 6-8 friends along to really make the difference.

And why is it bad that if someone brings 10 ships with webs and painters is it bad for dreadnoughts to hit the target? Right now it is possible because signature is not affecting damage formula much. If it would do that like tracking does, them hitting even painted (with 6 reaper level 5 painters) and webbed to hell Loki would be a pain cause it's signature would go only up-to 450 m, that means dread can deliver only 45% of it's potential damage if scale is linear and much less if it's exponential. And if that ship gets close on low orbit - dread will have hard time hitting because of tracking.

As PvE wise for WH - the only real broken thing is the wall sleeper hunting that allows people to do it solo. There was an idea from fanfest to add a sleeper dread or something like that to counter it - that would be the way to go, make sites more chalanging. Not nerfing dreads to oblivion, because there is a difference in how you live. That's one thing to live in numbers like 200 people in one system when you sweep in 40 T3 and clear the sites like hurricane anytime and other is when you live in small numbers and you really have to wait for people half the evening to start something going (I personally despise the wall sleeper blaping, and where we live it's out of the question and we hope it gets changed so one day sleepers get to those dreads on the wall and nuke them flat).