EVE General Discussion

I was thinking about the idea of the rebalancing of the (useless) defender missiles. The only ships that use them are the rats. How about buffing them a little bit and give them some new properties that make them useful. Imagine a fleet warps in and "deploys" a drake itted with defender missiles. The defender missiles kill at least some of the incoming missiles and protects his fleet of some of the incoming damage. The defender missiles should also be able to shoot missiles agressing his fleet / corpmates.

Greetings Ice

Well a purpose fit ship, with only 1 task ( to shoot as many missiles out of the sky ) is not such a bad idea.
Coding for it is not that hard either, the server is constantly aware what is out there, where it is going and who it came from.

Sexual Transmitted Diseases?
I hope not.

A very simple and easy fix would be to introduce specialized "Defender launchers" with very easy fitting requirements and the added benefit that they would not count as weapons, and thus could be placed in utility highslots without sacrifing firepower.

A further issue would be: Even if they could do it, would it be a good idea?

Do missiles need another nerf in PvP?

This would turn Faction ships into monsters. 2 high slots pumping out defender missiles and your hard points pumping out DPS.

No caldari/drake pilot would ever go anywhere near them

Don't FoF missiles have a nasty habit of hitting your friends in the process?

They wanted to propose a new destroyer.

Slap some defender missiles on the new caldari destroyer, some anti-projectile, anti-hybrid, anti-lasers on the min, gall, amarr versions, respectively.

Reduce incoming shots from each source by one (8 turrets effectively becomes 7, or y'know...maybe more? I'm not a dev!). Larger the fleet they go against, the stronger these dinky little ships become.

Or y'know..just get rid of 'em.

Buffing them without adding other anti-weapon weapons would just be a missile nerf.

Sometimes I dream EVE used honor harrington battle rules and we had XO racks, huge swarms of missiles, a powerful wedge on your ship so you'd rotate to intercept the brunt of enemy fire and command datalink to combine an entire fleets missile defense into one unit. Good times.

CCP has officially labeled the defender missiles as a PiTA and have been pushing it around on their plate like a small kid that doesn't want to eat his broccoli.

The problem is in the way missiles work. And they work that way to minimize the lag they create, which has seen many iterations over the years, and never kept the defender missiles in mind.

Though with the fact many people group their missiles these days, Defenders might actually perform a bit better.

I'd love to see it made a bit more useful, maybe take defenders out of normal launchers and giving it it own launcher with different sizes (and adding a phalanx and laser turret missile defense for non launchers). Basically they should offer a DPS reduction, not a total 'block all missiles' blanket.

Missiles would have to become a lot more useful first before any decent anti-missile systems would be even remotely balanced. Perhaps by making missiles the kings of alpha with more damages and lower ROF(so dps reduction makes a lot of sense). Maybe even making missiles only show redbox when they actually hit (so your anti-missile stuff going off while only yellow-boxed would make some alarmbells go off in your head)

Another possibility is making signature radius have more effect for turrets to determining their chance to hit, so a big battleship gun as little chance to hit even a stationary frigate, and no glancing hits nonsense, because with 1400s that's still a lot of hurt. (also putting an end to mael's easily insta-popping frigates at long range, unless it's heavily painted). Missiles that would always hit because of their 'splash' kind of damage, would with (slightly decreased) sig-related damage reduction be more favorable