Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It has recently been revealed that CCP plans to add drone ships to the Amarr lineup rather than missile ships. I'm firmly opposed to this idea and want to present several compelling arguments for adding Khanid-style missile ships instead. This is written with the planned ship changes in mind by the way.



1. Missile ships create a logical ship progression

The current progression for Amarr missile ships is:

Rocket frigates:
??? -> Malediction, Vengeance

Rocket destroyers:
??? -> Heretic

HAM cruisers:
??? -> Sacrilege, Legion

HAM battlecruisers:
??? -> Damnation

With CCP's plan, Amarr will completely lack a T1 stepping stone to all these T2 ships. This makes no sense considering the other races do not have this type of problem. Caldari has missile and railgun ships at every tech level in every class. Gallente have drone and blaster ships at every tech level in every class. With Minmatar, the distinction is not so much in the weapon but in the type of tank, and indeed, they have shield and armor tanks at every level in every class.

You might argue that Amarr has a drone ship progression. While this is true (even though all but the Legion are EWAR ships), it's a complete ship progression with no gaps left to fill:

Drone ships:
Crucifier -> Sentinel
Arbitrator -> Curse, Pilgrim, Legion


2. Missile ships avoid redundancy

One of the problems the Amarr lineup has is that there is little variety at the tech 1 level. In other words, there are too many laser ships.

T1 frigates using lasers: Executioner, Tormentor, Punisher. The first two are very similar to each other and one of them should have been a rocket ship.

You might say: but couldn't you make it a drone ship as well for the sake of variety? Well no, because the drone ship spot is already taken by the Crucifier and having two drone ships would be excessive.

T1 cruisers using lasers: Omen, Maller. The drone ship spot is already taken by the Arbitrator. The Omen and Maller are two different approaches to the laser ship: one is a speedy kiter, the other a brawler. I would find it completely acceptable for the Maller to become a mini-Abaddon, but if the goal was to diversify the Amarr lineup as much as possible, a HAM ship would be the only logical choice.

The battlecruiser and battleship level suffer both from redundancy. A drone or missile ship would fit in nicely in either groups. However, the missile ship is the more logical choice.


3. Missile ships complement laser ships better than drone ships

Laser ships have several pros and cons. They are limited to em/thermal damage, their high cap usage is incompatible with heavy active tanking and makes them very susceptible to energy neutralizers and TD's. On the other hand they deal instant damage at good range.

Khanid ships are meant to perfectly complement lasers. They have fully selectable damage types without cap usage which allows them to mount heavy active tanks and to withstand energy neutralizers far better. They're immune to TD's. They do have delayed damage though and need to fight in web range.

Why is this important? To make sure that Amarr players have options to rat in Angel space, deal with Minmatar T2 ships, deal with a heavy neuting situation or tracking disruptor situation. Last but not least, Khanid ships fly different than laser ships, so it makes a real piloting difference as well.


Drone ships complement lasers ships too, so I can see why CCP though they would be a good idea. However they do so to a lesser degree. Let's examine some Amarr drone ship designs meant for straight up combat:

A -10% laser cap usage, +10% drone damage/hitpoints design
This one sucks like all other ships without a laser damage bonus before it. It's also the design of the drone Legion.

A 5% HAM damage, +10% drone damage/hitpoints design
This one defeats CCP's own argument about not wanting to make more T1 Amarr missile ships. At that point it should be a straight up HAM design instead.

A 5% laser damage, +10% drone damage/hitpoints design
This one could be good in combat, but doesn't complement laser ships nearly as well as Khanid designs do. It only offers partial damage selection and the cap usage makes it even less suited for active tanking than most other laser ships.

A 25% laser damage, +10% drone damage/hitpoints design with half the number of turrets
This one could be even better than the previous design, but still doesn't complement traditional laser ships as well as Khanid designs do. Also it will probably fly exactly like any other laser ship.


4. Summary

I firmly believe that adding Khanid ships to the Amarr T1 lineup will solve existing problems of redundancy and gaps in ship progression better, offer more variety and options in terms of piloting and complement the existing ships better.

Your first post makes a good and interesting point and seems reasonable. Your second post is a borderline logical fallacy :P.

the arbitrator is one of the best cruisers in the game.
the armageddon is obviously a drone boat with missing bonuses

more drone boats k thanks.

Other than the vengeance(which works as frigate engagement is usualy brawling), the other amarr missile ships suffer from the Gallente Blaster Syndrome.

Big Slow and Clumsy ships using short range missiles is one of the reasons why you never see the sacrilege being used very much compared to the Zealot.

Cruiser size and up, most ships can just kite you and stay out of your missile range while putting damage on you.

Scorch and pulse laser covers the weakness of slow armor tank. Short range missiles do not.

Drone are a much better option as they are not adversely affected by the slow mobility of the Amarr Ships.

The problem is that most missile and some drone boats are just bad.

The Legion does as much dps with Hams as the Tengu with HMs while having a fraction of the tank and a quarter of the range.
The Sacrilege is pretty much the same if compared to the Cerberus except that it actually has tank.
The Heretic is used a lot with dual bubble setups that do not leave you with enough room for weapons.
The Vengeance is often used as brick tank tackle and will fit ACs because they leave you with enough free cpu for EANM instead of Nano Platings.
Drone Legions are a horrible joke and even worse than the already horrible drone Proteus. T3 are supposed to be pumped up Hacs yet the Ishtar has considerably better drone options than even a Proteus while all turret and missile "SuperHac" fittings are at least as powerfull as the actual Hacs.

Both the Malediction and Damnation arent even meant do deal damage so their missile options are pretty much irrelevant anyways.

The only really good drone ships are the Arbitraitor and its T2 versions, and possibly the Armageddon that benefits a lot from good drone skills much the the Typhoon and Dominix do.

Either way CCP has to rebalance every single non laser Amarr ship because right now, pretty much all of them are niche ships at best.

Also the main argument for Amarr missile ships is imo that there is no armor based missile ship that is even remotely good right now.

Training missiles does not only leave you with just missile ships, it means you can only fly Caldari ships and therefore basicly cant join armor fleets despite having usefull weapon systems.

They are brawlers meant for soloing and small gang. They complement the laser ships meant for gangs and fleets. Whether they are good enough is a different issue, lots of ships are bad at the moment and need help.



Drone ships with lasers fly like a laser ship. They're more of the same and not as good as laser ships for mid-range dps, except for the drones allowing some damage type selection.

I would like to see Amarr get the missile ships just to get T1 Armor/Missile ships. If we get that from Minmatar, then cool, but if the Breacher is a model, it doesn't look that way.

Most of the Armageddons functions right now rely on its lasers.
Saying that its basicly a drone ship and only needs one bonus switched is like saying the Dominix is a blaster boat and just needs its drone bonus changed to hybrid RoF.

Also one should consider that all dedicated (read: bonused) Amarr drone ships use medium drones right now.
Since medium drones are scout drones and scout drones have to be trained by any race for BC and BS one could argue that Amarr have absolutely no close relation to drones at all right now.

The only Amarr ship that actually gets a meaningfull benefit from using drones that are not scout drones is the Armageddon, all other Amarrships are using scout drones and do not require any degree of drone specialisation at all.

edit2:
Amarr ships specialising in missiles should also be a lot easier to explain from an in character pov. Amaar could just adopt the missile tech from the Caldari or Khanid after seeing the later proving it to be effective. Its a lot more likely than refitting half of their fleet with dronesystems that have to be bought from their "best friends" in the Gallente Federation.

edit:
tl:dr Amarr have no drone focus right now and its meaningless to force one onto them.
Missiles are an existing, if niched, weaponsystem used by existing Amarrships and should therefore be the logical second weaponsystem for them

It seems to me that the Malediction and Vengeance are the stepping stone. They're quick to get to, after training fairly important and generally useful skills, and both of them are effective with barely any missile launcher SP. I for instance have barely any missile launcher SP still, but I've more than a few good experiences with the Malediction that were commemorated with killmails that place me at the bottom with zero damage. The Vengeance, with barely any missile launcher SP, starts out with a reliable unheated 100 DPS with any damage type with a basic fit - thanks to the double damage bonus that's attached to the Amarr Frigate skill. That's... really not bad. And of course after you get these ships you'll have an incentive to train up missiles to make them better.

If the stepping stone is T2 rather than T1, this might be a (valid) hint that gunnery and drone SP are much more important than missile SP if you want to fly Amarr. Which is to say, there should only be a T1 stepping stone if these other T1 missile boats that you'd like are really coming. I think they probably aren't.