Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is a balancing issue that would obviously come with the change.
Anyone could have guessed that t1 and faction would need to be balanced accordingly.

They too would be balanced in the same manner as every other weapon system.

I don't know why you had to make this comment really.

Hell, i left it out cause i thought it was obvious.

A question I have is where does this leave rockets? Their damage wasn't all that awesome to begin with and now you are now making the damage gap even smaller when compared with light missiles. I like the light missile changes, but I still think rockets could hit harder.


Heavy missiles...

Something has to be changed, but I think you are trying to nerf the tengu and drake by hitting heavy missile range/damage when it has been the same ever since the missile rebalance with little player complaint.

When I see these ships in space, I don't say "oh crap, they will have heavy missiles", I think "oh crap, they are going to be total hell death tanked :( " In the case of the drake, you have this stupid insane buffer tank for next to no isk investment. The range on heavy missiles I guess could be hit, but I never felt like their damage was too high.

I am not going to lie, I have a tengu mission runner. I don't pvp with it. My T3 super bad ass ship with level 4 supports and t2 heavy missiles is only doing 500 dps with three CNR ballistic controls and now you want to knock that down to 400? Seems excessive considering the isk investment to get to that. Much lower and they won't even be viable for L4 missions.

Also, you are boosting tracking disrupters. This seems to violate the golden rule of never nerfing something and boosting its counter at the same time. You could literally eliminate drakes/tengus from small gangs overnight. Maybe that is what you want?

In the mean time, I think I will look into building Curses.

I brought it up because people keep comparing precision and fury, T2 ammo, as a comparison to T1 ammo in turrets of the same size. If that isn't what you meant then I'm not sure how your suggestion addresses the issue of missiles being able to project over long ranges far better than same sized turrets.

The HM nerf has been much needed for a long time. For all those crying over it, let's put this in perspective:

1) A Harbinger with Heavy beam laser II's using IN MF does 318 dps at 15km + 10km falloff (25km total).

2) A Hurricane with 720mm Howitzer II's using RF PP does 290 dps at 15km + 22km falloff (27km total).

3) A Brutix with 250mm railgun II's using CN antimatter does 302 dps at 18km + 15km falloff (28km total).

4) A drake with HML II's using CN scourge does 250 dps at 84.4km.

Now tell me which one of these isn't even remotely like the rest. All of these numbers are at lvl5 skills without any other mods/drones fitted and without implants. This is just the base damage on a typical damage/RoF bonused ship. Toss in the fitting requirements of these various mods and things skew more heavily in favor of HM's than they do in the above example.

It's not the damage that is wrong, it's the range.

This is all paper numbers though. As a decently experienced frigate pilot, I can tell you that you can mitigate a Drake's DPS incredibly. I will and do buy X-instinct boosters to reduce my signature radius, and thus their damage. I do manually pilot in order to make sure I am moving perpendicular to the incoming missile, and I also make sure I am AB'ing above their explosion velocity. What does this all lead up to? A tackled Drake (which has NONE of the utility highs and mids for neuts and webs, like the Cane) and me ASB'ing to tank it. And then my fleet warps in and kills it. "But what if it is 84km away?". Then I can simply warp off. What? It's a Drake blob? I'll see those heavy missiles next year. The delay between launch and damage application really does matter.

By converse, if a Hurricane or Harbinger is at range and hits my little frigate, it is hit. Arty Cane literally wipes it away from the field.


Now, I've written all of this from the perspective of a frigate pilot. I'd imagine BC pilots could also simply warp away, but then why wouldn't a proper BC gang have frig tackle support to hold the Drake(s) down? I really am baffled. People are crying about how OP HMLs are because they're comparing a single BC to another BC. 1v1 is incredibly uncommon these days, so I see no reason to base a nerf or major game mechanics change off of one-to-one comparisons. I'm sorry if you want your Hurricane to be able to kill everything in a 1v1 scenario, but no ship in the game has the capability to always win against everything. They're not thinking of smallgang or fleet scenarios at all.

Don't nerf HMLs. Nerf the ships that are OP. And most of all people, stop thinking 1v1 only. It just doesn't happen much.

The issue is simply the range, that's nearly 3x the range of the 2nd longest range medium weapon. Yes you can evade missiles easily in a frigate but the same is true of turrets too. There really isn't much of a difference there. The only legitimate issue here is that missiles do have flight time and so their real range is often much less than the theoretical range but it isn't 300% different. A balanced HM has a range of around 50km base with either current or moderately reduced damage compared to current HM's. I also agree that HAM's need to have their fittings reduced. It's silly that they use more PG/CPU than HML's, they should follow the model of other short ranged weapons and be far easier to fit.

A final note, I said nothing about 1v1 or even overall fittings. I simply pointed out the huge range inconsistency. The reality is you simply don't see heavy beam harbs or 250mm railgun brutix's. The fitting requirements of the guns are so high that it simply isn't practical. The 720mm hurricane does come up frequently but it requires ACR's to work and the thing has the tank of a wet tissue. On the other hand, the drake can cover itself in those HML's without making any fitting sacrifices, it has half its PG/CPU left over afterwards. Thus it has by far the longest range, average dps for a ranged ship and the toughest tank of any BC in any reasonable configuration (excluding bait ships). And you say this is fine? I think not. HML's should have been nerfed ages ago.

After reading CCP Fozzie's new comments (updated OP), I think I have to rescind my belief that 20% is too much. I think its pretty well in line. On the same token, though, In order to make a proper balance between HMLs and HAMs, I think HAMs need their fitting reduced. Cruisers should (with proper sacrifices) be able to make decent fits with HAMs, just like a thorax with neutrons.


I also want to reiterate that I think having a separate mod that increases missile range and exp. velocity/radius is important, rather than adding another effect to the tracking enancer/computer. I think it will add flavor, balance, and diversity. I don't think tracking enhancers should be such a "god" module.

On the other hand, I do think tracking disruptors should effect missiles. The argument against it seems to be that its overpowered if it effects all ships similarly. My defense is that both damps and target painters share this attribute, and are obviously not overused.

I cant really think of a missile ship that has an extra low slot to fit one of these. Phoons i guess?

Or we can fly Celestis/Arazu/Latchesis hulls instead and use damps which not only lower range of missiles and guns, but also the ability to control drones, and with focused application can impact remote repairing, break tackles, and defend against neutralizers.