Ships & Modules

Disclaimer: I'll start by saying I am a pilot who is not an expert in pvp overall, my pvp career over my many toons is minimal compared to many out there. Yet, I would estimate that of my pvp experience, enough of it is in ECM ships, so as to make me somehwat of an authority on the subject. Secondly, all of these changes are intended for pvp. I have not fully thought out how these changes would affect PVE.

With Retribution came the new skills which increase sensor strength. And, while I think this is a a decent change in the sense that it mitigates the symptoms of that which is broken with ECM, it doesn't fix the underlying problem.

Proposed solution:
Why not just change the ECM module from "cannot target anyone" to "cannot target anyone other than the ship/drone currently ECMing you". This would have many benefits:

1: This would do away with all solo-pvp ecm (excluding drones, but we'll get to those), which is OP anyways (ie: dessies with jammers in mids). Simply put, there is little to no reason to put such a chance based decisive factor, on 1v1 pvp. Now I understand there may be a solo rook pilot out there, who would have a problem with this, but I believe the fix would help many more than those it would harm. Please read on.

2: This would allow you to lock drones that have you ecmed, and blow them up. This would buy the pilot using the ecm drones time (or allow them to "bug out" as a last ditch effort, just like they do currently), while still giving the target of the ecm an effective counter-measure. It will still require the target to find who is jamming them, lock it, and dismember the offending drone (keep in mind, the other drones, and the offending ship would be unlockable still) but it gives you a way to counter what was once a RNG "win" for solo fights. While this would make the ecm drones less useful, they would still have their place in the game, buying time and effectively tank (as the ship using them is not being hit) while not fully incapacitating a target.

3: This would allow those "jammed" to still shoot at the enemy falcons (any ECM ship can be included here, griffins, blackbirds, kitsunes, scorps, etc. Feel free to interchange your favorite ecm ship with the term "falcon" throughout this text) albeit only the one jamming them, (unless two such falcons worked together) while they would still be "jammed" to the rest of the fleet. This would focus falcons to work in teams of 2 or 3, increasing small gang teamwork and lowering the power of ECM blobs due to increased complexity**.

**The reason this would not scale well, is as a group grows, organization of who is jamming what becomes less clear, making for a great chance that a ship will merely be jammed (ie: and still be able to shoot the person jamming them, albeit no one else) and not "fully jammed". This would be more in line with damps or TDs which do not scale due to stacking penalties (Whereas there is no penalty currently to applying multiple ECM mods to a single ship). This would also add a component of organizational skill to the game, as an organized PVP unit can take on a larger less organized group (assuming an equal proportion of ECM in each group), whereas currently its mostly a numbers game.

What do you guys think? Please be civil with your retorts, but feel free to criticize anything I might have missed, or left out.

Normally I go into this "stop whining and get used to it" mode, but this is actually an idea that has merit. Thing is that with the increased sensor str and the rebalance of ECM itself and the ships I'm not so sure it'll be needed anymore. But again, it's quite an interesting idea I've not heard or thought of before.

just make jams suffer from diminishing marginal returns.

ECM boat balancing will have to be redesigned following this. Instead of paper, they would have to be brick.

Pretty much , just like the op.

He says it is a "I write a seemingly well thought out post on how to fix ewar" . No it is not.

If you want to decrease the current strength of ecm , then you would have to boost the ecm specific ships significantly.
The recent skill books to sensor strenght already lowered their usefullness a lot.
Go and think out a better sollution, until then stop qq.

I dont understand why some ppl want to remove ewar for the game. Clearly they can only think in 1 dimensional pvp , who has the more dps/tank. Why cant u just accept that ewar has and should have its part in pvp,being it solo small scale or fleet pvp.

I have no idea what you mean by this. As a simple example, assuming an ecm module jam strength of 6, and a target sensor strength of 12, we can assume a 50% jam for each module activated.

After 1 module, you have 50% chance to have jammed the target.
After 2 modules, you have a 3/4 (75%) chance of having jammed the target
After 3 modules, you have a 7/8 *87.2%) chance of having jammed the target.
After 4 modules, you have a 15/16ths chance of having jammed the target.
And so on, and so forth. Each module, increases the chance of having jammed the target by 50%.

This is different than say a stacking penalty which will give you x sensor dampening (I'm using sensor dampening as an example, feel free to input damage mod, armor/shield hardener, webifier, etc.).
The 2nd sensor dampener will only be roughly 88%x (I don't have the exact figures at my disposable, but these are good estimates) effective.
The third is roughly 54%x effective
etc.

Making FoF missiles suck less and introducing a projectile variant would actually be better, imo.

Any why single out ECM as evil? TD is just as horrible to a gun boat - to the point just about any unbonused hull with a slot carries one.

No, a better idea is (yet more) more viable counters rather than screwing with the mechanic.

Brutal truth: extremaly stupid idea from enraged kid who never flied any ECM boat but died once due to ECM ...

Before you will come with some nice idea how to improve or change something - use that thing.

Cheers,

Bad idea. Bringing an ECM to a cheap gang against a large/expensive target is a viable strategy as part of the "bigger <> better" style of eve.

Change this and everyone flies machariels and vindicators and slams you when you try to lock them out. ECM ships are already primary in fights, those change make them just fodder.

The difference being that a TD can mitigate turret dps. It does not prevent an enemy from neuting you, pointing/scramming/webbing you, EWARing you, using missiles on you, launching drones (after the fact) and focusing them on you, nor locking out logistics. All of which ECM does do, in addition to mitigating turret DPS, and ECM can often times do it to more than one target.

As for more viable counters, I was under the impression that that's what my proposed changes would do. They would add a teamwork component to ECM that doesn't currently exist, as well as a function so that ECM doesn't scale to a large basis well (as we all know, blobs suck), whereas all current counters are decided in station by one's fittings.



As for Bubanni's point about falcons no longer being able to jam a pilot who has gotten a warp disruptor point on them, I would reply once again the need for teamwork, rather than relying solely on yourself. Have a teammate SD them, Jam them, or kill them, just like any other ship in the game would.


As for Maeltstome's point. I believe Janna has already answered with part of the solution, range. The other being teamwork. Honestly if a mach/vindi is killing your ecm ships, (after these changes), something somewhere has gone very wrong and you deserve to die.



And finally Uncle Gagarin, if you're going to troll, at least allow us to get some humor out of it. Fly out to Egghelende and speak with fweddit. I'm sure they would be happy to teach you a few things about the art of proper manners. (Love those guys).