Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Thousands of rounds of continuous fire? What are you smoking?

Let's go ahead and pick the lightest one I can think of, an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. The lighter weapons are more capable of continuous fire from firing a lower caliber of bullet, producing less heat.

It might have a listed cyclic rate of fire of 775 rounds per minute. That is a derived statistic, not a functional one. It will have to reload long before you get that high. Granted, it's belt fed, so that will take only moments, but still. It's also quite likely to jam before that, NATO 5.56 is a finicky freaking ammo.

The barrel will melt if you just hold the trigger and go through an entire box of ammo.

It's actual sustained rate of fire is about 50 rounds per minute. And you're still not going to keep up continuous fire for more than about 15 minutes without melting the barrel unless you have a third gunner dumping a canteen on it.

So unless you're talking about one of those cute little "metal storm" weapon systems, which fires about ten thousand rounds in one burst, and isn't considered a machine gun (It's a point defense system for naval vessels), then no, modern weapons cannot fire thousands, or even hundreds of rounds of full auto.

There's nothing to add over this : this is homogenization at its best. A request for another graphics on artilleries, but with better stats, because...

I'm sensing a little bit of antagonism to the idea. Now that's a shock given the nature of New Eden's resident capsuleers. you wouldn't happen to prefer hybrids by any chance would you?

Artillaries only get small dps on account of their very long firing time, their alpha is exceptionally good, this alone has given rise to the alpha fleet doctrine that sees's CCP nerfing resist bonuses on ships they've previously claimed as balanced. I'm not asking for all weapons to be the same I am just proposing that all weapons be in some way equal, removing the cap requirement from beams is a good start.

If lasers are as good as you say how come you never see them on non amarr ships. I love lasers I don't use anything else as I almost always fly amarr, but I do recognise that cap use is a massive issue on amarr ships for all of the reasons passionately argued in this thread I get around it by flying a phantasm as my go to ship. It has less turrets hence less cap demands but a bonus to laser performance than a comparable hull and of course it shield tanks, cap use is still an issue though. This is not the case with non amarr equivalents, some of which I rather like. If cap use wss reduced by 50% on all large/medium lasers we would still be at a massive disadvantage, hence cap is a problem. I will be the first to admit that amarr frigates are in a pretty good place now post balancing, Ive had a lot of fun in them, I can't remember the last time I said that about an amarr battleship or even a bc, can't comment on the prophecy though, as I haven't got around to flying one in anger yet.

Lasers are on the strong side of balance with her base stats. They do more damage, got more range and have better effective tracking(they easily out track blasters at her max optimal range) than other turrets(beside blasters), with the drawback of far higher cap use and fitting requirements. Mostly because there was a time people actually fitted Tachs on everything, the laser ferox was better than blaster ferrox pre buff and people used to point out bad base stats on amarr hulls by fitting lasers on other hulls and compared the stats -> laser torax vs laser omen as nano hull for example.

The cap bonus(that was considered as a damage bonus, that was already build in into laser base stats) reduces one laser drawback to a point where it doesn't is a big deal, however it doesn't really amplify it's advantage. If you add a damage bonus or a optimal bonus to it, you will look at very impressive dps numbers or very high ranges, something no other turret can archive outside point blank engagements or falloff mechanics(what is far worse than working at optimal range). Hulls that got both bonuses are considered as best in class if you want med range performance. Medium range in this case means 50km+ optimal with medium close range guns and up to 100km+ optimal with large close range guns, if you compare that with blaster and ac performance, it is absolutely ridiculous.

So on hulls with enough cap or the cap use bonus a laser is a fair option, however the lighter fitting of acs and capless nature makes them more desire able in many of this cases(they don't do better dps or offer the range, they are simply less taxing on the cap and it gives you more room to fit other stuff). If you have a damage or optimal bonus for them, lasers are the best thing since sliced bread if you don't look a theoretical blaster dps at blaster optimal(it is ****), even with the considerable higher resistance of armor tanks against them.




50% cap reduction is to much to ask for, it basically cancels out one big drawback of lasers and would effectively add another bonus to any amarr hull.

The Harbinger is very good with the turret change(giving it the clear upper hand in EHP/DPS slugfests, like amarr hulls generally have), it was extremely powerful in solo/small gang low sec pvp by the use of slaves, however most people didn't notice(except a max skilled HAM drake or a armor cane, it had little to fear in a 1vs1 BC engagement and was better than other hulls in gangs that focus around 24km engagements). It was somewhat lacking if you compared it to the nano BC trend, but this was mostly a armor vs shield issue(the shield harbinger actually isn't to bad).

While the Apoc takes a slight hit for PVE, it will be probably the biggest issue if CCP rebalances HACs and lasers, since it will absolutely annihilate anything sub BS at 100km ranges. The Abaddon takes a slight hit to the EHP, however it is still a excellent EHP/DPS/range BS and my biggest issue with it is the speed, that didn't changed since 2008 where it did get a 20% nerf with the nano changes. The new Geddon is actually a fantastic utility BS for smaller gangs. Overall the reason why so many post Amarr will suck with the patch is that they don't understand how the changes will affect her hullls.

Btw, the Failtasm is terrible, since CCP nerfed it in the pirate faction cruiser rebalance(it simply lacks enough cap and a optimal bonus to be a good med range ship or a bigger damage bonus/extra turret to be a good dps ship).

IF they were true beams like this, they would actually have the effect of a very high rate of fire, because there would be a continuous stream of laser fire on the target. As EVE uses 1 second as the 'tick' time, they'd have a RoF of one per second. Anything that gave a RoF bonus would have to convert that into a straight damage bonus instead. Also, the power consumption of a weapon system like this would be ridiculous - i.e. it would use cap.

CCP Rise

don't know if you're still reading this thread but here we go..
Heat Sinks
These actually make cap usage even worse on lasers with the 10.5% ROF bonus..
I put in the thread i think this one and the module sticky (Well was sticky) a proposal to remove the ROF bonus in exchange for a overheating bonus and better cap management (cap bonus) i think.... which makes sense considering the name and all ...
i'm curious if you have any opinion and ideas to change them alongside or before laser re-balance?

here it is..
when i first thought heard of the heatsink mod i thought it would be some sort of cooling device a la RL...
so with that in mind i would suggest that heatsink
- bonus to OH duration of lasers and reduces OH damage to guns
- cap reduction usage of lasers
-slightly higher damage bonus than normal to comp for losing ROF bonus

This way you're not forced to use extra cap with ROF increase .... makes the name make sense and helps with cap usage.

As many pilots who use lasers know scorch and Tachs are part of the problem, they are so good that they disguise the weakness of lasers, They set up an area where lasers rule and it makes it all look alright.

Unfortunatly it is sort of a false premise since unless conditions are perfect you can not use your advantage, lasers also have the specific disadvantage of being up against Mimintar super resist at the T2 level, that are normally quick enough to exit the Amarr favored range.

The lasers advantage of cheaper faction ammo is actually inverted in a lot of PVP scenerios since the ammo is cheaper per shot, but more expensive if you expect to die in less than 100 shots per gun. Quick change ammo is cool, but you only have a few choices (you can not really change damage type).

THe crippling cap usage is a pain, since you have to use significant cap mods if you are on a non cap bonus ship. All it takes is a nuet and you stumble into no cap real quick. THis is somwhat shared with blasters, to a lesser extent.

I am sure the correct answer does not include make everything the same with different graphics, but hen how do you balance.YOu have the issue that the faster ship gets to chose the range it gets to fight where it has an advantage. YOu ahve to deal with situations where the ability to negate the weapon systems downside causes it to become overpowered in that scenerio, but once known the other side has no choice. This is the alpha doctrine issue, it should be rock, papaer, scissors. (DPS >Alpha >RR>DPS), but the alpha has found ways to avoid the dps issue downside.

One change I would make rather than making Rail and Beams closer to the alpha of arty is nerf arty alpha slightly in exchange for enough fire rate to slightly increase DPS. The problem here seems the gap may be to large. I am also not sure the concern is wholly warrented here is alpha concept is very much a meta concern, since it the way arround RR the concept will always use what ever system uses the best single shot damage and it is up to a planner to come up wiht a way to extend the time to let DPS catch up with Alpha. This may be hurt by the nerf to the resist bonus of the standard bearers of laser and rail BS DPS.

Thank you for contributing instead of whining. Great idea.

dbl post ftw