Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello, forums.

I come to you with my first post, concerning a tragic state of affairs in medium weaponry. Lately I have been doing extensive research on medium-range, medium-hull turret-based weapons, and I have reached some conclusions that should warrant dev attention.
*disclaimer: Rise or someone already said they would be working on this, I just wanted to get a good thread going for it.

Medium railguns suffer a number of problems. While they have decent range, depending on ammunition, they cover nearly the same gap as Scorch on medium pulse lasers. They do more damage, within certain profiles, while suffering worse tracking - I expect this when comparing them to a "short range" weapons system.

However, railguns compare unfavorably to every other medium range turret weapon that exists - the ONLY context in which they come close is with massive hull damage and tracking bonuses, tracking computers, and excessive damage mods. For instance, I want to fly a t3 tackler on an alt, and a t3 damage dealer on my main. A Loki is filling the tackler role, while I must choose between another Loki, a Proteus, and a Legion for the damage dealer. The Proteus has the best range and ewar flexibility, so I have spent a lot of time working on fits. I have found that, even with its heavily bonused hull and a TC II, railguns will track and apply damage worse in almost every case than equivalent artillery weapons on the Loki, which has no tracking mods apart from its hull bonuses. Overall it's underwhelming, though still usable.

However, if you take medium rails out of the t3 cruiser context, they become utterly unusable. Only the damage/tracking/optimal bonuses found on those hulls make them usable at all. Otherwise, we are faced with a weapons system that has limited range, incredibly poor tracking, little alpha, and very little sustained damage - there is no context of which I am aware in which medium railguns would be preferred over medium beams, pulse, artillery, autocannons, or even blasters with null - they simply can't compete in any field. On some Gallente hulls the tracking issues are abated, but range becomes a factor; on Caldari hulls the range issue is solved, but we are left with no damage and poor tracking.

In light of this somewhat disjointed wall of text, I'd like to throw out some numbers for possible changes:

Give medium rails +10% damage mod, +10% tracking and +5% optimal
OR
Give medium rails +5% rate of fire, +5% tracking, and +5% optimal

What I would like to see is distinctiveness from pulse lasers (high dps, good tracking, low alpha) by giving medium rails the ability to deal higher effective damage at longer range with comparably low alpha...
OR
a parlance with medium artillery (low dps, low tracking, high alpha) such that medium rails would have lower alpha and higher dps (but still fairly high levels of both) combined with better tracking than the artillery.

I welcome your thoughts on this matter. Hopefully I'm not duplicating some other thread I couldn't find.

Hybrids suffer from extremes.

Blasters are extreme damage, but such extreme short range as to make them nearly useless. The only reason they are tolerated at all is because fights need to happen in scram/web range anyway, and blasters have about half that range. On the battleship versions they can reach all the way to full web range before going into falloff, with the least damaging configuration possible.

Rails suffer the opposite problems. Poor damage at extreme range. Or they are supposed to. They fare poorly compared to pulse, and the very fact that pulse range enters a conversation about railgun performance suggests there is something wrong with pulse lasers.

Rails, to be where they should be, need a bit more range and a bit more damage.

Projectiles just have it too good. Zero Cap, Selectable damage, medium range, good damage. They don't have the extremes of hybrids, but their capless nature make using other mods to control range easier, and their selectable damage offset the lower output. They are the best of all worlds.

Honestly, I don't think it's a case of rails being terribly underpowered, but rather a case of projectiles being too good in too many areas, and pulse lasers having far too much range

You just described large rails

Edit: Except for the tracking.

Tracking goes to short range weapons, you can forget the base stats of a long range weapon being good with tracking without hull bonuses or serious module usage to provide it.

This is part of why pulse lasers are a problem. They have tracking befitting a short range weapon system, while having more optimal than the optimal+falloff of the other 2 short range systems. Their extreme range for their class makes them a very versatile weapon, and as CCP backs off the balancing point of cap use for them they will become increasingly powerful, relatively.

Missiles are not exclusively caldari. You'll find minmatar and amarr ships with bonuses to missiles too. The gallente get drone bonuses on their ship hulls instead of missiles.

Medium rails have a huge variety of optimal ranges depending on ammo (250mm rails have 13km with Jav and 91km with spike!). A fix should start with changing the optimal range penalty on Javelin ammo from -75% to -50% like antimatter. Then the guns themselves need a buff to tracking and a reduction in PG usage. DPS seems fine, maybe slightly low. Could buff with a minor ROF increase.

The biggest problem is the crumby T2 ammo for railguns. Short range is too short and long range is too long.

Extra Optimal isn't a problem. Spike would be great if not for the tracking penalty. Javelin does tune the rails down to what I feel would be a more appropriate range for blasters, but I would be happy if it tracked like them too.

Bump because I forgot about and then remembered this thread and still want more input.

We can either:

Increase some attributes and decrease fitting requirements of the weapons themselves

OR

Significantly increase the effectiveness of their ammunition, especially Spike.

I'm not the only one who cares, right?

I just saw that. Irrelevant bump is irrelevant :V

Just a small comment to the pulse laser range, as I understand it, pulse lasers have comparable good range compared to the other two short-range turrets because Amarr slowboat into that range. I could be wrong, but that's my hypothesis on lasers generally being quite accurate weapons; The ships they're on are almost stationary with the other races orbiting.

Makes me wonder why it is being balanced using faction ammo.

OP. Near the end of post:

"What I would like to see is distinctiveness from pulse lasers (high dps, good tracking, low alpha) by giving medium rails the ability to deal higher effective damage at longer range with comparably low alpha..."