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I will concede more range on blasters and rails is an alternative, however, this is somewhat in conflict with the intended nature of blasters. Even with increased range, a blasterboat will still not be able to consistently dictate/maintain a point-blank target.

Personally, I'm still waiting for a dev post acknowledging hybrids need some unique, core benefit to make the weapon-type appealing. After that, THEN we can all play the number-juggling game. Until then, people will still choose projectiles and lasers over hybrids.

I'll keep this short.

But Battlecrusiers outshine cruisers, I will back up reasoning if asked. But there are no Blaster centric T2 Battlecruisers for Gallente/Caldari. Drake is missiles, while Myrm has no bonus so you tend to see it with autocannons.

Meanwhile the Hurricane is double bonused 6 turrets (9.3) , making an excellent gunboat. Blaster only get Brutix at 7 turrets (8.75), Ferrox 6 turrets, and both the Ferrox and Brutix also have 1 less module slot being T1 BCs.


I think this makes it harder to balance the Medium Blaster/Rails because of their platforms.

Well the issue here is AC's and pulses both work in short, medium and in pulses's case long (45km) ranges.
Blasters work only in short range.

To put it another way if you removed all 15km and below damage from AC's and Lasers, this would equate to what Blasters deal with. Becuase in all ranges 15km+ for meds and 30km+ for larges we cannot hit without severly gimping tank and or weapon DPS by fitting 2 TE's minimum.

What needs to heppen is Blasters become Better at short range and medoicre at medium range. projectiles then become medoicre at short and better at medium and long range. You can play with this by shifting stats on the ammo. Decrease DPS on null range ammo while adding more range. Then decrease tracking or damage on conflag and barrage range ammos for projectiles and lasers for decrease dps at those ranges. That ontop of what you have done should work out very well. This way in short range they are very attractive, while at medium ranges just meh. Other turrets system are just meh at short range and attractive at medium and long range.

As for railguns, simply need more DPS, right smack in the middle of Beams and Arty.

I really like this. I would suggest one change though. Dont make our self or remote rep mods work on structure. That would overly complicate RR, logistics, etc. Just giving our big structure larger base resists and/or trimark-like rigs would allow more time for our armor reps (self or remote) to work. I suggested something similar before, but I like most of yours better because it helps Gallente and doesnt make Amarr OP.

Here is what I tried to suggest in another thread:

Anyway - its a complicated issue, and i dont claim to have the answers, but some simple-ish ideas For later:

We have to be faster, at least in a sprint. I dont see any way around that.

I also agree with the suggestion (for later) about increasing the mass/armor on gallente ships - but since im not really mathy, I just wanted to do it a simpler way - take some of our base shield points and move them into our base armor pool. The total defensive points would remain the same, but more would go into armor, where (presumably) our best resists and reps (self or remote) should be. It would also slow us down less than plates.

Also, buff the never used Regenerative Plating module (I think that is what it is called - the one that adds 8% armor) to a higher percentage. And because (if you make the change above) Gallente would have a higher base armor, it would help them more than the other races and get around resist stacking penalties. It would not be as good as a plate, but it wouldnt hurt our speed as much either. (I guess another way to do this would be to change some ship bonuses to: add X% of armor per level...). (I dont understand the mechanics well enough to know if adding just base armor slows us down much?)

Either that, or give gallente ships a base structure resist - not as much as a DC but something - like 30% across the board. That would give the option of freeing up a low from the obligatory DCU II for additonal armor tank mods - an EANM or Regenerative Plating, and/or make the DCU more beneficial to Gallente.

Well, that is what I could come up with. Its a hard problem and I dont envy the Devs. I DO look forward to the day that I dont have to put projectiles and/or shield mods on my Gallente ships though. ;)

Again, because nobody even replies - i think RUSH MODULE WILL SOLVE EVERYTHING with cooldown

1) - blasterships not able to get in range too slow - turn on rush module - get in range ( limited duration and high cooldown )

2) - blasterships have armor where mins have speed modules - wouldn't be fair for galente to be faster and with armor -no need to be faster, they are slower, but can rush time to time, after that min can run from range again, you can maybe make gal even slower - minmattars stays the fastest race, blasterships just got an ability to get close to them from time to time for some time.

3) - blasterships need armor, because they are in middle of battle - no problem they have it, they can buffertank, no need for such base speed they have rush. once they get in range, they will hold enemy ther for a while than enemy runs of again/ maybe not.

no need to make any more radical changes to blaster, blasterships, speeds over minmatars or whatever.
As i said its like warrior vs archer in other games, where is no trouble in concept. sometimes war is victor sometime archer, depends on skill and equip - everyone is happy

WHERE is flaud in this concept ? Anyone sees one ?

There have been a lot of excellent suggestions in this post and others, let's hope CCP are actively following along and discussing amongst themselves what approach is best.

I'm not in favor of the Rush Module, unless it's going to be fit specifically on a blaster boat only. What's to prevent me from fitting it on a Minmatar ship. Sure, fitting requirements, cap usage, bonuses might be a way to tweak the effects, but I'd also not like to see a new module given to just one race's ships.

Once upon a time, when EWAR was un-nerfed, there were a ton of fits one could conceive of to make your ship perform the way you'd like. Gallente with their sensor damps, passively dictated range by changing the lock range of an engagement. Amarr mitigated this to some degree by tracking disruptors since they now had to go close, and Minmatar made your signature the size of a moon with their target painters. Caldari just made it impossible to lock at all for a certain time, and this fits with missile usage and time-of-flight to even out DPS from missiles and turrets.

The initial design philosophy was complex and fair. And, all the EWAR fit within the combat strategy of the races. The initial problems were that everyone could fit them to whichever ship they wanted. When these modules were nerfed, a large part of combat complexity went away. Now, it's just fit the guns that hit the best outside point/scram/neut range and be as fast as possible. Combat became one-dimensional.

I think we're seeing this now in an exaggerated form with the proposed hybrid fix. What we want are guns that perform on par to others, but also a way to make sure we can employ them in combat effectively.

To that end, I would suggest keeping the hybrid buffs that are proposed and bring back the racial EWAR. This time though, make it so only Gallente hulls can fit damps, Amarr hulls fit tracking disruptors, etc. Modify the stats and ensure stacking penalties for multiple mods active on a target, and bring some variety and effective options back to combat.

probably not... rush module would jump (so it could be named microjumpdrive) to target nearly instantly (5 sec or so ) or XY km closer to it or to target but activation range is XY km.

As for blaster only - well it could have it's effects simply highly diminished by certain factor on other ships (im sure someone can come up with something clever, but that's not the point now ) THe shorter range weapon system the better parameters of drive. SOmething like activation range 25 km - microjump to 1 or so. Activable only on enemy ship ( hostile, kill rights, enemy corp etc ) also different attributes dependent on something

Rails are not the fleet weapon of choice for a plethora of reasons including (but not limited too): low DPS, low alpha, ammo size, tracking speeds, wasted range, and inability to efficiently select optimal ranges.

Low DPS and low alpha: Rails, due to their extreme range, have poor DPS. This is a simple fact of life that's been around for as long as I've been playing EVE. The crime here, however, isn't that rails have poor damage per second or poor alpha damage, it's that both artilleries and beams have strong DPS and strong alpha. While this may not be the most fair comparison as rails can be shot from much further, it is an issue, as I'll point out later on. Suffice to say that a weapon that has a strong alpha strike should probably have a slightly lower DPS for balance purposes (which artilleries would if they weren't always damage bonused); because if you get hit by 8 guns that deal 1/6 of your EHP each, it doesn't matter if the cycle time is two years, you lost.

Ammo size: Hybrid ammo is effectively the largest ammo type for turrets at .05m3 for the large variant (same size as cruise missiles). While crystals are technicly twice as large, there is no need to carry more than 1 T1 crystal and T2 crystals fit an average of 1000 shots (if I'm reading these stats correctly) per 1m3. This means that rails (and hybrids in general) can't shoot for as long as the other weapon types and that they have to reload more often. For any fleet that will be staging over a long time period, these are very important factors.

Tracking speeds: Have a hard time hitting stuff moving around up close. This doesn't matter until it does, and then it matters. If I'm reading the stats correctly, lasers have the best tracking (by a wide margin), with rails overtaking artilleries by a small amount. Not as large an issue other points, but worth mentioning.

Wasted range and inability to select for range: These are the kickers for rails, the final nails in the mediocre coffin, if you would. For all the stats that rails are either sub-optimal at this is how they are supposed to make up for it. Sheer range. Except once you've set up for shooting at a range, it takes 10 seconds (5 on Sisi currently) to change ranges. For a weapon system that's built around doing as much damage as possible as a target closes in, this is poor design, because you're faced with the choice of dealing a low amount of damage as the target closes or trying to change ammo several times and dealing even less damage due to ammo load times. Furthermore, fleet engagements happen at about 100km so those 150 extra km that rails can shoot through become useless, so the severe hits you took to DPS and alpha are all for naught. This is why both lasers and artilleries having an effectively higher DPS and alpha than rails is imbalanced; they all get used from the same ranges, regardless of their maximum ranges.

Rails do need some buffs to bring them in line, but they shouldn't be too hard to balance out. The biggest problem outside of wasted range (which can itself be fixed by making smart changes to ammo) is that people don't like the "middle of the road" approach, which most rail stats appear to fall into, assuming equivalent bonuses. That said, CCP needs to fix the hybrid boats with respect to blasters before trying to fix rails themselves because blaster ships do occasionally use rails and rail ships do occasionally use blasters. Hopefully CCP will remember that blasters can be fit to the Ferox and Rokh when they get around to improving the Megathron and Brutix.




Minmatar have a weapon system that deals better-than-blaster damage at blaster ranges and beyond. Allowing them to keep the ability to dictate range, even if blasters are made kings of DPS inside blaster range, means that Minmatar will almost always win or flee any given fight one on one. The problem is that if a Gallente and Minmatar have the same number of speed control mods and counters, the ship with the higher base speed can always choose to flee. A ship with a higher agility can also choose to flee, in some situations with crafty piloting. So it makes since to have one race be faster and the other be more agile, but not one be both at the same time. Since Gallente need speed to dictate the range their guns fire at, it makes the most since to have the Gallente be the faster of the two races. This will introduce other problems, but to deal damage Gallente either need the speed or a new module to allow them to dictate range. The latter is quite unlikely.

All of that said, you bring up a very valid point, it is hard to make blasters effective in such a way that doesn't marginalize projectiles; especially when ship speeds are brought into question.

Yes. We need to get into Optimal... end of story.

Agility decreases align time and increases acceleration. Wow, I'm smært.

Between fondling my multiple Pulitzer Prizes and shuffling my stack of doctorate degrees like a deck of cards, I found the time to locate this:

Shmekla:

Known ships of the last 3 months Ship Fittings kills with lost
2011-10
Capsule 1x, 0 1
Vagabond 1x, 1 1
Rapier Unknown 1 0
Hurricane Unknown 1 0
2011-09
Hurricane Unknown 1 0
2011-08
Hurricane 1x, 1 1

Am I to understand smart people overwhelmingly favor Minmatar because they know the difference between agility and speed? Because if that's the case, I'M FLYING MINMATAR BABY.

[/sarcasm]