Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Omg the forum ate my long post again.....ugh
Long story short a 10% and 5% drone damage bonus would be op, doing more dps than an Astarte without hams but less with hams

The current drone effectiveness is 1.5x and a 10%+5% is 1.875x but a 5%+7.5%(one could be just for heavies) gets 1.718x effectiveness, which would close the gap between the eos and Astarte but not put the eos overtop, but would make it worth not having more than 250 drone bay and -1 slot

There's a lot of options but this current eos is meh
All other done ships can compete with their turret/missile counterparts but te eos does not

And also if it gets a sentry bonus let it only be tracking not also range

Possible bonuses for eos
7.5% rep 7.5% drone(or just heavy drone) dmg and hp
7.5%heavy tracking and mwd speed 5% drone or heavy(opposite of other bonus) dmg and hp

Or you could change heavy tracking to drone tracking and mwd speeds (so it helps only sentry tracking not range)-helps mitigate it stepping on domi toes, tho the Ishtar already does that like a champ

There's so many things that could make this ship awesome but it's so meh atm

Your first two statements are a little confusing

But I compared the blaster eos vs blaster Astarte, although a rail Astarte does more dps than a rail+ ogre eos

And let's not forget how rails switch targets instantly
And no heavies have terrible damage projection
Unless you have something webbed drones will not keep up, they naturally loop around and fall behind because they try orbiting at a slow speed instead of mwding an keeping up, so often time your dps is drastically reduced because of heavy drones super short ranges, and the ai thinking slow boating at 5-6km away is ok
So instead o full damage you get much much less, idk how much less and is love to know, but even vs some webbed thins I found my ogres missing completely over and over

I will probably only ever use an eos because it will hopefully be shaped like a myrm
Tho I've used te eos before for smal gang pvp
People didn't know what to do with themselves

Optimal range and falloff of Absolution compared to Astarte?

I'm assuming you're referring to these:

Yeah, sorry, on reflection they lack context and are a bit ambiguous. I'm referring to the 10% bonus and 5% bonus to damage off different ship skills that you were talking about stacking multiplicatively instead of additively.

The 15% also refers to the damage bonuses but combining them into a single bonus off of the Command Ships skill.

Regarding drone behavior:

So, CCP admits drones need a re-work, and apparently this is coming "soon"(tm)

WARNING LITERAL AND LIBERAL USE OF SPREADSHEETS AHEAD

I love to theory craft, so I looked up the numbers. All Small, Medium, and Large drones, regardless of size, have a 1000 optimal range and then some falloff, which is determined entirely by drone size category. Small is 2000, Medium is 3000, Large is 4000.

Their tracking, orbit velocity, and MWD velocity is determined by their size and type, with T2 and 'Augmented' drones tied for highest orbital velocity. Oh and for some reason Light drones have a Signature Resolution of 25 and the other two have 125.

Per this article on the Uni-Wiki Large Drones try and orbit at 1000 meters from their target and actually manage about 1200 meters. With Drone Sharpshooting this doesn't really matter very much since you get +5% per level which puts them well within optimal but for the purposes of the spreadsheet I just cooked up I'm not going to include drone skills or modules because that gets messy.

Target is going to be a rough average of the new Command Ship sig radii at 250m.

Okay, that last bit is no longer true, I was curious so I added ways to adjust tracking, optimal, ect.

Pics of the spreadsheet at the end, or maybe a Google Drive link if the formulas still work.

Long story short you lose fairly little DPS even from Heavy Drones against a stationary target. About ~8% on Ogre 2 and ~4.7% on an Fed Navy Ogre, though the Ogre 2 still does marginally more damage than the Fed Navy Ogre.

If we assume the target is moving about 200m/s then the Fed Navy Ogres start performing slightly better than the Ogre 2s, though the difference is still marginal. For reference, before it was 1 damage in favor of the Ogre 2, now it's 2 damage in favor of the Fed Navy Ogre per volley. Keep in mind this is base damage so that gets a bit higher with drone skills, but not much higher and it's still a very tiny difference.

With a target going 200m/s the drones should still be able to orbit fairly well though so their MWDs shouldn't be kicking in much. In-fact now that I think about it they'll probably only be "orbiting" at 100 m/s since they'll be using the other 200m/s to keep up with the target, meaning this should actually improve drone tracking. May require further testing. For the purposes of these numbers and the spreadsheet though assume that "ship velocity" is being added directly to the drones' traversal.

Anyways...

It's worth noting that with 200m/s added to their traversal the Ogre 2s are losing about 20% of their total damage and the Fed Navy Ogres are losing about 15%.

Now lets see what happens when they shoot and MWD.

Now the Ogre 2 is losing about 45% DPS and the Fed Navy Ogre is losing only 35%, and that's without taking into account the likely increased orbital range which means we'll lose some damage in falloff. The Fed Navy Ogres are now doing 6 more damage per volley, which adds up considerable with skills, ship bonus, and 5 drones, especially since we're talking about a much smaller overall amount of damage.

With an Omni Tracking Link we get about 32% loss on the Ogre 2s and 24% on the Fed Navy Ogres and the damage difference is down to ~3.6 in favor of the Fed Navy Ogres.

LITERAL SPREADSHEETS END HERE

So, from this we can conclude that if you skipped ahead for a conclusion you should read my work, because it's not that simple.

Okay, seriously, a rough conclusion is that you're probably not actually losing that much DPS against anything Battlecruiser sized and up and against a ABing cruiser you're still marginally better off with Heavy drones rather than Mediums or Lights.

None of this takes into account for killing the drones, any sort of prop mod, or the occasional insanity of the Eve Drone AI, it's just my best guess and a little bit of someone else's testing.

Here's a link to the spreadsheet. Yes, it's currently only for Gallente drones.

As for the Eos, I think another 7.5% bonus to Tracking and Optimal of Heavy Drones (or all drones) would be unique and rather interesting given these numbers.

I would not say "it's the worst" but I do agree with you that cap recharge on commands needs another look at. Hacs having significantly better cap recharge seems stupid, all of the commands having exactly the same cap recharge seems even more stupid.

Furthermore, we can't even get an idea of fleet cap stability on sisi atm because the skill for "capacitor transmitters" has been broken since the name change to the module. It has been bug reported 20+ times by myself and others and still manages to elude fixing even over the past 3 sisi patches.

What I'd really like to know is how long it's been broken on the internal test server and if anyone ever even noticed...

If i'm not mistaken, that was the old name, and the new one is "energy transfer array", but sisi still thinks it goes by the old name

how did sisi manage to go through 3 patches with the new name without it hitting live yet? doesn't it only get patched once every few months??

Yup, new name is horrible, just like command ship's cap recharge rate

wtb CCP rise for command ship buffs

(love you for everything else, fozzie, but that capacitor is just killing us)

It barely has enough base recharge to keep its guns firing. Being the "most" cap stable amarr ship because it runs out at 3 minutes instead of 2 is just a matter of max cap pool, not the actual recharge rate. Compare that "stability" to all the other command ships, who dont have to spend their entire cap recharge just on guns, and then against the shield ships who can use ASBs for cap-free rep, and finally try to make a half decent active tank fit, and you'll see how huge of a discrepancy there is in cap stability. I'd imagine those minmy ships are just desperate to find more things to throw their capacitor away for.

I think bringing average Command cap recharge to around 5.7/s would be a pretty reasonable proposal. Give the abso around 6.5, Astarte/eos/vulture around 5.8-6.0, Sleipnir/claymore/damnation/nh around 5.0/s to 5.5/s.

There is no reason the sac should have so much more cap regen than the abso, and there is no reason the deimos should have so much more than the astarte/eos.