Assembly Hall

I wanted to put my simple idea in a straight forward and simple manner, so I fired up MSPaint and went to town!

How They Work Now

How They Should Work

The idea is simple, when using blasters if a target gets inside your optimal your critical hits start to do more damage than normal, and at point blank range, let say 100m your critical hits will do up to 4 times more damage than a normal critical.

This change gives blasters a big damage boost but only when certain criteria are met so it's not over powered. The only change to blaster boat set ups might be more tracking mods and more webs.

As for a rail gun fix, my idea for this is a bit extreme but, meh welcome to eve.

Rail guns should only really be put on sniper ships, Harpy, Moa, Eagle, Rohk for example and used in sniper set ups. Sniper set ups use up quite a few mid and low slots to do well and hurt the ships tanking potential, so I think a critical bonus should be a good way to boost rails and sniping as a tactic.

Small Rails
-If optimal is > 100km and
-Target is with in %2 of optimal range then
-Chance to do up to 12 times normal damage critical

Medium Rails
-If optimal is > 150km and
-Target is with in %2 of optimal range then
-Chance to do up to 12 times damage normal critical

Large Rails
-If optimal is > 200km and
-Target is with in %2 of optimal range then
-Chance to do up to 12 times normal damage critical

Again as much as this looks over powered it's not because of the very strict conditions that must be met.

For example if a sniper rohk with a 210km optimal warps to a 200km book mark off a gate then only targets with in %2 of it's optimal are at risk of get smacked with a super crit, and a smart FC is going to know that if he moves his ships with in the 200km requirement then their will be no way the rohk can hit them for a super crit.

Anyway those are my ideas on how to both fix hybrids and give them their own unique flavor.

Lasers do not run out of ammo and have insta reload.
Artillery has many damage types, don't require cap, and have the highest alpha.
Missiles never miss, have all damage types, and do the same damage at any range.
Hybrids have none of these so lets give them a super crit chance.

If you have read my whole post then thank you.

-On a side note, new forums have no image posting? seems like a step backwards to me

hybrids need something, blasters are supposed to be awe inspiring raw damage i mean molten nuclear weapons flying through space! But no we've got rails that suck and ships that fit blasters that cant get in range ever to actually apply any lethal force....

Super crits for rails sounds interesting, i'd like to see them get a boost to range and ROF, (extreme range almost autocannon speed) ...

Blasters need to get wider optimals, and "blaster boats" (See brutix, megathron etc), need to get either a mobility boost, or a ehp boost or some form of combo to make it so they are actually usefull for gods sake.

Blasters already melt your face if you use them right. They don't need a fix...fit a tracking enhancer you lazy jerks.

Rails either need more damage as the OP said or perhaps they could use a special ability such as being able to penetrate the current layer of defense and do a % of their damage to the next layer. So if you are hitting someone's shields let us say 5% of that volley goes into armor.

Once shields are down and you are hitting armor 5% goes into structure...etc. The % is obviously negotiable. 10% might be too much and 5% too little.

As it is...it is a good way to beat massive buffer tanks that rails suck against. They are supposed to be effective penetrators and not just a big hammer...a spike fired at near light speed should go through something right? Also they use way too much cap for what they do.

Yeah fix em. I use blasters now and I find they do plenty of damage with the main problem being that they only do kinetic and thermal. But the real issue is gallente blaster boats and not the blasters themselves. Decrease gallente mass so they get up to top speed faster and can close on a target...maybe tweak agility modifiers. Getting blasters on target is a good way to make dps go up.

Tracking is fine...fit a web and a tracking mod (they exist for a reason). They are supposed to have a short optimal and falloff...so learn t2 and use null ammo and a caldari range boat and you can get some impressive range out of the blasters.

Learn to think outside of the box.

I actually Like this idea Alot. It does Make Railguns true snipers like they should be. i can already amagine a sniper cormorant

I like the idea of of improving railguns ability to snipe, but the OPs idea is far too much RNG for my taste to be frank.

Do you want the crit numbers to flash above ship in a giant comic book font too when they hit?

READ THIS !

Make frequent recharging hybrids and equal to 5 seconds instead of 10. on each recharge a certain amount of capacitor will be taken instead of on each shot. say to recharge clip needed 150 capacitor instantly(well, make it around number of shots, example one shot take 10 capacity, clip have 15 ammo = 150 capacity) then shoot them without capaciy. number of rounds in the clip... say it will be 10-15. So we're partially leaving dependence DPS from capacity.

After this fix hybrids take their own place. Plus, this can vary damage mode depending on how many ammo will be in clip.(leveing it to devs) (example: 10 rounds with damage mode X10 and 5 rounds with damage mode x13 (well, calculate how much dps is lost by recharge to leave it the same as it is now)) DPS is still the same but appears new side - we have superDPS(also very close depend in clip) for a short time and in the coupe with overheating blasterboats would like everyone is waiting for.

Messy and inelegant. All this does is give hybrids a 9% DPS buff within the arbitrary range you've set, which screws with the conventional damage/falloff curve. If you want to buff their DPS, then just do it. If you want to make them more effective in close range, improve their tracking.

Not supported. Ew.