Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello fellow Spaceshipwarriors,

as you might remember there was a new kind of Bomb introduced in Phoebe called the focused void bomb. A bomb designed to be used in combat against capitals that will neutralize 15000 GJ in the capacitor of the enemy ship hit.

For the ones not familiar with it, I posted the attributes below, also highlighting the issue I have with them.

http://puu.sh/dkOV4/f83ecf0d23.jpg

As you can see, the area of effect radius is 1m only. This effectively means, you have to time the bomb that exactly that it will explode while being inside the collision bubble of the target. While I absolutely understand the need to make it impossible to hit multiple targets with that kind of bomb at once, currently it is just too difficult to hit them at all.
You can absolutely forget to hit more than 1 of 10 tries on a moving Carrier or Dreadnought (of course, hitting Supercaps is easier, but I don't think that's their intended use), and on Carriers in triage or Dreads in siege it still is very unreliable.
Hitting them should be difficult, but a skilled player should be able to do it reliably. At the moment, there's just too much luck involved.
The reasons for that are

• Above 9999m distance from your target, the EVE overview only displays in "km". Meaning, for the whole range from 30999m to 30000m it will simply display as 30km.
• There is a delay between you clicking the button and the bomb being launched and activated
• The bomb spawns in front of your bomber and then flies away. I have no idea if the 30km it then travels are from that spot or from the center of your ship (which is again different from the distance you see on the overview)

This all makes it so much more a game of luck, than a game of skills - and that's wrong.

So please CCP, fix it :) I think the easiest solution would be to implement a logic into the bomb, where it automatically damaged one capital target closest to it's location up to like 100m or so. Also some visual clue on the overview (like bomb launcher button turning green or whatever) when you would hit your current target could be a solution.

Supercaps don't die because they get neuted so hard, they die because a lot of fighter bombers and doomsdays hit them. And quite a lot of other stuff. It's a battle of dps vs enemy logistics there. Just have a look on supercap kills on eve-kill or whatever, you won't see a fleet of Geddons or Bhaals on there, just DPS.

Dreads and most of all triage carriers however, can often only be broken and killed because you neut them out - at least in WH fights and smaller k-space fights. The bigger a fight gets, the less important neuts become because you can just out-dps their tank.

use these all the time in WHs and you can hit a siege/triage cap every time unless its just been bumped and i had always thought they were meant to be used on suppers. Even as they were announced people were worried they would be to strong against regular caps

I was talking about proper supercap fights.
The kitchen-sink supercap ganking fleet does that mainly to keep targets capacitor below jump-cap. Of course they also do it to shut down active armor/shield hardeners to make it quicker, so the super doesn't get help. But that's not a fight anyway.

The only proper use of that thing is, to finally break that triage carrier you couldn't break before.

Also, eve online ships are rendered as spheres, some of which are quite large... This precision strike weapon only needs to hit inside the sphere, which on a battleship is over a kilometer in diameter since the whole model needs to fit in it for rendering reasons...