Player Features and Ideas Discussion

From the [Vanguard] Combat and Navy BC Rebalance thread:


Start making plans.

Seriously. PLEASE consider it.

I grind my teeth every time I see a missile damage locked bonus, because it goes against the advantages and philosophy of the weapon system - which is CHOICE. The advantage of missiles is the consistent damage application, and flexibility of choosing the damage type; with less overall damage, and delayed damage application compared to turrets. It's the same reason I hate the 30 second reload on the Rapid Light/Heavy Launchers, but at least there I can make some decisions in combat to reload or not, or split my launchers.

Locking 50% of the damage bonus into Kinetic (such as with the Drake) doesn't let you make interesting choices in combat, where you can try to determine your opponent's resist profile, and decide if it's worth the time to reload ammo to try to exploit a potential resist hole. Most of the time it's not worth switching to lose raw damage bonus. It's more pronounced on the Drake because there is fewer cases in the current meta where firing Kinetic is actually preferred. The only race that MIGHT have a Kinetic hole is Minmatar, and even then with the more even resist profile and choice of using Shield or Armor, it won't be a very large one. Compare that to firing EM into some Caldari ships with a default 0% shield resist, which may or may not have been plugged in some builds. Someone can run the numbers to compare the damage bonus against racial resist profiles to show when it's actually beneficial to fire unbonused ammo on a ship like the Drake. In a PVP Drake Blobfleet scenario this may work, but we shouldn't balance around that.

It's all over the place in terms of consistency anyway - out of the Minmatar missile ships, only the Talwar has an Explosive lock to my knowledge, and none of the Amarr missile ships are damage type locked. Stealth Bombers are probably the only torpedo ship locked to racial damage type consistently, but it's not as much of an issue because with the SP level a lot of players have - they can have all Frigates 5 and take the ship with the damage type they want. It's really just the Caldari missile ships that get screwed, and I don't understand why.

I don't think this would be as big of a sticking point if the range of the locked damage bonus was so large. The Hookbill and Osprey Navy Issue have a "halfway" measure of 2x Kinetic damage, but still has damage bonus to the other types - this gives you CHOICE where the disparity isn't as high, and firing slightly less damage bonused type could be beneficial to exploit a smaller resist hole and be worth time to reload.

So some ideas to try to mitigate this:

• Acknowledge that locking missile ships into one damage bonus type is not creating a beneficial distinction between ships, and is just pissing off the player base. Accept the philosophy of choice in combat, and get rid of racially locked damage on missile ships completely. Most of the ships are differentiated by missile flight time, rate of fire, explosion velocity/radius, or other factors. Continue with differentiating on these terms, rather than locking damage type for missiles.


• Give all of the damage locked missile ships a bonus similar to the Hookbill or Osprey Navy Issue to reduce the damage gap when firing unbonused ammo. Reduce the gap in damage bonus for the Hookbill/ONI even further, or change it to something else to give the faction ships a distinctive flair.


• Change the missile damage application so the ship always deals a percentage of it's damage in the racial type, regardless of what ammo is loaded. For example if I'm firing Nova ammo on a Drake, I could deal 80% of my damage as Explosive, but always 20% of the damage as Kinetic. If I'm firing Inferno on a Bellicose, I could deal 80% of my damage as Thermal, but always 20% of the damage as Explosive. If I fire Scourge from a Drake then it's 100% Kinetic. This would be my preferred option for balance, and could be applied evenly to all missile ships across the races for consistency. The amount of racial damage could be tweaked depending on T1/Faction/T2/Pirate Ammo.

What is the difference between giving bonuses to all damage types, and giving it to none? Also, giving omni damage to a weapons system that applies perfect damage out to a certain envelope is obviously not the best idea..

Other races are locked into damage types too. Lasers and hybrid only deal two of the four types of damage. And there is no max damage kinetic ammo for ACs and arties.

I'll file this away under, 'don't fix what ain't broke, CCPlease!' folder.

A quite note on the recommendations:


Who's pissed? (Other than you, obviously..) I'm fine with it. Along with the other folks I fly with in droves of caracals and cerbs.


No one's special if everyone is special.



Yes.. because that wouldn't be lore breaking at all. Imagine lasers doing kinetic damage.. unless of course you make the case that energy got transferred to mass when it hit your face.

I was gonna add on you're going to be [censored] on by people who don't know what they're talking about, but I wanted to give the EvE Online: Forums Community the benefit of the doubt. That is, until I saw what the guy who sniped my first post said.

I concur.

Please define your definition of perfect.

You seem to forget at some point sig radius determines damage in some way. Which is why it is quite possible to fire at a stationary target...and not get full damage.

Target moving faster than 0 m/s....watch the damage start to drop.


This is what the type specific of missiles fights to make it a legit system. Beyond shooting serp or gurista rats anyway.

Sometimes it loses the fight as missile chuckers can generate tables where using the right type ammo (but not kinetic) is worse than running wrong type ammo of kinetics. IE kinetic against bloods....can pan out better than using em missiles.


That and ccp's stance of because of diversity....where the hell are they maintaining it at. See caldari missile chuckers tank for kinetic. Be missile chucker pack kinetic. Diversity I am not seeing. I tried spicing it up to bring other ammo and hope if kinetic tanked I'd get extra points going for another resist hole. Didn't pan out to where the constant ammo changes to/from cn kinetic worked too well for my liking.


OP even nice enough to make this split damage ammo. I vaguely said lets this have a caveat long long ago. I'd give up my 100% ammo to go split type ammo with a more universal bonus. I'd give it happily tbh.

I'd honestly rather see rate of fire bonuses or damage application bonuses (explosion radius, explosion velocity) instead of kinetic-specific damage bonuses.

There is o such thing as missile damage lock. Accept the fact that missiles are by nature a low damage weapon system, because applying their damage requires no piloting skills like turrets.

I disagree. The only difference in "piloting skills" that turret guys keep angular velocity on their minds and missile guys keep transversal one. But what percentage of pilots really use this? The only true "unskilled" weapon system in the game is drones, like fire and forget weapon. Even drone guys must play launch\scoop game or to maneuver if they use centry drones.

Missiles have low damage and bad damage application. Why it is necessary to even lock their damage type? That's why the most of missile boats use LML and RLML nowadays. For example, compare Navy Osprey and Fleet Scythe. They are near equal ships, but last one much more popular because of unlocked damage type:
Osprey - 254 kills https://zkillboard.com/ship/29340/top/
Scythe - 1938 kills https://zkillboard.com/ship/29336/top/

I am sorry honey but no. You still have to fly your ship and when your opponent is halfway competent she or he can evade missiles entirely. It is not as simple as you think it is.

You may not evade cruise missiles but if you think about this for a second, you won't outrun a Tomahawk that is locked on your boat.
And on top of it there are anti-missile missles which you can fit to shoot them down.

Ships in the same class mostly have equal dps. So ships with unlocked damage types would have better results in playing with resists holes, then for example drake or hookbil. Kinetic damage bonuses give advantages to people who can't fly ships with unlocked damage.