EVE General Discussion

For God's sake, please don't forge the lolEagle.

The caracal is considered to be quite terrible tbh, only rarely used for killing frigates. The Raven has seen greatly reduced use in pve and no sane person flies it in pvp. The only worthwhile T1 missile boat is the drake, especially from a pvp perspective.


There are a few noteworthy options as you go up in terms of T2/T3/Faction ships, but in terms of T1 boats missiles are quite lacking. I have never seen a fleet that relies heavily on ravens. You typically only see caracals on toons less than one month old.

Some missile ships need to be looked into but not only the ships but the missiles themselves too.

As far as the Merlin goes, I would love to have the launcher slots turned into turret slots. Having two kinds of different weapon systems on one tiny ship is what have confused me alot in my first weeks in New Eden and when I first started working for my first level 1 agent I chose two launchers and left the turret slot empty.
I then went from the Merlin to the Kestrel and even if she is a little less tanky, she is a very well missile bombardment ship and I loved here very much.
The Caracal followed this line perfectly later in skill progression, thou she lacks some powergrid for fitting the shorter range heavy assault platform.
The Raven used to be the king of the heavens before someone had that terrible idea of missile tracking.

That pretty much made an end to the cruise missiles as viable pvp weapon platform. Now cruise missiles only have their use in PVE content and such.
As some artifact from the early days of New Eden when missiles were quite powerfull, anti-missile missiles were a counter to missiles and had their purpose. Now they expentionally uber-nerf missiles and I have begged for a very long time to remove those.
Since missiles use some sort of primitive tracking system, every ship is able to evade them by accalerating.
If you really want the Caldari have a critical role in the ongoing wars and taking their primary weapon system as another flavor for fleet compositions, missiles need to be worth their flight time and damage delay.
I grab cruise missiles for long range combat as an example for long range bombardment to reflect on that.
Nobody wants cruise missiles in their fleet battles since at the time they arrive the intended target might no long be there or is by nature so fast that the incoming damage they would offer is pretty much obsolete by then, taking into account that shield recharge themselves over time and at ranges > 50km.
By the time missiles fly to a target at 70+ km, the shields on a target - smaller that a battleship - have already being recharged so far, that the damage missiles would offer is being dimished by range.
Now if the intended target would have a launcher slot fitted with a rocket launcher and defender missiles that would have crippled the incoming damage so far that it is no worth launching them in the first place.
That is why large fleets dont want them coming along.
(Some do it anyway but thats another story).
One thing that could be implemented is that the missiles get "smart" in a way that they use the same kind of targetting system the ship that launched them has and the target list "stored" into them at the point of the launch, so that they no longer fly "senseless in space" if the target they were launched to hit is no longer there, they head on to the next target in the list as long as they have flighttime left (which is plenty on cruise missiles).
Another thing that would make more sense could be that the explosion velocities and explosion radii get tweaked so that ANY missile will hurt any kind of ship a lot more then they now do.
Which was what I ment with "being worth their flight time".
I said that already,
it makes no, zero, 0, null, sense at all that a turret of any size just pops any size of ships approaching them and a cruise missles is just evaded by flying at full speed or even lower for that matter.
Think of it for a moment.
A cruise missle with that amount of payload ( up to 4400 hp damage with 4 grouped launchers floating in a straight line) and applying maybe - just maybe - 3-5% of the payloads worth of damage at 0, zero, null traversial.
Some medium size artillery guns would have just got a new entry on some killboard and the cruise missles dock sadly at a station.
Things go even insanly worse for the citadel size missiles.
The one and only thing a citadel cruise missile / torpedo will ever hit is a planet, moon or very large station in space that doesn't move.
If a Phoenix would fire a volley to a moving titan, the titan can SPEED TANK that missile (yes it can, even with 40m/s).

Another story would be the current railguns.
Railguns used to be on the most wanted list for fleet comabt as "sniper boats" and if the minmatar would not have been buffed to insanity they still would.
Now in order to make those worth their range, the longer range ammo could be changed so that at closer range (Antimatter) would flavor thermal damage a little more then kinetic and as the hybrid ammo increase the range (long range hybrid charges) they flavor less thermal damage (since the shells "travel" longer and thus cool down from the particle acceleration) and more kinetic damage at longer range.
Now the long range shells ( Lead, Iridium, Tungsten, Iron) need to be adjusted but not to the current degree that they drop in damage as they now do, at least not as much.
The railguns (not the blasters) need to be tweaked a little more, maybe even get closer to the values for rate of fire and damage multiplier as the blasters do.
For tracking speed at those long ranges they could get a little more in the range of 1/2 blaster tracking speeds (but that just me ).
For example, a heavy neutron blaster I has a tracking speed of 0.04 rad/s and to my proposal that would give a 250mm railgun I a tracking speed of 0.02 rad/s and so forth.
Medium Antimatter charges now have 14 kinetic and 10 thermal damage and my proposal would be like 14 thermal and 10 kinetic damage and Lead M would do like 12 kinetic and 8 or 6 thermal damage (vaules are an example).

Well thats all for now.

Yeah, Cara is pretty bad. But it has an advantage of being ignored. All of a sudden a close range cara with a rack full of ECM is a WTF moment. Pretty much crap once they figure out what is going on however.

The Navy Scorpion is the Missile Fleet Battleship, the Caldari lack. It's twice the cost of Rokh, but very deadly. It absolutely does need a speed bonus to the Torpedos, to both increase their range to be that of the Rokh with Null ammo blasters, also help to negate the speed to target issue of missiles in a fleet situation. Basically I see the Navy Scorpion as the big brother of the Cerberus and it is the only battleship missile boat, good enough for fleets.

I could be wrong, but why would you need eccm, cap injection and mwd on a Rokh, when they should be far away from their target?
Are you putting blasters on Rokhs?

I'm going to be the grump here that happens to LIKE the split weapon system on the Merlin.

Hybrid ships deal a fixed damage type. Kinetic and Thermal. Against a ship that has naturally high resists, or tanks specifically for this, a hybrid boat's usefulness is limited. However, with something like the Merlin, I at least have the option of sticking EM or Explosive rockets into the launchers.

It's more helpful than you may think.

I'm getting pretty annoyed that the only people who will be able to choose damage types are Winmatar and the Khanid missile boats.

I agree with the idea of just coming out and giving *both* sides of a true split-system ship (i.e. Merlin) bonuses, I don't like the idea of making all of them into dual-system ships though (able to go all-launcher or all-turret). Yes, it means you need more skills to fully utilize the ship, but each race is *supposed* to be working several skill sets and it's only *really* getting T2 onto ships that's significantly more skill-intensive, so I don't really agree about the "hurts new players" bit, at least as long as there are other options (if any ship moves to more of an either/or for caldari, it should be the Condor, anyway). If anything, it'd best to encourage newer pilots to fully develop a fleet's capabilities anyway, especially if they do a good job making all of the races equally capable of a given "major" role (within that race's character, of course...).

For ships like the Ferox and Rokh, I'd rather see them keep the launchers (especially if the nighthawk isn't going to be swapped to use the drake as a base... which IMO isn't a bad idea if they can do it without royally screwing over people who do the inventing) as they add a bit of interest. Bonus the ships for the guns (just a little more attractively perhaps) but if someone finds a reason to use the launchers, good on them. Similar with the turret slots on things like ravens and caracals... sure they're *mostly* wasted but if they don't cause problems, leave 'em. (And if there's some system of balance where the total hardpoint count is blindly influencing bonus/grid/etc. allotments... that's probably what should be dropped)

your post is awesome.





xcept for the bolded line.

Depends on what you fly I suppose. But yeah, I agree. My Caldari tend to be good with drones and missiles. ECM is something of a specialization. I wouldn't expect all Caldari pilots to have it, although you'd likely find at least one per gang.

EDIT: Come to think of it, that's pretty much true of all ewar. Usually pilots don't pick it up unless they intend to specialize or they are older pilots fleshing out their skill trees. At least that's been my experience.