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Railguns alpha or dps guns
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elitatwo
Zansha Expansion
#1 - 2012-03-29 13:07:08 UTC
Since the announcement of the hybrid turrets buff, I started to investigate both of the hybrid turrets and while blasters are cool railguns still are far away from cool.
This has been discussed before and I spare you most of the issues that come along with railguns in general.
Now most of us will agree that they have little (little != none) purpose in pvp engagements and I would love to see that change a bit in the future.
The top advantage of railguns is failry obvious with their range but despite that they cannot be used for most engagement, where you take speed and tracking at close / closer ranges at 0 - 10km.
The tech2 ammo for them even makes them worse even with their range and tracking bonus they get.

Remember tracking of a low value still wont make them track that much better in closer ranges.
(example: large 425mm tech2 railguns with a tracking of 0.01 rad/s + 25% tracking with javelin charges now get 0.0125 rad/s which is still low and so on).

Now my idea is to either make them a real alpha guns or dps guns and not a terrible choice in between the two in which they do both very bad.

Railguns should either get a large damage buff and leave the tracking as they are (as alpha guns)
OR get their tracking and rate of fire changed so that they get close to thier blaster bretheren at longer ranges as a long(er) ranged dps guns.

However CCP decides, please DECIDE between the two.

That said, the longer range ammo should be changed along the way.

The range+ ammo lacks a lot of damage and after analysing them in pve engagements I tend to use none of them below lead ammo despite their longer optimal ranges.
After a while I only had antimatter and thorium charges with me, since I didnt want to change ammo every 10-20km.

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mxzf
Shovel Bros
#2 - 2012-03-29 15:38:10 UTC
The issue rails have is that fights don't happen at their engagement range because of on-grid probing. At the range that fights do happen at, they're out-shined by arty and beams which have higher damage while the range bonus of rails goes to waste. If rail fleets could safely operate at their engagement range, I think they'd be more useful.
leviticus ander
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#3 - 2012-03-29 17:34:04 UTC
mxzf wrote:
The issue rails have is that fights don't happen at their engagement range because of on-grid probing. At the range that fights do happen at, they're out-shined by arty and beams which have higher damage while the range bonus of rails goes to waste. If rail fleets could safely operate at their engagement range, I think they'd be more useful.

ya, I've been thinking that they should up the min warp range to something like 1000km, so that sniper fleets can still be effective.
mxzf
Shovel Bros
#4 - 2012-03-29 17:43:20 UTC  |  Edited by: mxzf
leviticus ander wrote:
mxzf wrote:
The issue rails have is that fights don't happen at their engagement range because of on-grid probing. At the range that fights do happen at, they're out-shined by arty and beams which have higher damage while the range bonus of rails goes to waste. If rail fleets could safely operate at their engagement range, I think they'd be more useful.

ya, I've been thinking that they should up the min warp range to something like 1000km, so that sniper fleets can still be effective.


I'd disagree with that. There are many times where you want to warp around on-grid or at sub-1000km ranges for valid reasons. A few that I can think of off the top of my head:
Gate safes
Warping from one side of a large asteroid belt to the other
Warping from one side of a mission pocket to the other (especially relevant for sniping ships)
Miners using above-belt BMs as turning points to warp down to a specific part of the belt

There are many valid reasons for using short-range warps, I don't think they should all be nerfed just to fix this specific issue with one certain type of fleet composition.

I think a more reasonable thing to do might to be to tweak combat probes so that they can't lock on to ships on-grid with a gate, station, POS, or sov warfare structure (with an error message about interference due to proximity to blah, blah, blah). Something along those lines to make it so that you can't do a short-warp to a sniping fleet via probes, but it doesn't break short-warps themselves or combat probing.

Edit: there's also the fact that removing on-grid warps completely makes sniping fleets OP since you can't do anything but slowboat to them (with the tweak that I proposed, you can still send hero-Intys running for the fleet to get warp-ins on them).
Strategos
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#5 - 2012-03-29 18:36:23 UTC  |  Edited by: Strategos
I've got agree, rails are pretty bad these days. Thankfully blasters were buffed but even then gallente bs's just aren't used much anymore since amarr and minmitar are just so much better. Amarr pulse range hits to stupid ranges and minmitar arties do stupid amounts of alpha.

The blaster buff is great for smaller ships but did nothing for gallente bs's really. Not to mention gallente are so slow, which means they need to perma run mwds just to be in range to hit things.


There is a reason everyone uses arties or lasers right now. Gallente have really had no impact anywhere for awhile now though, long enough that smart people have cross changed out.

Will have to see how the micro jump drives work out. Warping 100km might help, but imo it wont make too much of an impact in how the modual has been explained so far. 2 minute cd is deathly high. It should work on cap with no cd, even then it still makes the range bonus (gallente) worthless because youre only jumping 100k. This also means you're leaving your entire support fleet behind which is once again, a death jump basically.


Either way, I don't see much going into helping gallente battleships any time soon since the the blaster buff, ccp probably think that was enough for the forseable future, even though it did basically nothing for bs's.