EVE General Discussion

Imagine how the Amarr feel about T2 Minmatar resists :P

Also change it where Caldari Navy hybrid ammo has better optimal and bit less damage and Gallente Navy has less optimal and more damage than they normally do right now.

Just throwing this out here, a laser would mostly cause explosive damage. It would heat the armor up until it evaporates, causing explosive damage to the surrounding area.

To be honest, I'd like to see different damage types depending on whether the gun is fired at shields or at armor/hull, especially with lasers and hybrids.

Ships have seperate resists for shields and armour, so this mechanic already exists. Shields are already naturally more vunerable to lasers and EM damage. While armour is more vunerable to explosive as I recall.

That said, selectable damage types seem like a fairly big advantage with the way the game works but Amarr's lasers hamper attempts to change it from a lore perspective. Amarr could perhaps be revised into Energy Weapons to include particle acceleration weapons which would thus have mass and possibly deal some Kinetic damage.

Hybrid weapons however are merely delivering a payload via magnetic acceleration. There's no real reason they can't deliver any kind of damage as a secondary. Seeing as they're merely a delivery system for a physical projectile.

I know that this thread has a pretty common request in it, has a test run ever been done on SiSi and if not why not?

Actually in Hybrid ammo there's only a couple of those that are interesting and cover all the needs you might have, I'll try to make it simple with examples, however this will be ONLY my opinion.

Rails:
-T2 long range ammo got better, however needs a little more raw numbers because if against T1 hulls it's decent after Rails them selves changes, against T2 hulls it's a little bit weak (personal point of view would need Uranium values)

-T2 short range ammo: now you've got a very decent ammo increasing your tracking by 25% but reducing 75% of your global shooting distance, fair trade off. The increase of tracking makes Rails actually very good at shooting stuff at close range and have a significant DPS boost (seet it like if you were shooting T1 ammo with blasters but better distance/dmg)

-Regular ammo: You'll use essentially Anti Matter, with 2 TE's you shoot stuff at 100km with no tracking issues and will burn it to the ground under 50km, no need any other ammo since T2 Long range ammo covers all other ammo dmg but shooting far than any other one.

-Faction AM: Caldari or Fed Navy AM are the best and cover almost all purposes you might have with your Rails, add some tracking computers with scripts range and you get the crap out of stuff at over 150km, again, once you start shooting after 150km T2 ammo does better (because range penalty in some ammo does not have the appropriate dps values to compensate this)

Rails simple way: Take faction AM, T2 long and short range (T2 short range puts much higher holes on BS ships than faction AM the moment you get in optimal around 25km+), everything else is quite pointless.

Blasters:
After hybrid changes T2 ammo got some love, while long range T2 ammo got a very nice +25% range and tracking bonus dps values are still a little bit under player base expectations.
T2 short range ammo keeps that -25% tracking and -75% range witch is extremely penalising, dps gain vs faction AM is little and doesn't really makes any difference unless you're "All Gank" fitted.

Because of other ammo dps values and T2 blaster changes you don't need to use any other ammo type. Slap some TE's or TC script range and now you're shooting decent ammo at 40km with large blasters witch a good tracking and dps.

Load T2 long range ammo, keep a nice stack of faction AM and a smaller stack of T2 short range "just in case" some large target gets under your nose. It's all you need with blasters.

Edit: Actually kin/thermal is not bad except vs T2 hulls, however I'd agree on one thing is that hybrids should do a little bit more thermal dmg

I've always thought every race should have access to every damage type. In fact the whole EVE weapon setup is pretty nonsensical. Why do longer range ammos do less damage? There's no resistance in space, they would hit just as hard at 500km as they would at 10. Accuracy shouldn't even be an issue at less than 250km or so, the travel speed of all weapons would be limited only by the speed at which it was launched/fired/projected. But fantasy spaceships aside, there's a reason the only mission BS is a Raven: missiles = most effective dmg at every range. The technology in EVE is more than capable of allowing at least some variety of damage for every weapon. And the whole "lasers shouldn't do kenetic" is totally off-base...real lasers actually do thermal with a tiny bit of kenetic (pulse lasers would do the most kenetic, logically). If EVE lasers were simply light-based they would have virtually no EM effect at all, but we have gamma crystals. Gamma radiation isn't light, so clearly "laser" is just a a holdover term, or perhaps Amarr weapons are merely laser-initiated: maybe their tech is advanced enough to shift the spectrum that radically. The real bottom line is, why would any race purposefully limit their options in combat? EVE backstory is rife with "oh, the Amarr did this so Minmatar countered with something". Well, alliances can change so every race would logically be capable of dealing with any other race's navy. Why would Caldari be the only ones determined to "be able to defeat any other navy in the world"? So how about this:

* Rails have three new kinds of ammo types available with main/secondary dmg:

LR lower-dmg EM/explosive (railgun only)
MR avg dmg EM/explosive (railgun only)
SR high dmg EM/explosive (railgun only)

(rail only because there's no logical way a blaster could use this ammo to fire an "explosive beam", at least none I can think of. Probably a good thing..an EM/explosive blaster boat might be slightly uber.)

* Lasers have new kinds of crystals available

LR therm/kenetic low dmg
MR therm/kenetic avg dmg
SR kenetic/therm high dmg (note dmg types reversed. I'm not sure why, honestly...it just felt right. Consider it a quirk of the new crystal technology.)

(If significant kinetic from an energy weapon seems hard to swallow, think of these crystals as creating an instant, high power "reverse tractor beam" effect. Like a fist - pow!)


I see nothing game-breaking here, just makes each race's ships viable in most situations.

It's more like absence of logic :D

I will admit not to knowing that much about projectiles as I have only small projectiles 2 and maybe fit a merlin with an autocannon once.

As far as the bulk of your critique is concerned it was an intentional fallacy as a response to his simplistic and derivative post that didn't actually explain anything.

Also I never said anything about lasers other than that having only 1 good ammo type made them a sub-par choice. Also I specified that volley damage was not being considered as part of the test. The question I need answering is: why do people think giving hybrids explosive damage in replacement of kinetic for close range ammo is a bad idea? Raw dps is nice but doesn't mean much when base resists for kinetic and thermal even on t1 ships is higher than explosive or EM for armour and shields respectively... kinetic and thermal are essentially just secondary damage types and the explosive/em holes need to be specifically targeted to be filled while invuls/nanos fill kinetic/thermal weaknesses passively.

Applied DPS is also higher. PvP boats bigger than frigates have pretty even resists across the board. Drakes are always better shooting Kin than anything else unless you know your opponent doesn't close their EM hole (if they have one). Thermal is the secondary resist hole (which usually ends up being the lowest resist) on a T1 ship.

Base T1 Resists are:
Shield: EM 0%, Therm 20%, Kin 40%, Exp 50%
Armor: EM 50%, Therm 45%, Kin 25% Exp 10%

Patch one Hole (which is normally all you the specific hardeners you have room for if you're lucky), and you get:
Shield: EM 55%, Therm 20%, Kin 40%, Exp 50%
Armor: EM 50%, Therm 45%, Kin 25% Exp 59.5%

NB: Omni hardeners don't matter because we're comparing relative resist holes.

So, Kin/Therm tends to be the best vs T1 ships. Which is great, cause that's what most people fly. (Also wipes out your argument that Kin/Therm are bad against T1 ships).



On to T2:

Minmatar:
Shield: EM 75%, Therm 60%, Kin 40%, Exp 50%
Armor: EM 90%, Therm 67.5%, Kin 25% Exp 10%

T2 Minnie shield ships don't normally have their resist holes patched because the resists are pretty balanced, but Kin/Therm is even with pure Explosive, and I can't think of a popular T2 minnie armor ship off the top of my head, but patching the Exp hole leaves a huge Kin hole.

Amarr
Shield: EM 0%, Therm 20%, Kin 70%, Exp 87.5%
Armor: EM 50%, Therm 35%, Kin 62.5% Exp 80%

Patch the shield and you have a Therm hole. Patch the armor and you've got balanced armor resists across the board.

Caldari
Shield: EM 0%, Therm 80%, Kin 70%, Exp 50%
Armor: EM 50%, Therm 86.25%, Kin 62.5% Exp 10%

Finally, we get somewhere where Kin/Therm's got trouble. But lets look at the T2 Caldari ships. None of the useful ones are tanky at all (except the HiC which will have very even resists). They're all fragile things that will pop very fast no matter what damage you do.

Gallente
Shield: EM 0%, Therm 60%, Kin 85%, Exp 50%
Armor: EM 50%, Therm 67.5%, Kin 83.75% Exp 10%

Another place where Kin/Therm's not great on the face of it. But again, T2 Gallente ships are not well known for their tank.


Blasters have problems, sure. But damage selection isn't one of them. When a blaster boat gets on top of something and gets its webs on, it's usually game over for the prey. When you're putting the amount of DPS blasters can put out onto something, resists aren't all that important. The chart you put up shows the Vindi outdamaging its nearest competitor by 40%. See any fit (actual fit, not empty hull) that's got Kin/Therm resists 40% higher than EM/Exp and the tank to make it matter? Me neither.

And with the Null buff, blasters can finally do something when they're being kited.


Basically, the reason that people are telling you that you're wrong is because just about everything you say is based on one of several faulty premises, and this thread gets pulled up every few weeks.

Finally,
The useful Caldari missile ships don't do much other than Kin damage.
Projectiles doesn't have a good Kin damage source, and Barrage is mostly explosive.
Lasers to EM/Therm which, with their stupendous damage projection (hard to graph because using Lasers right means switching crystals a lot) and high base damage, is magic in PvP.
You are having a very bad day if a blaster boat gets on top of you. Your resists will not save you. (Enyo can do ~450 dps and fit a decent Buffer)