Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello Spacefriends. There is a serious effort on the part of CCP underway when it comes to rebalanacing. One of the areas they're looking at is bringing all the forms of electronic warfare, or EW, into balance in terms of usefulness. After hearing this my mind immediately turned to the under-utilized and highly situational Target Painter, which as of now serves a small niche role in missile boat fleets. After reading some of the fluff text on skills such as Surgical Strike and the like, I realized that a good additional role the Target Painter could serve is in the area of promoting damage bleedthrough.

As it stands now, damage bleedthrough is a rather straightforward thing. If your shields drop below 25% (assuming no training in Tactical Shield Manipulation), some of the damage will "bleed through" into your armor. And this is also true of armor, where damage will start leaking into your structure hitpoints directly. Now this all works as intended, except for one thing: no one ever really worries about it. It is not perceived as any sort of major threat in PvP, and this is where target painters can come in. No one fears damage bleedthrough, and no one really fears TPs. So have target painters increase damage bleedthrough effectiveness! By this I do not mean in some sort of minor way either. If you are being target painted, in my mind small weaknesses in your defences should be "painted", and this should lead to exotic scenarios where you can literally start losing a majority of your armor at 10% shields, even with Tactical Shield Manipulation V. The tactical utility of TPs would be greatly enhanced, as it would effectively bypass some of a target ship's tank.

There are a few issues I can see with implementation, however. Imagine the rage of a cap/supercap pilot when they still had 10% shields (quite a few thousand eHP for a Chimera) but end up dying anyway. Imagine an Avatar that took a sudden alpha hit that brought it down into bleedthrough and later received reps; while able to technically tank the DPS the Avatar could still very well end up dead due to bleedthrough. I am not sure if this is a good thing or not, though it might help eliminate what this poster considers to be an overabundance of capital ships. It would also seem to jive well with the direction CCP seems to want to take PvP in: faster, gank-like scenarios with asymmetric warfare (look at the tier 3 BCs and improvement of the attack frigs first).

Thoughts?

well . . . avatars cant be target painted, but I see what you mean . . .

Its a really interesting idea that makes absolutely no sense from an RP perspective but gameplay > RP anyway

Im not really sure what to think other than this might be an interesting counter to logistics, however it would be more of a nerf to armor tanks than shield because of the way armor reps cycle and the fact that they have less buffer to bleed through to . . .

Get a fleet of torp ravens and a few TPers.

Oh they will fear the TP.

You are right that the TP is highly situational. It only boosts the damage of missiles against targets that are smaller than the missiles are intended to hit, and it makes ships target smaller ships faster.

I think this idea is a good one.

+1

maybe if it allows for more consistent but small amount of bleedthrough, sure. I'd like to see a ship that is holding back a group of attackers at 50% shield lose 20-30 hp of armor and/or structure every time they are hit with a serious, target painted blow. Would certainly bring structure reps into the field!

Seems like a good idea, it would make TP useful even against slow high sig targets, and it would also provide a way to ad least do some damage to active tanked or remote reped targets without overpowering them with raw DPS. Only problem is that ratting and missioning against pirates that use TP will become harder, dual tanking mught become actual requirement instead of something only ignorant noobs do.

+1

To be fair, it makes some sense in RP terms (I am a light roleplayer after all :p). Just read the description of Surgical Strike!

I hadn't thought of how EW doesn't impact supercaps...not sure how I feel about that, but at the very least regular carriers and dreads would still be impacted. As for armor tanks, I already agree that they are underpowered as compared to shields, particularly after the release of ASBs. I do not believe that invalidates my idea, but rather is an indicator that armor tanking in general needs some form of buff. It might mean introducing a new armor-related skill akin to Tactical Shield Manipulation in order to reinforce your armor against bleedthrough.

As for the others saying how TPs are fine as they are, might I point out how the Blackbird is used MUCH more than the Bellicose? The Griffin more than the Vigil? ECM is useful in ALL situations, is not stacking penalized, and is a force multiplier. With TPs, you can only get so much effect out of them due to stacking penalties. Target painting bonused ships are not turning the tides of battles like ECM Falcons are.

target painters have no counters ECM does and is easy to counter, its just that most people dont bother to fit a counter when they can have 50 extra dps or more buffer tank instead.

Bump. Does anyone have any other ideas on how to bring TPs in line with other forms of electronic warfare?

I think this is a fine idea, and no I'm not just supporting a corpmate, I actually do think its a reasonable way to balance TPs and would add an interesting mechanic to the game.