Ships & Modules

You mean the same mods making Scorch Pulse shoot over 60km at full dmg and Auto canons over 90?

Well 25/30km would still be the closest range of all close range weapons wouldn't??

I believe that with the addition of 25m3 more drone bay (not bandwidth) on top of a modest increases to fitting potential, ship speed/agility and turret dps (no more than 5%) many of the dedicated blaster platforms would become more than competitive. A reduction to the sig radius of some of the dedicated sub bs blaster platforms would be very welcome too. Now as to what they will actually do? No idea.

As for rail guns... I believe that fitting requirements again should and probably will be looked at. I'd hope that overall dps is increased marginally and their dmg/rof ratio is moved closer to that of artillery.

Well, i guess hybrids will become even more useless, because the "balancing" will completely miss the point.
Such as giving rails even more range at the expense of damage and tracking. And blasters... i´m confident there is a way to make them even more crappy than now and ccp will find it.

they should be fixed like this

while those are good ideas, I'm still partial to the face-melting nuclear loaded shotgun concept, and they should have much, much more damage, bit more tracking and less range.


face-melting dps. that's what blasters should be.



and no, atm they don't do said visage deconstruction damage. they just do a bit more than the next best thing.

One of my friends and I came up with what I think is an interesting solution based on the RP of what a blaster and rail gun are supposed to be

Right now we have projectiles which have versatile ammo uses and lasers and hybrids which trade damage for range.

Our idea is to change hybrid ammo so that it trades range for cap usage but keeps the damage the same.

So the damage on all large ammo caldari navy L ammo (for instance) would be 23 thermal 32.2 kinetic, but antimatter would have -50% optimal and no cap cost increase, and Iron would have +70% optimal and +120% cap usage

This would mean that gallente ships are still the close range choice and Amarr are still the kings of damage projection, but gallente ships can get out to the range of conflag lasers, they just cost around 2x as much cap to do it.

The RP reason for this is that blasters are basically a ball of plasma generated by the round being fired, and it costs more cap to heat the ammo and keep the plasma hot over that long a distance.

For Rails, the extra cap is used to fire the projectile faster off the rail achieving a better time on target and thus more range but the shell is lighter resulting in the same damage.

Thoughts?

Hmm agility would be nice if they also added say a hull based bonus on the blaster boats that gave a bonus to afterburners. Same speeds as the ships fly now just with afterburner instead of microwarpdrive.


This would reduce capacitor need of the ships. It would make it easier to get into range and increase the GTFO chances. They would need to increase tracking as well because the ships would be orbiting at a higher speed.

I tend to think that part of what makes hybrids not working well, are not only ship bonuses (or the lack of those) and ammo types, but also TEs and TCs.

As an answer to the over-whining about lasers before the Dominion patch, the fall-off lovers received an insane boost...esp minmatar, where boosted in every possible way...

Ammo types where boosted for proj...nice

Falloff was tiered so that D180s would not do as much as 425s, but everything was rebalanced so that again ACs would be insanely easy to fit and make-work.

TEs and scripts for TCs got chanded to favor fall-off way more than optimal (counter intuitive, i know).

Though the latter would favor hybrids in comparison to lasers for some long-range fits, the range diff between the performance gains by fitting TEs to AC boats is simply a joke in comparison to using them for short range laser or hybrid weapon platforms.

TEs act as a huge falloff range booster, and tracking booster. For ACs that means being both an effective dmg mod as well as a range and tracking mod, greatly negating the "ACs are penalized by fighting in falloff" arguments.

Pulses can cope with that, having similar total Dps (tho most of the times laser-boats need to add fatter drones to come up with similar dps, even on paper) sucky dmg selectivity but at least great optimal.

Blasters that are short ranged in both optimal and falloff, cannot receive those benefits (aka TEs effectively boosting the applied DPS), as range benefits are small(er) even with Null, and the dmg reduction formula for falloff follows a way steeper curve.

IMHO, there is no way to boost blasters with range etc increases without producing an AC clone with worse dmg selectivity, requirement for cap use etc. As much as I hate getting my beloved canes nerfed, in order to preserve diversity in this game, ACs need to be nerfed SOMEHOW, before attempting to boost anything else to their level. As it is now, ships like the nano-cane can both browl and out-dps as well as kite their counterpants, with the same fitting. Reliably and repeatedly.
Changing how TEs bonus ACs or how they stuck would at least remove a portion of that versatility: high dps @ close ranges, amplified by dmg selectivity for ACs, or kiting with okz dps - not both.

Having 1500 dps Brutixes or frig like tracking Megas (with 2500 dps) shooting at laser ranges is not an answer.