Ships & Modules

Transversal is the relative distance between two ships (gain and crush).

It is the primary thing that make Missiles and Turrets different (together with the element of chance).

Missiles consider the speed of the defender but not the attacker.

Turrets consider the speed inbetween the defender and the attacker (from there you create radial and angular).

That means a Turret ship have two things that interact with TD: counter-modules and movement.

If you create counter-modules for Missile ships but do not deal with transversal they can not deal with accuracy.

Distance itself, a Missile ship can deal with same as a Turret ship: with modules and movement (move into reach).

This also mean that for a new module you introduce: either TD affect only distance, or you rewrite missile accuracy.

In the interplay of distance: Missiles have alot to gain and little to lose. I prefer not touching it.

If you want to give Missiles transversal: I don't mind the difficulty level rising. I do mind the mechanics streamlining.



This is you literally saying you wish to balance the entire game based on popularity and not on performance.

That means you don't care about what is good or bad, powerful or weak. All you care about is what is popular.

If the largest nullsec block decided to fly Deimos, and made them rise to Top20 you would want them nerfed, correct?

Then you don't care about how stats or figures relate, just wether to take and give. Not what makes it popular or how to balance that. In fact you might as well remove the ship and introduce a new one. That would be an easier way to keep things fresh from your perspective. All you want to do is punish what's popular, like whack-a-mole.

No matter how you turn that picture, i will consider it stupid and not the way to design a game.

I belive a game should be balanced around figures and how good they are: what potential they have.

Not wether people are smart or stupid enough to realize that potential .

That also mean i am interested in what make ships popular: is it the weapons? is it the bonuses? is it the slots? is it how they scale? is it what they cost? If you only care about popularity, those are irrelevant to you. You could grab any one.

The reason is don't buy into that and "mischaracterize" you is that you keep grabbing ineffective ends (like TD's) and inferring the relation between power and popularity while raising good-bad balance concerns yet root them in popularity (ie., "this is popular, it must be good", it's usually true but not by principle and it doesn't translate to it's "too good" or "this is impopular so it must be bad"). That conflict is what makes me think you need help with perspective .

As always, if you want to deal with the popularity of Drakes - screw with insurance and BC rigs. That's the most effective method with the least workload and collateral. Don't try to drum up issues that aren't there and create new problems.

I do operate in low-sec and yes, missiles are indeed alive in low-sec. Even though I still would say that turret based weapons are still more popular. Otherwise, nobody would bother to bring some TDs with him.

If you take a closer look at the ships which using missiles and TDs you will notice that these ships usually suffer from low DPS. So if you are flying an EFT-warrior DPS-only pimp ship and you die to a low DPS missile boat just because you haven't been able to counter his TD and apply your DPS then you deserve to die. Get rid of some of your stupid DPS and start thinking out of the box. Neutralizers for example work very nicely against ships using TD's. Afterburner works good against missiles in general, especially if you are in a smaller ship. So stop crying and start adapting.

on Topic.


- TD or missiles bad
- Reducing missile damage through a mod good (just not the TD)

- I prersonlay would like to see a (mid slot) Goal getter that uses ammo (projectiles would be a good choise)

On statistics.

conclusions on statistics only is asking for trouble, ask the Coca Cola company.

considering the hight number of drakes and Heavy missiles, one need to take with him.

1) unlike turrets you have limited choise, if you look in the statistics and take medium projectile kills, you find the numbers far closer to eachother.

2) The Drake is the only t1 missile BC. in a game where t1 BC's dominate as a whole, that has 4 main weapon platforms only 1/12th of the available t1 BC's fires missiles as it's main weapon, so when you use missiles you can't go arround the Drake even is you wanted to.

None of which I claim to make a particulair conclusion, but it should be considered before one makes one.

That was my point: with turrets you can blap a frig. You'll never do that with missiles. Precisions are a joke atm. Did you really try them in PvP? To kill a frig fast you need a specialized fitting against frigs. Getting rid of hard tackling frigs very fast is the issue here. Really important when fighting outnumbered. Seeing that it's only fair that it's possible for frigs to avoid getting *blapped*. After all it's about piloting skill then.



While the turret ship is vulnerable to TDs, it can do alot more damage compared to a HM Drake. This is one counter to missiles. Depending on luck, situational awareness and piloting skill a turret pilot can absolutely rampage a missile ship. Hint: to fit a TD a Drake loses tank. Now the turret ship only needs to be faster or in a good position to mitigate or eliminate the TD effect. Which is possible.

A pulse Harbinger with INMF deals twice the damage compared to a HM Drake. A HAM Drake deals the same damage like said Harb but only against other BCs and up. Against smaller targets it needs webbing and painting support. It's all situational at the end. Which is cool, isn't it?

I don't claim missiles are bad compared to turrets. They deliver consistent, reliable damage which can't be countered that hard a turret can. In certain situations this is way to go. Fleet fights are an example. If you, however, need flexible but still maximal damage in different situations then turrets have the edge imho. At the risk of beeing countered.

Tracking enhancers really do little for TDs, they are going to be there anyway, its a very binary situation. Am I faster than the guy disrupting me? Yes, no problem. if no, problem. I've never looked and been like "Man I'm getting tracking disrupted, good thing I have three tracking enhancers" You are flying manually to hit anything at that point, and if he's faster and in an orbit , you are likely screwed.

As it applies to missiles, that is easy, the guided missiles you understand that guided missiles are often controlled by the firing vehicle, thus "lore" aside, if it screws up the computer driving the turrets it should also screw up the missile. Make a TD on a missile platform jack the explosion velocity down. The missile still hits damage is still done FULL damage is not done.

... and don't give me that AB crap, even in Low no one uses AB's on anything but frigates and those frigates damn sure aren't running in gangs, because they would get destroyed by anything they didn't land on.



Missiles don't need a large scale buff in any way, you could argue the opposite, easily

...and in that regaurd, missiles HAVE a tracking enhancer, its called a target painter.



Transversal only gets you so far. Sig radius counts as much or more depending on range, this is why you can speed tank titans at 50km, with a MWD'd Vagabound (and yes I've done it, more then once) but a maelstrom with 1400mm arties that have WORSE tracking then an XL Mega pulse with an officer fit will clean your clock.

Yeah for a third of the range, medium pulses with scorch only hit for something like 25km, unless you start stacking on tracking computers, and even then40(sih) is as far as you are pushing that if I remember right.

I have a Drake that does 400(ish) DPS at 110km, do that with a medium pulse (you can't)

You can get large pulses to go that far, but you need an Apoc to do it.

If you're comparing lasers and heavy missiles, use at least large turrets.

And yes, there's way to get under Apoc's guns. If ship uses large beams and you can't get under his guns with frigate you're doing something wrong.

What you have done is selective quoting though. The remark about TE was apart of a sentence that contained several other factors, most notably transversal. No one argued that TE cancel out the effect of TD, merely that they were a modifer in the interplay between TD and several other factors. Let us get back to that, and how, after the next quote:



So, how do the Missile user "jack the explosion velocity" up, or use a mitigating modifier to make sure the TD doesn't jack the velocity down as much? More importantly, how do he do that through piloting his ship?

This is extra important when you look at your own comments in the first quote. If a missile have no transversal and we introduce a "weapon specific" TE to do deal with the event of TD, how will the Missile differ from the Turret?

I've said it several times over now, Missiles have no transversal so you can't just shoehorn on a TD (or TE-) effect without understanding how it would impact an equation that have no transversal modifier.

Why is that so hard for you and Lili to understand? It answers why an AB impact Turrets and Missiles differently, while other things like MWD, Webs and Painters affect them more levelled.

Let me try it again:

Missiles can't deal with a TD-effect's accuracy-component through piloting. They can only deal with the range-component through piloting. That means a TD-effect for Missiles either can't include accuracy components, or the missile equation have to contain a transversal modifier (or other ways to balance that out). Else, you get exactly the situation you describe in the first quote with how TE don't "cancel out" TD. What TE do though, is interact with transversal giving you the potential to cancel out the TD through effective piloting. A TD do not effect the "gun resolution" component of Turrets, that you refer to in the last quote (4). It's not the best comparison: but TD on Missiles would be more similar to TD on gun resolution. If someone said to let TD affect gun resolution i would equally be against that, because it's arbitrary and bad.

I'll give you a simple overview:

My turret ship is faster than my opponent: regardless of propulsion, i can nullify transversal.
My turret ship is slower than my opponent: regardless of propulsion, i can mitigate transversal.
My turret ship kite a 100mn setup at 2km/s: both ships go the same speed, transversal is null.
My missile ship is faster than my opponent: in the event of an AB, he can still mitigate damage.
My missile ship applies a web to my opponent: in the event of an AB, he will still mitigate damage.
My missile ship applies 3 webs to my opponent: in the event of 100mn, he will still mitigate damage.

If the second line there feel complicated for you, look up Hatsumi Kobayashi's comment on BS alignment from another recent thread. Sadly, i can't remember the name of it so i can't link it, but find his profile and list his recent posts and i'm sure you'd be able to find it within a reasonable timeframe.



Let's see: 10mn Tengus (mostly null), 100mn Tengus (low and null), 100mn Loki/Proteus (and DP, low and null), 10mn Loki (your alliance?), AHAC Zealots (pulse and beam, low and null), AHAC Ishtars (10mn and DP, low and null), AHAC Legions (low and null), 100mn Gilas (low and null), 10mn Bombers (mostly null), DP Deimos (low and null), DP frigates of various kinds from Dram to AF to Tech I (low and null) etc.

That's alot of no-one's, making movies and ending up on BR's.


No one said they needed a buff. I said giving Missiles a TE equivalent would be a big a buff. I don't want them to have that. A TE for Missiles is even more stupid than a TD against them. It's a Drake-buff, and i would like the Drake "nerfed". I just want to see the actual problems with them adressed, and not something inaccurate that will only make things worse. Drakes are not popular because they are "good" (performance), or because TD don't counter HML: Drakes are popular because they are "cheap" (cost-effect) and because their bonuses translate well into big fleet scenarios of "projection-buffer" (large scale).

Letting TD affect missiles do not deal with the cost-effect of BC or the hegemony of projection-buffer at large scale.

Attention to eg., insurance systems and rigging deal with the cost-effect of BC.

Looking at options to reinvigorate the solo-small-medium scales (by introducing more ship-ship interaction and other solo-small-medium targets) deal with the hegemony of projection-buffer.

On a solo-medium scale there is no problem with the Drake, and people (like Lili Lu) who belive there is have yet argue that specific point. They still simply refer to popularity, which have nothing to do with Drake performance in solo-medium scales. Nore their popularity there as we don't have a metric for that.

Welcome back Nosrevibus. What do you think of the proposed missile changes? I envision another set of dissertation posts from you. At least I doubt they will be the garden variety why you take my candy away that others are posting. Seems it is as I predicted, sorry for you, missiles will have something to overcome soon, just like turrets and drones.

I'm currently laughing at all the qq posting in that thread. People can't even recognize some of the buffs they are getting (like faster missiles, better lights, better tech II performance) and they're all focusing on the nerf stats. CCP is steering the Drake toward closer range and possibly HAMs. It's just that now I won't be the only one wishing they could get to rebalancing BCs and tech II ships faster.

Ah the sweet smell of change in internet spaceships.

oh and https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1936782#post1936782

second edit - btw I answered your specious argument that my position is simply against popularity, again, read up. Seems CCP does not see Drake usage as popularity driven either.

I just see a (sad) day when 90% of ships all fly around with

a) Nos / Neut
b) TD's / TE's
and in the case of shielders c) ASB's


boo hiss down with cookie cutter items. o.0