Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Thats an important point too. Remember my suggestion, some 100 pages ago?

Remove missiles completely, reimburse SP, invent a new gunnery system which would be Caldari signature ... or give all hulls a weapon size bonus, and not a specific system one: 5% RoF per level for medium sized weapons and so on ... although then all the ships and weapons would need to be more in line than now, PG/CPU wise.

Well basically thats the point. As long as there are differences, you will not have full balance. And its sometimes a point of view thing if people feel stuff is balanced or not. If one takes just numbers, nearly everything is broken in Eve. If you check the game itself, some things seem to still work ok even if the numbers show something else ;)

Bring balance, ok, but then do it in a way really every race and every weapon system has its fair share. Atm this is not the case.

Crosstraining ? you can use your missiles the same for each race. That's quite even better than turret IMO.

2v1 ? Two missiles boat can spread out to create problem zone for the attacker too...

And yes, that's the main difference between turrets and missiles : missiles have reliant damage on which you have almost no control ; turrets have statistic damage dependant on your piloting and the one of the ennemy. This is by design.

That's something we saw a lot though : people complaining missiles are not turrets, and hence deserve to be OP to be useful. As long as this idea remain, we will have useless debates with no other solution than deleting missiles and making them turrets.

Missiles have fundamental caracteristics, as have turrets :
missiles :
delayed damage ;
reliable damage, independant of piloting ;
time out ;
dps depend on external things (speed/signature of target) ;
destroyable.

As a consequence, damage on smaller targets may be a problem. Long range missiles have precision to hit one class lower ships ; and short range missiles have javelin to hit faster target or at longer range.

Turrets :
instant damage ;
statistical damage (hit chance) ;
tracking ;
falloff.

As a consequence, dps is highly reliant on piloting, and that can be used in both ways. Their ammo allow them to modify range and dps, and hence their dps tend to drop slowly as range increase.

Turret being able to blap smaller targets is a consequence of tracking, as is small target being able to outtrack turrets. Small targets mitigating missiles damage only by being a small target is a consequence of the reliable damage, independant of the piloting skill of the target, as is the inability of the target to protect itself against the missiles.

Now, all these caracteristics have to be balanced, but no one of them should be removed. Then, balance the weapon systems with these caracteristics in minds (and maybe others I forget, it's late).

For HML, making them being so powerful at long range only because turrets are more powerful at short range is not balance, because if turrets have not enough dps to compete with HML, they are obsolete, exactly as you can see on TQ. You cannot boost turret dps too much, because they would then obsolete short range turrets in long short range (web range is the realm of short range weapon system). Hence, we need to nerf HML dps.

Damage application though is not directly comparable between turrets and missiles. They both have their pros and cons for damage application, it's by design. The question is more how you have to limit the dps. For turrets, it's tracking and signature resolution (even though the second is almost useless, but I'd like it to be more relevant), and range. For missiles, it's missile speed, and explosion velocity and radius.

If turrets are balance damage application wise, then we don't care about a turret blaping a frigate in certain conditions. The question is, how bad a missile should hurt a fast target or a small target or a fast small target. The question, of course, also apply for same size target.

PS : balancing is not making everyone happy, because you cannot make everyone happy. You always have someone unhappy and whining.
PPS : I'm realizing you were certainly saying that all systems should have a fair chance or a role. This is it.

being able to swap damage types and ranges mid flight is balanced by long reload times. if ppl manage to swap ammo mid fight with AC's in 10 seconds u can do it with missiles too.



what the hell are u talking about? its not a slip up that gets u alpha'd by a turret, the slightest bit of transversal in a frig at ranges under 10km completely throw even 220's off. u have to be a complete bone head spamming the approach button to take turret damages at such close range. or are u talking arties? that are even worse. avoiding turrets is a lot easier than avoiding missiles and it hurts less too.

also, 'maneuver around missiles'??? what do u even mean by that? can u tell me a method of mitigating missile damage mid flight other than flying very fast in any direction, even directly towards or away from the target? (something u cant do against turrets)

i'm agreeing with bouh, missile skills apply to all races, like drones, not just caldari. when it comes to turrets u have to skill up everything but support skills when u cross train.

its also worth noting that caldari are the quickest to train for. most of the hardcore caldari pilots here are only likely to have missile, shield and spaceship command skills upto BC maxed. Other races have at least 2 weapon systems to max; Amarr and minnie have to skill into BS to effectively run level 4's and; gal and minnie need to skill both armour and shield skills to make good use of their tanks.

it would be reasonable to suggest that caldari maximise their potential sooner because they have fewer tanks and weapons to skill for. it could be argued that caldari should also skill for ECM, but most of the ppl here have given me the impression they haven't.

Base stats for missiles are already higher. And in Tengu your rof is already less than 3 seconds. And that's with HMLs not HAMs.



Amarr pilot with pulse lasers has superior range and damage at low skill levels. Do you know why nobody uses Radio or Microwave crystals? Go try those and you will understand. Even with your all l5 Minmatar character you will have really low dps with those crystals. But of course you can continue sharing your biased opinions in this thread and keep us entertained.

No doubt.

And in any case, when someone cross-trains into direct fire weapons they damn sure aren't sticking with Caldari anyway. Who in their right mind would.

I never mentioned cross training, but it is a worthwhile discussion. Unfortunately it has nothing to do with balance because again, you cant balance around the noobs with 20,000,000 SP, you have to balance around all the bitter vets with > 100,000,000 SP

Allow me to illustrate: if they said "missiles and drones are two weapon systems that take 2x longer than everything else to train, so we're going to reward the players who train for them by making their weapons 20% better than the other weapons" what would be the problem with that?
Eventually everyone would just be flying missiles and drones, and the bitter vets who have tons of SP would be flying them tomorrow!

The game must be balanced outside of the training time it takes to get anything. This is also the reason why cost is not a balancing factor. This is how we got into the titan/super carrier disaster that we have now; they said since they cost so much and take so long to train for, they should **** everything in their way . . . it turns out that doesnt work for balancing.


You also realize that missiles have the negative that you can never avoid all of the damage that a missile ship is going to do to you (unless you fly out of range), so eventually a missile ship will kill you . . . There is no such truth with turrets.

My vengance can tackle a tempest literally until down time because at 10 km with faction titanium sabot his chance to hit me is less than
0.00000000000000000000000000010062%
by comparison, the odds to win the powerball jackpot are about
0.0000000005707%
So it will hit me basically never, but even a torp raven with faction missiles will do 12 DPS to me, which isnt all that great, but my vengance will still go down in around 16 minutes as opposed to . . . never . . .


Missile ships can spread out forcing their gun toting counterparts to fly from one ship to the next to apply full damage taking up valuable time that the missile ships all spend doing full damage.
CF every alliance tournament with drakes, tengus, caracals, cerberus (cerberi?), etc

Gallente isn't hybrid race just like Caldari isn't missile race.

Both races have almost even split between two weapon systems (if you can call drones one).

Gallente: drones/hybrids
Caldari: hybrids/missiles

And Amarrians aren't purely laser users.
Missile ships (even though you are limited to short range missiles), drone boats, laser ships.

And we still have ships that are better with projectiles: Maller and Prophecy for example. At least you can take full advantage of half of the bonuses this way (maximizing tank).

Caldari have a perfectly good hybrid line up, its only the secondary weapon system that has problems.

Gallentean pilots dont have any working medium and large hulls with hybrids . . .

EDIT:
Ok, maybe the Talos . . . but really thats it . . . including serpentis faction ships . . . none of them can ever get in range . . . ever!