Player Features and Ideas Discussion

christ 125km HM drake is ludicrous and shouldnt be able to get half that range how unbalanced is that?
needs the classic CCP nerfhammer not this plastic floppy mallet treatment its now getting instead

And a more important question is how are you ever going to get TE/TC's in when all the missiles will still be over-ranged after this rebalance?

So the range on a T2 Fury Missile from a drake will be around 40k I dont see this as being game breaking. That IMO seems pretty fair to me.

True enough as for not game breaking, but not so much for fairness. Regardless, I think it's more like 46km (63km x .75). Basically, it will pull the Drakes that want to use fury within reasonable lach and huginn range (without all the top-end faction and offgrid loki bonuses, which mechanic is slated for removal). Of course this will all depend on what the new TC and TE %s are set at. I imagine they will have to be pretty weak, like 10-15% on range, so that we have the fury drakes sitting within 60km. Of course faction missile drakes will still probably be sitting at 70km or so, only they will have to sacrifice mod slot(s) and/or rig slot(s) to get that former range back. Thus eating into tank/ehp and/or damage.

I'm not sure that this is sufficient in an of itself to remove Drakes from constituting a fleet comp (unlike all other tech I BC currently not sufficiently tanky for making a serious fleet comp, and the Cane is being emasculated already). So we will probably have to wait for the general BC rebalancing for some meaningful nerf on Drake tanking before that happens. And we get a game again for BSs, and tech II and tech III cruisers to be the necessary expenditure for serious sov fleet warfare (no more cheap drake blobbage).

These changes do though, in concert with buffed 1600 tech II plates, tilt the balances toward the current BS standards, Baddons, Napocs, Maels, and AHACs. And then further when the BS changes come we may have viable missile BS and Gallente BS additions and new possibly mized fleet comps. So, all in all the current Drake strategies will still probably get used, just they won't be as powerful as they are now, being reeled in closer and with less damage potential. And, we may see new use of HAMs on Minmatar BCs as well as on Drakes for closer range BC gangs.

As for Tengus and the 100mn Tengu stuff, they may take longer to get their adjustments.

This all is a work in progress, and even though I think the original proposal was the best, I can live with the current 25% range, 10% damage, and 75% fury range changes. At least something is being done indeed "soon" to end the 3 year reign of the Drake at the top of eve-kill.

edit - and another guy in response to an earlier post of mine brought out the old story of how it wasn't so long ago that he was told to go home with his drake. I think if he engages in honest reflection he will have to admit that it was 3 years ago and that that occurred because so many Drake addicts were bringing purger rigged and spr loaded lowslot draeks to pvp fights thinking they would tank a player fleet like they do npcs, doing no damage worth anything for their fleet mates and being the last to diaf as they discovered that regen wouldn't save them from 30 angry duders on the other side.

I wouldn't quite say "quite" balanced. Missiles will still have a good amount more damage at ranges beyond ~15-25km than other medium long range ship weapons depending on the ship and fittings.

I would say "more" balanced though. And that may be enough, when ship rebalancing comes to BCs, to result in more equal numbers among BC usage stats.

These are the problems:

prophecy sucks
ferox is almost good enough but needs same amount of slots as drake
brutix is almost good enough but needs a bit better tank to make it more useful tank-wise than a talos
cyclone has split weapons system
myrm doesnt have enough bandwidth
harb is too slow with full armor fit

cane is good, drake is good. Range comparison with long range weapons are more reasonable now, missiles still higher. Maybe if medium rails were a bit more useful in terms of damage, there would be a good weapon for comparison. Considering the insane alpha on arties, its understandable their range isn't as great. Beams however I think should be looked at because they are rarely used in their medium form.

People complaining about the drake having too much tank, if the prophecy was useful, it would have a similar tank. A boosting ASB cyclone has more tank than a drake. Dual rep myrm has a beast tank. The only time the drake's tank becomes crazy is when you crap fit it and put like a single ewar module and everything else tank, which (for some crap reason!) is the standard way people fit drakes in blobs. This is why people think they are OP, in blobs they have like 1 ewar mod (a disruptor) and huge tank. If you did that in a fleet of prophecies, they would have 80k tank as well, but its simply the drake's damage projection (now fixed up quite a bit) that made it more prominent in comparison. It doesn't need a tank nerf, really just projection nerf (which is what it got).

Fozzie, I appreciate the response, and I think you guys are doing great work with tiericide. I wonder, though, how you intend to balance HMLs when you reintroduce the idea for TC/TEs to affect them.

Part of your original "sale" for the nerfs was essentially that HMLs would be nerfed, but you could choose less tank/gank to increase the range/tracking to what you had before, and part of that cost would be increased susceptibility to TDs. That, to me, seemed balanced. As balanced as the choice is for every other pilot in the game that uses turrets for their damage application.

By continuing to whittle away at the nerfs--and I'm not saying there didn't need to be some adjustment--how can you look ahead and think that the introduction of TC/TEs won't break or overbuff HMLs and create much of the same problems that existed before these nerfs?

I agree with what you said. I like where the missile balance is atm but if/when they introduce TE/TC it will break the balance that was created. One way I can see it working is if TE/TC would effect exp velocity/radius and if it could make it so missiles flew faster but for a shorter time so as not to drastically increase the range of HML.

Bouh, this is my very last answer to you in this thread about this topic (Raven/PvP): go skill for it and use it. And then maybe get a small clue about how those magic numbers feel on the server in Caldari missile PvP. You will then maybe also see why this game is *not* Drake online, even if the numbers look so nice ...

yep ok my fault i never read properly sorry fozzie thought it said reduced by 75% mpt reduced to 75%