Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If the skills actually did that in a tangible way then I think people would have less objections with them. For example, let's say the skill reduced the duration of a successful jam by 10% per level, then my skill investment would be guaranteed improvement in a fight vs ECM, just like Long Range Targeting would help me vs damps. With their current design however, the skills don't help me at all when I'm actually jammed. They will never enable me to do anything, they will only give me a slightly higher chance to not be disabled and that's fundamentally different.

Most people think the all or nothing dice roll that is ECM is deeply flawed and having to spend a bunch of training time getting a slightly more weighted dice is not a band aid, it's salt in the wounds. It's only going to make people curse your name when their level V sensor strength comp does nothing and they sit permajammed by a dozen EC-600.

Or maybe Target-Painter get more boost to effective counter the skill

or all off grid booster at once...

Oof. It's a bad time to be percep/will mapped.

I think they should seriously consider doing the OGB nerf in much the same manner that they implemented the early FW changes. Except with less warning.

Like none at all.

I feel like I'm missing something with the sensor strength skills and modules... They pretty much have two effects:

a.) It makes you harder to scan down.
-- This only matters if someone is trying to scan you down. Really, the added difficulty to scanners is negligible to most combat ships vs scanners. Furthermore, since their is a cap on your signal strength, unscannable is not achieveable making using mods for this purpose only valuable on specific ships (like boosting t3's).

b.) It makes it harder to jam.
-- This is majorly beneficial when facing ECM, but of very little utility otherwise. In many situations ECM is used ubiquitously (because it is very potent), and a skill to increase your sensor strength is a nice touch.

However...

Why do we have four racial lvl 3 sensor strength skills? That seems out of whack to me.. The utility of these skills, as listed above, are not universally beneficial. In short, I don't care about the individual level of each skill, but the equivalent rank of ALL four skills should be comparable to Signal Dispersion (rank V) or maybe Astronometric Rangefinding (rank 8).

Compare Signal Suppression (rank V) to Long Range Targeting (Rank 2) and Signature Analysis (Rank 1)
Compare Turret Destabilization (Rank V) to Trajectory Analysis (Rank V), Sharpshooter (Rank 2), and Motion Prediction (Rank 2)
There's nothing to compare Signature Focusing too....

Now Compare it to Signal Dispersion (rank V), which provides a skill bonus to ALL ECM jammers no matter the race, to four Racial lvl 3 skills. That's 12 ranks of SP to counter ECM, whereas countering TD's or SD's takes 9 ranks and 3 ranks, respectively. Additionally, of the utility skills that counter TD's and SD's is pretty significant to most situations.

In summary, I really don't care if you have 1 Signal Strength Skill, or four racial ones, but the equivalent rank of them should be inline with the rest of the skill tree. Twelve Ranks is ridiculously EXCESSIVE. Eight ranks is a more equitable number, and truthfully, unless sensor strength starts to play a role beyond jamming probability and signature strength, I think Four ranks would be balanced!!!

Dear CCP Fozzie,

One of the biggest problems that I have with EWAR is that they use Mid slots. I think that they should use High slots, because if they used high slots:
- It will discourage non-ewar ships from using ewar.
- Ewar ships from shield races can finally use shields.
- All races will be made to choose between DPS and EWAR. And each situation and ship will have its own balance (fleet/gang/solo).

Moving them to high slot would likely require too many resources for Retribution, but please consider it for the summer expansion.

However I admit that I am not perfect and thus might have missed a really compelling reason for them to use Mid slots. So can you please give me the reason why they should use midslots?

Target Painter
*Set the TP strength bonus on TP bonused ships to 7.5% per level for T1 and 10% per level for T2

why not 10% for both t1 and t2.seems reasonable considering its not the most used ewar module

The situation with T2 armor plates wasn't really fixed. The buff to T2 plates is mitigated by the weight penalty, making Rolled Tungsten still preferable in most cases (the fitting and SP reqs are also lower for Tungsten plates).

However, the real problem with both high and low meta modules isn't the module specs - the problem is the NPC drop rate.

The drop rate for most meta items is currently so high that supply often exceeds demand, making the price for meta modules much lower than T2 and, in many cases, even T1 modules.

Don't know if Fozzie and Co. have time to tweak this for Retribution, but it does need to be looked at sometime soon. T1 modules across the board are just not worth fitting, and thus not worth building.

I understand the theory, but, in practice, it doesn't work this way.

Older players are much less adverse to spending time to train a skill up to level 5, esp. if they already have everything else trained up to level 4/5. Thus, when you add a new skill, or group of skills, the older players are going to train them up to level 5, without giving it much thought or effort.

For the newer players, you've just added a few more days (or more) of a skill that other players will tell them that they need to get up to at least level 3/4, in order to properly PVP (true or not, doesn't matter - this is how advice tends to work). This means that the new players have to compromise something else - DPS, tank, ability to get into a new ship, etc. - in order to spend those few more days (or more) training up your new sensor compensation skill. They will skill it up to the minimum, before switching back to their original SP plan (or perhaps, will just add it to the end of their current plan).

Thus, after a month or two, the older players will have all of the new skills trained up to level 5, while newer players will most likely have only one of the skills trained up to level 3/4, at best.

Where is the advantage to newer players?

If you want to make newer players more competitive with older players, the goal should be to have *less* skills to train, not more. Adding more skills just makes the situation worse, not better.