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Fit Artillery for Loki, and the right long-range guns for every T3 and you will have a proper range.

And Yes, I could agree that all T3 should have a longer range, up to 80 km.

Ive see a couple of posts earlier about the eefects of TD's, and the NPC's hating drones now.
I thought i would add my experience so far. I run missions in a well fit Macharial, and have been for a couple of years.
My toon is pretty much specialised for the role, and before retribution, there was not a scenario I could not deal with in L4's.

Since the patch i have had 2 experiences that are a direct result of the changes, and both caused me significant problems.

The first was TD's. I dont remember the mission, but it was against Sanha iirc, and I had 2 elite frigs and 1 elite cruiser using TD's on me, and could not hit anything at all. I could not use my drones to kill the frigs, and i could not hit the cruiser with my guns to mitigate some of the ewar. In this instance, i had to burn away to 85km untill they all dropped agro in me, and snipe them.
Im lucky that the mach can tank a rooms agro easily enough to mess about like this, and has the extreme range, even with T1 emp ammo and 800mms to kill them. I do not see how a Maelstrom pilot would have managed to survive this scenario.

The worst, and biggest issue for any BS pilot is actually webs.
Ive had the same problem in a number of missions where you get a spawn on a gate, or a group spawns on you before you can get range. I ALWAYS primary frigs in any mission, if i can kill them at range, they cannot get close enough to be a problem, but if this is not possible, there is no current solution.

You launch your drones to kill them, (which is how a BS kills frigs) the drones die.
I had been trying medium webbing drones, as the frigs dont seem too interested in those. I have had some sucess with this appraoch too. Get them on a frig, set your keep at distance to ~30km, and burn away from a frig to reduce transversal. If you are lucky, and can get about 8-10km away like this, you stand a good chance of hitting a frig with your ships guns.

The problem is, they dont give up, they just sit there at 2.5km and perma web. There is no way of dealing with this, can't pull range at 12.5 m/s and any drones you launch are destined to die before you can get far away enough to try and kill them.


In general, i am REALLY liking Retribution, there are by far more good things added than new problems, in my opinion (Ive alrady lost count of how many times the new cap alarm has stopped me capping out when i forget to turn off my shield booster, lol) .
I am already testing out the New T1 logi ships, and am testing a Target painting Scythe for reps and assistance for problematic small stuff on my alt, but also accept that not everyone has the benefit of an alt to deal with op ewar, so feel some balancing is needed.

I have no problem with more of a challenge, dont get me wrong, but this is not challenging, because im not aware of any means a solo L4 pilot has of dealing with situations like these. (Have just this moment though of the viability of a spectrum target breaker!?, woner if that would buy enough time to pull range on webbing scramming frigs!)

Petition like I did, maybe if there's enough people they'll realise their code has a problem and is ****.

The worst bit is I actually love Retribution, cruiser changes and crimewatch are great (drone agro not so much, no more carrier lvl V's for me).

The only one that springs to mind before Retribution was the respective second rooms in worlds collide, the spies in each room would perma web you and drones would get agro off the rest of the room. At least then as a minnie pilot, you could slowboat out of the main room and pick of groups untill you had managable full room agro, then launch your drones at the spies.

Regarding your idea, although self guided projectiles would make no sense, maybe something that allowed to to fire blind, and you had to manually aim the ship at your target would be viable?

Just had a big laugh thinking about what the Dust bunnies would have to say about dealing with a gun safety every time they got on. ROFLMAO!

Nope, flying minmatar has been gimpy for 7 years out of 9, their buff is pseudo-recent.

Not everybody uses the ONE missile sub that increases range, try using the covert or the sub that lets you have a tiny (now) piece of s*** dronebay. Or god forbid you should wind up in any other ship using HML's. I don' care much about the damage nerf, it needed it but seriously, pre patch precisions got 37k, now they get 24k even though on Buckingham they got 58k. (I'm 1 rank shy of perfect missile range) normalise the range some, the damage aint the issue really.

(edited quote section due to forum whining about it)

Always loved the jukebox. Sound on for last year. Off probably forever now (eh).

Is there any way to reduce the new UIs size of the circle around a targeted item? (not the actual target portrait)
I ask because any more than 4 targeted npcs in close is just a blobby mess of red and circles with little if any value gained.

Following Retribution 1.0.5, I was able to grind a few missions today in the Amarr Epic Arc I've been stuck in since its release. So I figured I'd write about my experience now that I've had a chance to actually try out some of the features.

No more full room aggro, so that's a plus, but tanking a doz npc bs isn't too challenging if you're tanked properly. It's having a dozen web/scram frigs chasing you at once that's scary. Glad that's over. And, it is sorta humorous that the patch notes claim a correction on "the chance percentage that an enemy NPC will use tracking disruption on a player's ship." This would be great news if npc TD hadn't been ramped up to lvl 2000. I found that even with just two ships TD'ing me, my optimal range still dropped to 12km. So what to do?

Adapt or die left only two options really. Snipe or charge. And as I was running the Epic Arc in a Navy Apoc, a beautiful but pretty slow-moving vessel that can't hit near targets well or turn on a dime, for today's pve needs, I opted for sniping. (But not before driving my ship head first into a few Sansha BS to see how close I had to get to actually hit them. A: Less than 2km.) It required a refit, the loss of an armor rig for a tracking rig, the loss of a mid-slot mod for a sensor boost w/ targeting range script, and swapping out the cap-sexy IN Standard and Multi crystals for IN Ultraviolet (I tried a number of variations. UV worked best for me.) But sure enough, if you can keep npc ships at 90-110km or so, (mercifully) they rarely TD at that range.

I started the day with 30 million isk (don't laugh - I live in high sec) and ended my day just shy of 220 million. While this may seem like small potatoes to some of you, for me, a casual player, increasing my funds via missions by a factor of 7 goes down as a pretty good day around here. There are many people still with legitimate complaints, but now that my game is functional again, at least for me, Retribution is a nice expansion.

Observations:

When a npc TD cycle ends, the icon disappears from the overview, but you are still being TD. The tactial overlay graphic also still shows the reduced values even though no TD icon appears next to any npc ship in the overview. I tested this multiple times. Only by increasing range was I able to hit despite no apparent TD.

I play EvE on a 50in 1080p flatscreen at a 1920x1080 resolution. The size/placement of the targeting reticules isn't an issue for my game. I actually like the targeting circle that shows the time remaining 'till target lock. The only issue I see here is the lack of contrast in the graphics. The shield, armor and hull graphics are all thin red lines that on smaller screens may be more difficult to discern from one another. Maybe different shades for each would work. I wouldn't be a fan of multi-colored circles, but I'm sure theres a way to increase the contrast. Additionally, the ship graphics in the reticules are (for me) difficult to tell apart. They all look like dark blobs in a dark area. I wish there were a way to more-quickly ascertain which "pizza" is a frig, cruiser, bs. For my first run out, I actually selected targets as frequently from the overview as I did the reticules. You just can't mistake those size-adjusted red X's.

The criticism levied that explosions sound like a metal door being slammed shut is warranted. The sound doesn't bother me, but this is exactly what it sounds like.

The issue I've been having regarding the option to select alternate crystals from the stacked hud icon has self-corrected. I started the day without the option to switch charges and it just started working. I think it happened when I opened the fitting screen in space and changed ammo from my cargo hold. I had already changed ammo numerous times (even ungrouping and removing the turrets) in station with no improvement.

The 1/3 dmg bug popped up quite a few times. Even though we've been assured its only visual, I just redocked and undocked again to make it disappear.

Several months ago, I wrote on these forums asking for a camera view that keeps the target centered since most of the mouse work we do is to keep the target on screen while orbiting. I have no idea if this has always been an "advanced camera option" or not, but I love the feature. It seems more useful against 1 or 2 targets than a dozen and I'm still adjusting to the lack of a need to micro-manage the view. But when I'm traveling, it's great. How many times have I scanned the edges of this game looking for the yellow gate I'm heading to? No more. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Pretty cool.

I also wrote asking for a low-cap alert. This may seem like a minor detail, but Amarr pilots fly cap-hungry ships with boosters which have to be constantly manipulated. The new cap alert is awesome for my game. It was useful dozens of times today alone. Thank you CCP.

So while I'm feeling lucky...

When I visit the hubs, bountied players are readily apparent in local due to their blinking icons. Just count 'em. There they are. Why then can't a small corp icon appear just above the bounty status? Tonight, the arc took me to a system with only 12-15 people but as it was a dead end with only a few belts I grew concerned at the Lokis and Dramiels I saw flying around. Sure enough, I had to "show info" on each player individually to discover that I was in a nest of dedicated pvp'ers! I don't linger much so it wasn't an issue - this time - but this info could've been much more readily apparent at a glance of local were there visible corp icons. Wouldn't this be useful in game? Anyway, it's just a thought.

(EDIT: After a nap I realized that the ticker would have to be used since a corp's icon can be changed and used by multiple corps. )

I had fun today.

Thanks for reading.

Yonis Kador

The anti weapon system for gunnery would be tracking disruptors! Fair enough you dont get the projectiles blown up, but they just dont hit stuff instead. Seems about fair to me!