Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So one day fitting up some new ships to pew with wile in RvB and trying to decide which guns to fit and actually comparing them to each other and noticing that they all are about the same except for a slight increase in fittings each level along with more damage/range. So looking over all the ships and other mods getting tiercided I don't see why guns should be no different. For the most part there are 3 tiers of guns small, medium, and large within each class of ship guns, so I figured we could change it up some instead of it being more fitting cost and what not we can have guns that specialize in different aspects and keep the fitting cost the same for all three (will get to fitting cost later).

I'll use blasters and rail guns for my examples atm. Using a scale from 1 to 3, 3 being the best in which the guns will be good at and the weaknesses of the gun. Starting with the blasters first, each gun will specialize in different aspects being ether high DPS/Fire rate, Tracking, or Alpha/Range.

Med Blasters

Gun
Heavy Electron Blaster DPS/Fire Rate 3 Tracking 2 Alpha/Range 1
Ion Blaster DPS/Fire Rate 1 Tracking 3 Alpha/Range 2
Neutron Blaster DPS/Fire Rate 2 Tracking 1 Alpha/Range 3

Breaking them down like this will let each turret have its own little niche whether you want a high tracking frig killer or a kiteing alpha ship would offer more flexibility in what your ship could do instead of just using the highest tier of gun.
Med Rails

Gun
Dual 150mm Railgun DPS/Fire Rate 3 Tracking 2 Alpha 1
200mm Railgun DPS/Fire Rate 1 Tracking 3 Alpha 2
250mm Railgun DPS/Fire Rate 2 Tracking 1 Alpha 3

So with long range weapons I would think it should be best to have them all keep the same range based off of the current highest tier gun since they are all long range weapon systems and should just be good at different things instead of bigger gun equal range/dps and fittings. IE using 250mm in larger fleet fights for the alpha or using the Dual 150mm for mission running for the higher DPS.

Damage/Tracking mods

Since going this route all the guns in that class will have the same fittings requirements could lead to OP fits using say Neutron Blasters with lots of tracking and damage mods and still room for tank could lead to a problem. The fix to this would be in when Mag stabs are equipped onto your ship it increases the PG required by a certain percent and fitting TE or TC onto your ship it will increase the amount of CPU the guns cost by a percent. This should help with the forcing player to ether go max gank and have to use fitting mods to fit some tank or to fit other mods into those slots so that they can still fit some sort of tank. On a side note I know this will be a buff for Armor ships and give them more flexible fire ranges which I think would be a great thing instead of them usually only able to fit the smallest guns due to armor taking so much more PG to fit than shield ships.

I think this is a brilliant idea

its a nice idea but then the fitting requirements for each gun would have to be a lot closer together, and this poses some problems. There are quite a few ships that are better off by downgrading their guns to save fitting resources.

For example; a Domi has six turrets, but as a drone boat it is a little lacking in grid and cannot realistically fit 6 neutrons or 450mm's. it generally has to settle for electron/ions and 350mm's. same with the myrm.

There is a similar situation for the Merlins and Moa's, which sometimes fit ion's to allow for oversized shield extenders. its basically a tank/gank trade off made possible by the difference in fitting requirements.

The cane can chose to fit 180's along side a 1600mm plate, or it can chose a 800mm plate and go for the full 425mm (another case of tank/dps)

on top of this, lets remember that newer players do not start out with electronics V, Engineering V, Weapon Upgrades V and Adv Weapon Upgrades IV. Newer players often have to downgrade guns in order to have viable fits.

However, it may make more sense to replace the current Meta tiered system with a niche system. For example a 1400mm 'Scout' artillery could have extended range over the 1400mm Gallium artillery, but at a cost of alpha and/or tracking. Though that would mean we'd need T2 for each variant whilst at the same time pave the way for T3 modules...lol no lets not do that.

like the torp raven? they've had to specifically upgrade its grid this time round to not make the torp raven suck. The option to downgrade would have been useful there.
and the most torp phoon fits ive seen used meta launchers because they couldn't fit T2's. Again, downgrading to keep T2 ammo would have been nice.
and on medium sized ships it is not uncommon to use rapid light launchers over HAM's or Heavies because they use less grid. so downgrading DOES sometimes happen with missiles where it can be.

however, with the way that missiles work (velocity, flight time, damage, explosion radius, explosion velocity) it would not be viable to downgrade at the cost of range/tracking/alpha etc...not unless they make some weird rapid heavy launcher.