Player Features and Ideas Discussion

An EC-300 drone, which can be used by any ship with a drone bay, is capable of jamming its target for 20 seconds. Long story short: due to the statistical nature of ECM these little drones are sometimes massively OP and sometimes totally ineffective. The average length of a small scale fight is not long enough for the drones to reach their "average jamming frequency". An average taken over all of New Eden makes them look well balanced, but on the level of individual fights their performance fluctuates a huge amount from the mean. I have a suggestion to balance this out a little.

Tweak 1: Change the effect from "target jam" to "lock break".

Tweak 2: Reduce the cycle time to balance out the obvious nerf in tweak 1. Enables drone to reach the expected average number of jams per unit time within the course of the fight, thus increasing reliability.

Tweak 3: Reduce jam strength. For fine tuning of balance issues.

These changes will increase the reliability and reproducibility of results for ECM drones thus making them viable offensive weapons, while simultaneously decreasing their effectiveness as a smokescreen behind which to warp away. (The latter is a result of reducing the time between landing a successful jam and the re-establishment of target lock and point).

Finally, EC-600s and EC-900s are way under powered at the moment because they can be easily destroyed before they have a chance to take effect. Applying the above tweaks to them as well would make them much more viable. Drones which take up the same amount of m3 in the drone bay deserve to have roughly the same effectiveness. Right now, would you rather have a flight of Ogre IIs or a flight of EC-900s? I thought as much.... let the flaming commence!

No, they are not. No ECM boat has a bonus for these drones, they can be used with full strengh from every ship that has a dronebay. And thats exactly the problem.

They are extremly potent and as a consequence of that fare to popular on the battlefield, allmost every ship without dronedamage bonuses uses them. And they are way to cheap.

ECM is a very strong and for many players frustrating type of ewar. It should be limited to ships in my opinion.

Yeah, you allways only use one drone with bandwide 5, don't you? These 5% average summs up fast. And there is no stacking penalty as fare that i know. I'm not talking from 1v1 performance here.

I often fly ecm boats in pvp btw and i also often use these drones. I know how strong they are. And ECM-drones definitely don't add a mesurable increase of power to them. Most of them have 2 or less. Not 5 like allmost every ordinary cruiser can launch.

And the last sentence is just ridiculous. You're a tough guy, eh?


Back to topic:

The change from "jam" to "lockbreak" sounds interresting. But i'm not sure if it's good to put different mecanisms for ECM-Drones and Moduls into the game. Also, some frigates and cruiser have really fast locktimes and would be allmost immune against it.

Perhaps they should simply increase the cycletime and put in a stacking penalty after 5+ drones.

Except you have 5 chances. EC-600s have a 35% chance to jam your 24 ss battleship.

Against a battlecruiser (~18 ss), you have a 44% chance of jam per cycle.

If a typical engagement lasts 3 minutes, you have say, 4 or 5 changes for ecm cycles. (Im assuming some travel time for the ecm drones, in a perfect world it would be 6 cycles)

That leads to a 90-95% chance of being jammed at some point in a bc vs bc engagement. (Say, harb with ec-600s vs a cane) You only need to be jammed a single time to lose a fight, or have the thing you are shooting at warp out.

Calculations: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=probability+of+1+or+more+successes+in+25+trials+with+p%3D2%2F18

Wouldn't lockbreaking instead of jamming make them pretty much useless as a way to break tackle and escape?

oh math
then at least make the starting stats right,where the hell the 1/9 jamm chance came from?:O pulled out of your arse?
an average bc has 20+ sensor strength not 18 (probably missing the sensor strength skill), the lowest is the hurricane with 19,2 with maxed skills,so you fail right there
ec-600 has 1.5 jam strength
chance for 1 to jam is hence 1.5/20 = 7.5% and not 1/9(11,1%)
5 drones makes that to 32,3% / cycle
so 5 cycles makes that ~86% to have at least 1 jamm

now if you are in a hurricane and see those jammer drones and you do nothing vs them ,the only thing you should blame is yourself, you have 5 small drones to kill the jammer drones easily or web+ac they die in seconds

I see 2 problems ECM is most powered ewar out there it works basically against almost anyone. This makes it probably most used ewar type especially for clones.

The other problem of it is exactly that its sticking effect that is very powerful once you have it you are more or less screwed.

Ewars need to be balanced and ecm if it would break a lock it would already mean big loss in DPS for the target especially for BC / BS size ship.

Suggestion of original poster was wise and also took in consideration that the cycle time should be adjusted. Definite bump also would like to see this happen to whole ECM.

why? ECM is a gamble and its ok the way it is.
Breaking lock instead of current jamming mechanics is a clear nerf to ECM, so OP simply started another sh*tty nerf ECM thread.

ECM drones are non-stacking
5 drones does not equal 5 times the base chance of jamming per cycle
it is 5 separate jamming attempts per cycle



[edit]
this is how I've always understood the way they work

No it isn't. If all you can do with drones is break a lock, then you'd better hope you're aligned and at speed before you try to warp or you're probably going nowhere.