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So, 3 years, thousands of complaints, another 37 pages of "I think you need to look at this harder" and you STILL THINK this is a good starting point?????

Ideas that propose to give blasters some form of area damage are not thought through. There have been proposals a couple of pages back where a sort of "focused smartbomb" was proposed. How do you discriminate between targets? What if a fleet member is close to the target (maybe also with blasters)? Or it only applies to targeted ships, which would be one solution, but then you open another can of worms: What about the mate I have targeted because I want to remote repair him, or tracking link him or whatever? This would also put target count limits on ships in a completely new perspective due to a single weapon system requiring multiple targets. Will 5 (ish) targets be enough for a cruiser sized blaster boats? what if he wants to shoot at drones, where a single enemy already brings 5 of those (plus the enemy himself)?

It also means you basically can't use blasters in high-sec (depending on how you decided you want to distribute the damage), or your target just parks a cloaked ship (non-WT) close by just to get you concorded. There's a reason nobody uses smartbombs in high... Or he decloaks right before your salvo if it doesn't work on cloaked ships (generally AoE weapons do work just fine though).

It would also likely cause additional server stress. You'd have to check if you hit a target for every possible target. This includes selecting the target (via cone ot proximity to actual target), then performing normal "hit checks" for every one of those. They only relatively recently reduced the server load by grouping guns as those are not as cheap to perform as you might think!
Just to put the magnitude of this problem into perspective: Imagine 20 blasterboats shooting at a group of "whaterver"-target-ships, grouped close enough that you have a chance to hit them all. After this change it would need to calculate which ship is a target for 20 shots and 19 potential targets (one is the primary target, no need to check there), then have hit/damage checks for the resulting ships (I propose half as an example). So we'd have:
20 shots with 19 potential targets + 10 hit checks each = 3800 checks (!!!!)
Currently a salvo of the blaster fleet would cause 20 hit-checks. That's it...
Now have a guess what will happen with 200 ships on each side...

If you somehow derive if the surrounding ships are hit from the hit check on the primary target you'll get exploits. Say a fleet is attacked by a skirmish-like gang of smaller ships they can't properly hit. They start shooting one of their own ships (heavily tanked, potentially with logistics or something) to hit the surrounding smaller ships.

All in all: incredibly STUPID and IMPRACTICAL idea!

Rails, as they are now, are really only useful for the +150 km ranges. Landing even 100 km away from the targets would most likely put the rail fleet at a severe disadvantage. Landing at anything closer than 60 km would in most cases spell the death of the rail fleet, as those ranges start to see speed out-tracking rails.

Opting instead for 20 km to 60 km deviation from desired warp in point would be a better potential fix, but would almost always spell death for a FC that warps his fleet; as the fleet could end up scattered over an area of 120 km. This could still work as a fix, however, by not applying the deviation to ships in fleet warped to. Thus forcing someone to act as a dedicated prober in hopes of quickly getting to a good staging point for the rest of the fleet.

This is approach would be making rails better by trying to shoehorn the extreme range role back into the game, and while CCP could take this route, I'd prefer a more elegant solution in tweaking the ships and modules themselves.

What about the introduction of a third T2 ammo for both hybrid systems? Something that gave strong damage (somewhere near antimatter and plutonium) at 0% range bonus. This, combined with a modest increase to railgun damage (at the cost of some range) and blaster tracking and optimal (at the cost of some falloff) could go a long way towards fixing hybrids.

Yes, Yes, Yes. with these changes I will now finally have a point having large railguns on my domi instead of just afking and letting my drones do all the work like others i know who fly them.

Overall I think that a few additional fixes could be thrown in and not make everything super crazy right away.

I really like the idea of blaster boats getting a MWD speed boost at the expense of additional cap drain - Could be the extra sprint mechanic that everyone seems to agree that is needed. (Remove active repper bonus on the boats)

People are saying that if the ships are going faster they'll need more tracking so give blasters just that. Even more tracking to make sure that it's not going to hinder blaster boats even more to make them fly up to something and miss most of it's shots because of it. (Not giving an actual number because personally I have no idea what is exactly needed)

Also on the issue of rails being useless at super long ranges possibly change the warp distance requirement. It was mentioned in a thread not too long ago that I read, something in the area of 200km distance required to warp so Hybrid Rails may have some further use in game again for PvP.

Hi Tallest I would like to bring a couple of things up.

I have noticed that the fleet weapons tend to have several traits in common. Range between 35-70KM, accuracy and High DPS/Alpha.

To that regard the major choices are Heavy Missiles, 1400mm Artillery and Scorch Weapons.

Rails meet the range requirement but even with the buff this is how they will compare to the above.

* Mega Pulse Scorch, less Dmg, less accurate.
* Heavy Missiles, Large Rails slightly more Dmg but way less accurate. Medium Rails do not even come close to comparing range or Dmg wise.
* Artillery, Lower DPS and way less Alpha.

Beams suffer as well. Having less DPS then Scorch and less Alpha then Artillery.

If you want better balance then you need fleets using LR Weapons again. You have to make 1400mm less OP and bring Scorch back to a Short Range Weapon.

If you do not Beams and Rails will just be a PvP foot note. Along with it the Rokh, Ferox, Moa and Eagle will never be the fleet ships they are supposed to be and will always be squarely in that suck column. You should also look into a Damage Bonus as is standard for every fleet ship.

Another thing you should look into if you are going to put in the time to really fix Rail Gun Ships would be to give Gallente a dedicated Rail Ship. increasing Hybrid Tracking you could throw the Megathron, Deimos, and a Proteus Sub system a 10% Optimal Range Bonus. Or remake the Hyperion out to be one. Really any change that gives Gallente a viable fleet choice would be nice.

Feeding back as requested:

This does not address the key issue; kiting.

Cannot get into range
Cannot dictate range
Cannot lay down effective DPS

Why you have decided to ignore this key issue is beyond comprehension.

All this says to anyone wishing to fight a blaster ship is: "carry on using the same tactic you've been using since we introduced the speed-nerf."

Blasters were designed in a world where webs slowed ships down to max 90% and mwd would only turn themselves off if the pilot pushed the button.

Webs are still at 60% and the enemy can turn off someone's mwd if they fit a scram.

Blaster will therefore be at perpetual arms length to any ship, outside their optimal, repping armour until death.

Fix the ships using bonuses and attributes applicable to reversing the speed-nerf.

CCP Tallest...please please please please look into the root cause of the speed nerf, hopefully you will find out why the speed nerf was introduced in the first place.

Go through the dev blogs, looks at the feedback, look at the changes that were made PRIOR to the speed-nerf concerning agility, mass and all related hull upgrade modules.

Where we are today is a direct result of this, not the speed nerf; that was purely an attempt to correct a mistake, and it was very poorly thought-out.

What made the dev blog on the speed nerf worse was it was written in the style of someone who lost too many ships to a blasterboat, and changes the rules to affect their style of play - I'm not insinuating this is the case, purely that the dev blog was written in that style.

AK

as an interceptor pilot, im none too happy about this. if the taranis and ares arent getting a speed boost, why the agility hit? ceptors need agility.

that said, if you remove that god aweful turret from the roof of my taranis, ill call it even. i havent even flown the thing since you put a hat on it :( not all of us fly fully zoomed out.

that said, hybrid improvements look decent, looking forward to testing them out on sisi. winters gonna be alot of fun.

Maybe I'm biased towards my own question? But I thought it was fairly relevant to ask for clarification on the rational for being hesitant in adjusting hybrid platform ships?





Why? Could you elaborate on this please?

Speaking of rigs....

In the past, I almost never bother using hybrid weapon rigs, since the PG penalty on top of the high PG req of hybrids is severe - esp. on a gunboat with 5-8 PG hungry blasters or rails.

But, with the reduction in PG for hybrids, it looks like the gun rigs can be used more often now.

A quick EFT test of a T1 Hybrid Collision Accelerator on a old Brutix loadout, with seven T2 heavy neutrons, looks like it will add around 7% to the DPS. The T2 version looks to add around 11%.

Another quick EFT test on an old PVE mission rail loadout showed that the 30% cap reduction of hybrids allowed swapping a CCC rig for a HCA rig, one for one, boosting DPS while still remaining cap stable. Also, the T1 HCA rig is much cheaper than the T1 CCC rig - so, more bang for the buck.