Player Features and Ideas Discussion

And what of non-equal-class engagements, which you conveniently ignore? Ah, that'll be where the unreliability comes in...

Current Nos simply requires you to glance at your cap % and estimate the likely cap % of your target. What could be simpler, more predictable and hence more reliable? With future Nos you will have to add extra layers of calculation in - how big is the ship that I'm flying, how big is my opponent?

Added complexity such as a consideration of ship size decreases the ease of prediction of results and therefore decreases reliability. QED.



Look, I appreciate that you may think that heavy Nos doesn't exist, because almost no-one uses it. But it does exist, and you need to explain why you think it's so overpowered that it needs nerfing into almost uselessness. Both you and the Ranger guy have ignored this point, every single time. Why? Is it because that you don't actually care about heavy Nos, that you're only looking at this from the POV of a frigate pilot using small Nos, and you simply want a return to old-style self-fueling Nos, no matter just how terrible an idea that was shown to be?

Since you're trying to snag me out of the other thread, I'll post here for you!

I really don't have a lot to say. We aren't trying to do a full cap-war rework here. I think this change will improve NOS use significantly, and open doors for some ships that have struggled most since the nerf (Amarr recons). The fact that there is so much debate here indicates to me that its hard to say exactly what the effect will be, and I think that's good. Lets see what happens and if things get worse or stay the same, we'll make more changes.

" I think this change will improve NOS use significantly" amongst frigates and lower NOS use amongst BS's

There fixed your typo there.

I think people have concluded that already, it's the non-addressing of the Heavy NOS and nerf they received that is of most concern now. There are simple improvements that can be made to give them a fighting chance of ever being used again after this change, the primary one being their obnoxious fitting when compared to the infinitely more useful (after this change) heavy neut.

Being an admirer of logic, I must ask that we make Nosferatus,
"usable" against non player characters,
at least, some sign that the targeted ship is affected its empty capacitor (lights go out).

On the topic of answering the questions...
Yes, go for it.
At least trying the idea, will give us results and feed back....
Who knows, maybe the % approach was better.

Opinion on Nosferatu moduels.
As long as the aggressing ship has space left in its capacitor,
then let it [by all means] keep sucking the target ship dry.

What the helm is with all this "lets turn weapons into feathers" ,
and stuff guns with pillows, for they we might hurt some ones feelings...

Those are weapons I jam onto my murderous ship,
with pre determined malice,
yet I have to suffer these fools that start over reasoning everything in the name of the insanities of BALANCE;
resulting in nosferatues that have to follow an entire proposterous encycopedia of rules.

End:
Thank you for asking.

NOS changes - "we aren't trying to do a full cap warfare re-work here"
energy weapons - "we aren't trying to do a full re-work here, that comes later"
etc
etc
etc

Clarification :: I have 500/500 cap, my enemy has 400/400 capacitor at start.

I activate my lazers and pew pew and it goes down to 200/500 cap, my enemy has 400/400 still, and I start draining. As soon as he goes below my capacitor available, my NOS stops successfully draining. Is this how it works?

Also, some kind of effect would be nice to let us know if a NOS is working rather than having to guess on the capacitor gauge. :-/ I know this is a GUI design issue, but ask.

Also, now that you're fixing this. Do you think you could tweak up the amount of cap that a NOS pulls in? Some of the numbers are pretty pathetic for the requirements. :-/ Just a 20% increase in cap drained would help a lot.

Hard? No, it's dead easy to predict the effects.

a) More frigates will fit more small Nos.
b) Small Nos will be more effective as an offensive weapon and start intruding into neuts' role with its less restricted self-fuelling ability, but its abilities to defend against hostile neuting will not change, because fitting requirements, cycle time and drain rates haven't been changed.
c) The effects on Amarr recons will be minimal. In organised gangs, full neut fits will be preferred because they're much better at depleting an opponent's cap and cap transfers from logi are normally available.
d) The only time that a battleship will fit heavy Nos ever again will be in suboptimal fits for depleting hostile caps' cap where for some reason you didn't bother to bring logi support, because a Nos drains less than half the amount of a neut. So, never, most likely.
e) Heavy Nos will become utterly unreliable under the new regime, and hence become impossible to balance when you do realise that you just nerfed it to uselessness.

Result - the most extreme case of imbalance between module size class and on-field utility that exists in the game. Nos on BS will make medium railguns look like Doomsday Devices. You are creating more and worse problems that you are solving, and ones that can only be solved by a subsequent reversion to percentage cap.

"Every insane person", more like. You've just described neuts' role. We used to have the self-fuelling Nos that you describe, except that old Nos never generated cap from thin air, but they were capable of capping out an opponent at no cost to, and indeed to the benefit of, the Nosser. It was massively overpowered, a cap warfare module both offensive and defensive, a bad mechanic that obsoleted neuts and reduced the diversity of cap warfare to "Just fit more Nos, lol".

Hence the 2008ish change to the clear separation between Nos as a defensive module and neuts as offensive ones. Until this proposed change, where small Nos regains much of the offensive capabilities of old Nos, and the main effect of heavy Nos will be to slowly suck down your own wallet.

Your psychic abilities are impressive. For most of us normal folk it's a lot easier to look at your target and ask "is his ship larger than mine" instead of "I wonder if he's burned off a higher percentage of cap than I have".

Thats an over simplification of course, as you can be fooled in either case... however it is much more difficult for a larger vessel to burn off enough raw cap to be at a lower total amount than you are, while it is relatively easy for a larger ship to burn off just enough to be at a lower percentage of cap than you are.

As to speaking form a frigate pilots point of view, , I have several BS NOS fits that I'm looking forward to using again... especially on the new Armageddon, Domi, and perhaps even Megathron (and some of their variants). Possibly even a Bhaalgorn (but Neuts will likely remain more effective in that case). I'll certainly be looking hard at my Nightmare as well.

By the way, I know you are fond of the catch phrase you created, but there is no such thing as a self-fueling NOS... they require no activation cap to begin with. Furthermore the proposed NOS exhibits none of the characteristics that made the old (pre-nerf) NOS overpowered.

In general that encyclopedia consists of 5 words "Is it bigger than me?"