Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Oh sure, it gets a powerful offensive ability and this may cause a shift from neuts to Nos. Or will it? For the role of destroying the cap on capitals, neuts remove cap so much more rapidly than Nos that dedicated boats will always want to use neuts instead of Nos. Of course, the trick comes with fueling those neuts. In relatively small fights with caps, such as the classic WH environments, then everyone is already used to setting up cap chains for Bhaals and neut Legions etc, so I don't see much change - with a Nos or two you get a bit more resilience to disruption of the cap chain, but at the cost of weakening your prime combat ability. On a Bhaal, a single heavy Nos only fuels roughly one heavy neut, and that Nos drains only 40% of the cap of the neut. I don't think this is a worthwhile tradeoff.

The other environment of interest is null blob fights, as you mention. Old welpcanes were able to use their dual med neuts tp nuke capitals' capacitors in pretty short order. While welpcanes no longer exist, at least in the dual med neut variety, and Rokhs won't be fitting neuts or Nos at all, Domis such as PL's or Black Legion's Tempests do have this option. The question is - will they choose Nos or stick with neuts? Again, to me, the Nos looks unattractive - while it would help with cap stability when engaging capitals, the twin problems of its cap drain rate being so much less than that of a heavy neut and the size-dependent unreliability of future BS Nos when hostile capitals don't turn up suggest to me that fits will generally stick with neuts. What do you think?

No comment on fitting?

As I see it, the NOS's role is to give you cap, not decap the enemy.

I think the way to do this is draining cap regardless of how much your ship has cap but the drain amount is diminishing when the enemy has lower cap. let's say you have a linear drain like this: at 100% enemy cap, you drain 100% of your NOS strength and at let's say 33% of enemy cap you drain 1%.
this way, the enemy isn't running dry completely and your effectiveness is dependent on enemy cap without looking at how much you have yourself.

I never assume an ideal PVP situation. However I do have confidence in my ability to pick my fights (and targets) wisely, to have good enough intel to minimize unpleasant surprises, and to fit my ship to leverage it's strengths.

Now that we've cleared up the assumption that ships that use medium NOS will be worthless, that leaves the only real sticking point you have... large NOS.

Will large Neuts continue to be the capacitor warfare weapon of choice for BS? Yes.

Will you need to be a bit more careful choosing your targets and your fit? Yes.

Are there still large NOS fits that will work very well against against similar sized opponents? Yes, more now than pre balancing actually.

The primary cap warfare concern that the average BS has is as a defense against tacklers (by capping out their ability to tackle), and no matter how you rework the mechanic NOS will never be more effective at that task than a Neut.

Now if you are in a situation where you don't care about tacklers (bait ship, or in a gang set up for others to provide frigate defense, in a group or solo hunt for other BS... likely ratters or mission runner targets, or a gate camp that really only needs your BS if something big comes through) suddenly NOS become a very viable alternative if you are set up to capitalize on it's strengths.

So let Neuts do what they do best (benefit large ships more on average) and NOS do what it does best (benefit smaller ships more on average), with room left for a few surprises here and there. The mechanic change is fine, especially if there is a tweak or two done on fittings.

You must not have seen the rest of the post. I'll emphasize the part I made unclear.

"Make whatever changes to distinguish that...

the purpose of a NOS is to maintain your cap, and it's good at it..."

I hope this helps. Let me know if I can make this more clear for you and I will be glad to help.

First and formost, sorry if someone has already posted these thoughts but I can't read everything as I am on my phone. I flew the shield tanked nos curses back in the day. Flew the nos domis. The problem that I see with the nerf that was made is that it was a mechanic based change with out any way to get some effect back from skills. All the large nerfs have come with a skill change to make the playable and to be able to advance not necessarily back to full effect but to at least give pilots the sense that they were getting something back and to give a base to work from.
All of the big changes have had a skill set with them. Drones, ECM, armor and shield, missiles... The list goes on. For a good change to take place you need to make the base kind of crappy and then have the max skill effect decent. Throw in a few skills that say reduce cycle time and increase cap transfer amount and perhaps one that increased the difference in cap neutable between the two ships and you might be getting somewhere.
Another idea could make it more like EW with nossing. Keep neuting as it is but make nossing chance based with skills affecting if you can take or not. If it is chance based then you should be able to suck them dry. Like eccm, battery's could reduce the chance or being "cap jammed" so to speak. And it could have a skill set for chance based stuff like EW with certain ships getting role bonuses to it.
Until then all I see this as is CCP owning up to an over nerf. With the proper change, you could actually see people employing nos again. But I still bet CCP ignores all of the good ideas and messes it up again.

Seems this thread has stopped moving.

I recall a fight years ago when I lived in Syndicate (on alt) when my gang meet a gang with a trio of guardians in a close-up brawl outside a station. Their battleships was RR fitted and so was ours but some of us also had neuts. I was probably the only one that also had a heavy nos fitted. The fight was very even, no one gaining upon the other. I noticed that when I nosed one guardian while neuting the others my capacitor never dropped below 40%. I didnt have to cap inject to keep my neuts going. This keept on for several minuts until their cap transfer broke and they all docked up. A draw as I see it, 'cuz no one died.

I always imagined the way nos shold be used is to keep your neuts firing even if the capacitor is close to zero without injecting. If you got 2 netus and 1 nos you neut one target and nos the other. If your 1vs1 then your better off with just all neuts.

To make nos (more) usefull again is either by halving the cycle times, or double the ammount being nosed. Myself I would prefer the first option, but the later is perhaps more sensible with balance in mind. They still need all their fitting requirments lowered though.

As I see it Gypsio is correct, heavy nos will be almsot useless with this change, but nos on frigates and cruisers will be more common.

Edit: some typos

So lets see, assuming that you put small->frig,dessie, medium->cr, bc, and large->BS, it seems to me that:

Small nos: Boost in most circumstances as most things will have large cap pools, or at worst ruffly the same size cap pool which will result in working similarly enough to before, though it may be a small nerf to dragoons fighting frigs. Nos already functioned pretty well at this level, and this will only increase their use more. Overall = healthy buff.

Medium nos: This one is a bit more interesting. Neuts were already favored at this level for anti-tackle work as well as shutting down the tank, guns, etc, of similar sized targets. Once again, nos against similar sized opponents will likely remain mostly unchanged, as absolute cap is usually close to percentage cap. Boosts the use against BS and caps by cruisers fit for heavy tackle though. In the end, I don't expect to see nos replace neuts on ships designed to fight against the same or smaller class of ships or those designed to fight outside web/scram range, but might see a few in place of smartbombs or neuts on those designed to fight up a class within hard tackle range. Overall = mild buff.

Heavy nos: Against similar sized opponents, it seems more a change than a nerf or a buff. Against smaller opponents, it is a clear nerf. Whoever was talking about some nos BS being able to pull from BCs after this change seems to have missed that if absolute cap is bigger on a bc, then percentage is bigger as well, so no gain there and if you expect your absolute cap to be low enough to nos from BCs, your relative cap to other BS is probably also low enough to nos from them. BS sized guns, prop mods, and reps also take a good bit of cap compared to how much a nos draws. And while it is a boost vs caps and supers, if you are fitting nos rather than neuts and relying on cap xfer/booster when fighting caps, I'm pretty sure most people would claim you are doing it wrong. Overall = moderate nerf.

All this is just my opinion, and I'll admit I'm not as in touch with the current meta as I could be. *shrug* time will tell.

Many pvp and pve based EVE players I have talked to about "new" things they would like to see is the AoE and buff/debuff aspects being improved.

Would it not be a great opportunity to use NOS as the first iteration in such a direction?

Why not make NOS a ranged AoE effect.
Small 2500m (+var)
medium 5000m (+var)
Large 10000m (+var)

Any ships within that sphere around the NOSsed ship would be affected and add further to the gain of the attack?

OFC to balance such a feature the cap boosting might need to do something similar, maybe at a slight reduced range, forcing pilots into tighter formations.

I might just be doing pie in the sky, but would this not have the potential of creating intersting formation based strategies, especially considering ideas like shield overlapping (ship formation blob shields) and allowing new interesting future tweaks to bombings, missile splash damage, and maybe even minor collision damage or at least debuff features?

I just know I hear many say that things along these lines would be interesting, also they tend to find many aspects of EW and Logistics a bit lacking compared to other dynamics in other mmos.

Crowd control, Healing, and moving around in combat is fairly sluggish in EVE and especially in PVE compared to other games.

OFC this would have to be introduced and done in an EVE way.

Just a few thoughts.

I dont get what you and CCP Rise are going on about. It was never the case that Nos drained irrespective of whether there was anything to drain.(at least since 2005 i.e. years and years before the NOS nerf) I remember running NOS Domis. You could dual rep with nos active as long as the target had cap. Thereafter you had to switch to your boosters. Make it a priority for Devs to check their facts before designing balancing changes perhaps???

EDIT I now see a possible reason for your error... back then you were nooblars so you only ever used Nos in pve...