Player Features and Ideas Discussion

No, you're overlooking the offensive capabilities of old Nos. Old Nos was popular despite the high fittings and relatively low cap drain because it was effective as an offensive weapon, one that you could rely on to cap out your opponent. In this case, "reliability" of the kind that you champion was the reason that it was broken and overpowered. The main effect, and indeed purpose, of changing from always-on Nos to percentage Nos was to neuter that offensive capability, limiting neuts to the offensive role and leaving Nos as a defensive weapon. But without the offensive role, the relatively low drain amount and tricky fittings of percentage Nos rendered it suboptimal in this defensive role, lacking the drain amount to relaibly counter similar degrees of neuting.



My vision of Nos is a counter to neuting capable of maintaining low-drain active modules such as tackle and hardeners, and maybe prop mods, available to all ships sizes. As such, percentage Nos is the correct mechanic to achieve this, avoiding the problems of unreliability resulting from an additional level of complexity in the form of a consideration of relative ship size, as arises from absolute Nos, along with those related to imbalances between ship classes.

I'm not sure what your vision of Nos is. You talk about predictability, but include this extra level of complexity. You don't emphasise the defensive role, but yet talk about Nos seeing greater use on frigates - but I am unsure to what additional purpose, over the already-existing defensive role. Your vision of BS Nos seems to pretend that it doesn't exist, or that it should compete with neuts for an offensive role, maybe?

Tackle T3s like Nos too, my cloaky tackly Proteus always fitted one, and here's an example of an extreme T3 tackler. Nos is a good choice for HICs too.

It should be noted that the proposed change to absolute cap level doesn't help these ships in any significant fashion. "Reliability" is invoked, but if you're getting neuted, then your cap is reliably lower than everyone else's and hence it doesn't really matter much who you Nos. What would help is increased cap drain, lower cycle time and easier fittings - but this needs to be maintained with a percentage cap mechanism to avoid Nos usurping part of neuts' offensive role.

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".

but I have characters in RvB and FW (and other places as well of course) both of which have a high percentage of frigate combat taking place. NOS fits are few and far between comparatively speaking.

I don't think it's possible to give Nos an offensive role that is useful and balanced without obsoleting neuts or ending up with severe size-related imbalances. That's why I'm so strongly in favour of fixing Nos within its defensive role, rather than attempting to give it some of neuts' offensive abilities.

Posting to confirm we are reading here -

We completely acknowledge that this change probably isn't going to be some NOS revival that causes a huge cap-war shake up. Doing fitting changes, cycle time changes, etc might be good, but we want to do this rebalance in small steps. Count this as a good start, we are completely willing/expecting to revisit this after we see how things go.

Of course it does. It enables a small ship to suck cap for longer from a large ship, depleting the larger ship's cap to lower levels. This is the entire crux of your "reliability" argument.

For example, consider the ability of a neut Legion to Nos a hostile Moros until the Moros's cap is depleted to the Legion's absolute, rather than percentage, cap level. While the current drain amounts of Nos, relative to neuts, means that this will likely be a niche usage, this is unquestionably an increased offensive ability and I'm astonished that you're challenging this.

Yes, it is now theoretically possible to NOS a larger ship to a lower level than previously, thus providing you with a cap stream for a longer period of time.

This is still a defensive ability.

It is STILL nearly impossible to NOS a ship completely out of cap like a Neut can (and of course are far slower at reducing that amount), this is why Neuts are considered a more offensive module and NOS are STILL primarily a defensive module.

Now that's not to say that you couldn't use a NOS on them to your advantage, and it was done. However, with few exceptions, a BS was almost always better off using large Neuts on those tacklers than a slower NOS.