Player Features and Ideas Discussion

How about:

ECM turns off high slot and E-war modules instead of breaking target lock.

What I mean, is that ECM has a chance to disable any high slot modules fitted as well as any E-war modules, such as warp jammers, ECM, target painters etc.

What I think this would do is stop ecm being a Hit and miss mechanic and induce something more reliable.

How that would work is that the ECM jam chance would be calculated as normal, but this chance would then be ran against each individual module that can be effected, rather than the ship's target lock.

So for an example.

A blackbird tries to Jam a battleship, it has a 25% chance to jam.

As current, the battleship would most likely not be jammed, and would swat the blackbird out of space but it can jam the battleship, allowing the blackbird 1/4 chances to escape.

As this proposed mechanic, the battleship, assuming it does not have any E-War, has 8 guns fitted, that means 8 chances of 25% chance of disabling a module, so on average per cycle 2 guns will be disabled, reducing its ability but not knocking it out of the fight for the cycle, allowing it to still pop the blackbird, but not as quickly as it could have without being jammed.

Thoughts?

You have a good point with the grouped guns, perhaps auto fire them again if the group is toggled on? Problem with that would be differences in ammo count.

The idea is to provide a reliability to ECM rather than providing an all or nothing mechanic that it currently is.

Thats true, just an attempt to improve it.

How would this improve the life of a jammer? This would be a massive nerf to all ECM boats because you are suggesting that instead of shutting off all guns and electronic warfare modules on the enemy ship, the ECM boat only has a chance to shut down 1 module at a time with each jammer.

I'm not currently logged in atm, so forgive me if my numbers here are slightly off, but you should be able to fit 5 jammers on a blackbird with 1 prop mod. I am assuming that you are flying in a fleet since you are in a blackbird because ECM boats are fleet boats. From there one of the primary roles of ECM is to counter enemy logistics. Scimitars for example, can fit 4x shield transporters. Since the blackbird can only effectively fit 5 jammers, this would mean that for the blackbird to shut down the logi only 1 jammer per cycle could fail. This would be a massive buff to logis, which are already a pain to counter at times. Battleships would also be virtually impossible to shut down as they can have up to 8 guns, on top of having a naturally high sensor strength.

This simply would make ECM useless because they would be roughly 8-25% as effective as they are currently.

-1

The Jam doesn't work against a single module. it works against all of them separately. In the current version of the ECM it works against all of them collectively.

What I am saying is that the chance is ran against each module that can be effected on the ship, the more ecm modules on a single ship, the higher the chance of each module being jammed
not each ecm module running against a single module

In addition to the grouped guns problem, there is also the problem of strength for want of a better word.

The tracking disruptor has a reliable DPS debuff against small fast ships, but this proposed ECM mechanic not only does that in a different way, but it can turn off the Neut or web.

but, the larger ship would be resistant to the jam given the low amount of ECM modules on the frigate, as a result the ECM wouldn't have a high chance of turning off that web or neut

Problem for grouping weapons with the proposed mechanic is ammo. The jammed weapons will have more ammo, so will break the group. That is a major problem along with the extra server calculations,.

Not just weapons, everything that requires a target lock to work would be effected, remote reppers, E-war, remote sensor boosters and weapons.

FoF does not require a target lock, so yes.

Which, with the proposed mechanic is a part of the mechanic and cannot be fixed.

So it pretty much boils down to server load, a more reliable mechanic with about 8x the server load regarding ECM and a problem with the grouping of weapons, or a less reliable mechanic with a better server performance and without the grouping problem and isn't that much of a problem as it is right now.

I'd much rather have all-or-nothing ECM than a higher % chance to shut-off (random?) modules. If I'm trying to escape from a bad situation (needing to break a warp scam/disruptor), I'd rather have 25% chance to escape than 25% to shut-off a gun (which will only prolong the inevitable).

The other nice thing about ECM breaking the lock is that the pilot has to re-establish it again. This requires some concentration from the pilot, extra time after the lock is broken (even more so depending on sig radius), etc. Makes things a little more difficult than just waiting a cycle and pressing F1 again.

Also ECM breaks lock... allowing you to cloak. Often times that is much more powerful than shutting-off a module temporarily.