Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hello CCP

Missiles have been somewhat of a red-headed stepchild among weapon systems, albeit not as much as drones historically. Recently CCP has been making pushes to make drones “viable” in fleet combat by introducing new drone modules and drone weapon bonuses. So far they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, with Nullsec Alliances adopting sentry drone ships en masse, and ATXI teams can be sorted into 3 categories; Dominix comps, comps designed to kill Dominix comps, and losing comps. But Missiles have been neglected yet again, and CCP has been hesitant to fix the issues plaguing the weapon system, as missile behavior and damage calculations are a giant unintuitive mess. However, there are other problems plaguing missiles as well, one of which is the way Missile Skills are designed. See the Info below.

Range
Guns
Sharpshooting (2x) + 5% optimal
Trajectory analysis (4x) +5% falloff

Missiles
Missile Bombardment (2x) +10% flight
Missile Projection (4x) +10% velocity

Drones
Drone Sharpshooting (4x) +5% drone optimal

Damage Application
GUns
Motion prediction (2x) +5% tracking

Missiles
Guided Missile precision (4x) -5% sig
Target Navigation Prediction (2x) +5% explosion velocity

Drones
Drone Navigation (1x) +5% drone speed

Damage

Guns
Gunnery (1x) +2% ROF
Rapid Firing (2x) +4% ROF
Surgical strike (4x) +3% damage

Missiles
Missile Launcher Operation (1x) +2% ROF
Rapid Launch (2x) +3% ROF
Warhead Upgrades (5x) +2% damage

Drones
Drones (1x) +5% damage
Drone Interfacing (4x) +20% damage

Total ranks
Guns : 15x Missiles : 21x Drones : 15x

Missile support skills

I frequently stay in chat.E-uni, and whenever a newbie asks “what weapon system should I skill into” I warn them away from a serious commitment to missiles. Which is a shame because missiles are easy for newbies to use and helps get cash in newbie wallets, but putting SP in missiles means the newbies is walking down a dead end. Why? Because missile support skills are more costly in terms of SP, less effective at lower ranks, and apply to a much narrower field. 100million SP Bittervets might scoff “HTFU”, but to newer players, every SP counts, and it’s important to get the most bang for your buck. For example, these are the T1 missile ships in the game.

Kestrel, Condor, Breacher, Hookbill, Talwar, Corax, Caracal, Bellicose, Drake, Cyclone, Raven, Typhoon

Every SP put into missiles would only affect a handful of ships, whereas gunnery and drone support skills would help literally every turret ship and ship with a drone bay. Added to this is the fact that there are more missile support skills and some are more expensive, this means missiles are a poor investment in SP.

T2 missile skills

Missiles also differ from turrets in the way that Tech 2 Weapons are unlocked. In turrets, T2 weapons require that weapon system to 5, as well as the previous weapon spec to 4. For example, T2 large artillery requires large projectile 5, and medium artillery spec 4, which itself requires medium projectile 5, small arty spec 4, and small projectile 5. Missile one the other hand, have no such hierarchy, but short and long range missiles are split into different skills. For example, to get T2 HMLs (medium long range missiles), you only need HML 5, but to have the short range weapon, you also require HAM 5.
There are merits to both systems; it’s faster to get a specific T2 missile system, but getting all T2 weapons takes much shorter on turrets, as you only have half the number of skills to train to 5. The problem here is that if a pilot wants to get his money’s worth out of his missile support skills, he needs to train multiple T2 missiles, and that takes monstrous amounts of SP.

Conculsion

As it stands, Missiles are extremely inefficient in SP, and presents a “newbie trap” where drake/HML is decent for missions, but puts them on a route that is terrible for actual PVP usage. If CCP’s intent is to keep missiles SP inefficient, then they should just state it and add a warning to players. If CCP wants missiles to be the equal of turrets, then they should start fixing the problems of the missile tree, and cleaning up the mess that is the missile SP system would be a good start.

Exact Proposals

-Reduce the ranks of missile support skills to better reflect the narrow nature of these skills, for example, Warhead upgrades and Missile Projection could stand to lose a few rank, and the damage application skills should have their ranks dramatically lowered to match Motion Prediction in Turrets.

-Reduce the effects of Missile Projection and Missile Bombardment to 5%, instead roll the difference into missile base stats. With the all or nothing nature of missiles, having these skills at 4 makes a huge difference to the range of missiles, far more than leaving the analogous skills at 4 for turrets (ex, leaving MP and MB at 4 gives HML’s 55km range, vs 63 for all V, giving the all V character an 8 km buffer zone where the unskilled character can literally do nothing in return)

-As much as this reduces “flavor” and makes things “cookie cutter”, Missiles should be changed to the gun system of T2 skills, with small, medium, and large missile skills in hierarchy. Either this or drop the ranks of individual missile systems to make skilling into long/short range weapons less painful.

Comments? Concerns? Feedback?

edit: the point i'm arguing is not the mechanics of missiles, which is a mess but not the one being discussed here. The point is that it's dumb for missile support skills to cost more SP than turret support skills considering the narrower use and viability of certain missile systems. The situation with missile support right now would be like if gun support skills were also branched by type, so instead of having motion prediction you would have Hybrid, Laser and Projectile motion prediction.

Some oversimplification here tbh. Range and damage application should really be under one heading since fall-off and missile velocity (and even flight time in certain circumstances) can both effect damage application. Scout drone operation and EWDI obviously effect drone range as well and you have ignored those for some reason and drone dura effects application in many cases. Really its equivelent for drones and missiles, but both have a massive advantage vs guns overall in that a turret user has to skill up each turret type individually while missile users get only two different weapons at each size level and drones are only specialised by a single racial spec skill.

The only thing i could see being done that wouldn't require a huge reworking of everything would be merging rockets and lights into "small missiles", heavies and HAM into "medium missiles,", cruise and torps into "large missiles" and capital cruise and citadel torps into "extra large missiles. This would remove the short term advantage of turret user being able to use say beams and pulse where missile users need two differrent skills. The specialisations could continue as they are now.

The usefulness of skills in terms of ships they are relevant on is already being changed by ccp who are changing the balance away from turrets. Support skills are fine, though if you wnat to add some to the turret tree that say reduces the sig res of my guns to keep it in line with launchers go right ahaead :).

The problem is that signature has different effects on missiles and turrets. While for turrets, signature affects the tracking value and thus damage application, it does not form a mathematical limit like it does for missiles. In an extreme case scenario, take a completely stationary target and shooter. While a turret should be dealing full damage (within the limits of the RNG), the missiles would be hard capped at signature/explosion or full damage, whichever is less. Obviously this is just a fringe case, but with say a target that has several webs on it, it's likely guns can track it just fine, but missiles would still be limited by signature (needs target painters).

if merging missile skills that means sp refound.like true caldarian i have almost all missile skills at 5 that means 256k sp from small, btw light missile have rank 2 that means 512k, that woud be about 384k + 768k from med + 1.28kk from large. total 2.4kk sp free
i like that idea

u mean that only 1 cap transfer ? or maybe drone link augmentors ?
it is old standart buffer\active drone setup with neuts

Cruise missile doctrine would be an interesting thing to see. You're only really scaling up from the old drake. I see raven fleets being used to kill capital ships and maybe enemy battleship fleets, can't really say much else though

Why don't you take a look at the short range missiles in addition to the long range missiles? To get rocket specialization and light missile specialization you have to train both rockets and light missiles to V while for turrets you just train small turret + whatever levels of the specialization (and the support skill prereqs). Simply put, it's a different model and is not necessarily problematic. Even going to mediums, last time I checked, training two 3x skills to V it takes close to, if not more time than training a 1x skill to V, a 3x skill to V, and a 3x skill to IV. The trend may deviate on large missiles (I imagine it might), but until recently large missiles were pretty terrible which is why nobody used them.

While the support skill prereqs increase the training time, they also increase the effectiveness of the platform (tracking for short range, range for long range).

I'd agree with that, if, you know, you didn't get a free ride when training up another type of guns... and also compared complete mastery of a weapon system branch. All missile weapon skills alone to V? All Hybrid skills to V?

How come gunnery support skills have a lower total rank while also being worth 3x as much (except for controlled bursts which is only worth 2x).
I figure the tradeoff for having easier weapon specialization in missiles is longer training for all missile systems. The support skills are totally out of whack in gunnery, being worth 3x more than both missile and drone supports.

And for that 4.3mil SP you also get two support skills to 5 and all of the lower level gunnery specs to 4.

Now add up what it would take to do that for missiles.

Yeah, gunnery training is WAY better unless you're making a specialized alt to only ever fire one specific size and type of weapon.

Spin baby spin!

You are trying to factor in specializations to cloud what is really going on. You miss that if you were to train Small, medium, and large projectiles to V, with no specs, it takes 2.304 mil SP and gives you access to 6 weapons (S/M/L Autos and arties). If you were to train rockets, lights, heavies, HAMs, torps and cruises all to V it takes 4.608 mil SP. So I train for twice as long to have equivalent effectiveness.

Now what you are trying to push is the fact that Gunnery requires the previous sized turrets to V and the previous sized turrets to IV to train the size you want's spec. Missiles do not have to deal with that. That is how things work in Eve. I think we can both agree that is a big pain if you want to just use Large Autocannons. In that case missile training is more more beneficial as you don't have to train those prereqs. But once you get beyond two or so types of missile systems you actually begin to accrue more SP to try to get equivalent effectiveness. In the end if you train all 6 systems you have spent the time to train 2.304 mil SP to be equivalently effective.

The simplest solution is the one I detailed in my previous post in this thread: Split gunnery from generalized skills in to specialized skills and cut the training time for each one to be half of the generalized skill (go from Large Projectile Turret to Large Autos and Large Arties and from ~20 days training time to ~10 each), Remove a majority of the prereqs from gunnery skills, and the bring missiles SP down to be equivalent to gunnery SP. This allows turrets to specialize like missiles do without making missiles train an additional 2.304 SP to be equivalently effective. Both sides win.