Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I believe that's the crux of the matter, that all Rapid missile systems break the fundamental Eve balancing traits of fragility of plaform vs effectiveness of applying dps. Destroyers get 8 guns, but are relatively fat & slow. BCs get more turrets than cruisers, but again are less mobile and take more damage. Even tier3/A BC are fragile on paper for their potential dps.
"rapid" weapons are obviously about packing 8 or more effective, bonused smaller weapon systems onto a more durable ship. If they can't just remove rapid lights outright, then rapid heavies (and dare I say rapid cruises for capital ships) will need such a serious change to be balanced, to be a fair tradeoff consideration.

All those crying about their precious 'solo' RLML Cerbs & Tengus aren't kidding anyone. It's like the HM drakes & tengus before, they will usually be in a small gang, built to use multiple links, and harvest t1 noob frigate killmails (and then cherry-picking the remaining defanged gang), all the while claiming ~elite smallgang pvp~ and never having to think about diminishing their own damage application via transversal.
Edit: page1 replies have already nailed it, that these weapons systems aren't for a fleet's main dps, they're support. Compose your fleets at least, you crybabies.

The reload timer mechanic itself cleary isn't a problem for acceptance, people lapped up the ASB and its timer when it was OP, and now it still has tradeoffs that are very reasonable. Likewise I'm sure people will work out to do 2 or more sets of rapid launchers and manage them should these changes happen.

I thus quite like the idea of the burst & reload dps, letting these 'support' fits do that just as effectively as ever(if not far more so), but then facing a real tradeoff when tankier BCs, BSs, or 1 or 2 smart logi can simply deaggro from them if on a gate/station/POS, or force them off through greater sustained combat effectiveness. If you wanted to burn through cruiser, BCs and larger targets, you should have to bring medium & large weapon systems to get the job done with comparable numbers.

The only real point I still want to raise is light missiles in general, and on the Talwar specifically. They're everywhere, minimal-cost-meta fitted, and have a disgusting range & volley for their isk & SP cost. I like new players having something they get basic fleet experience in, but this mindless anchoring & missile spam just reeks of drakes of old. Maybe their fitting, or light missile's range/volley needs a look at? They are a frigate-scale weapon after all.

Sadly no, because what good is my increased dps when I have to fight say a T2 Gallente or Caldari hull and I find myself with Kinetic missiles loaded? Normally you'd cringe a little and waste 10 seconds swapping to EM or Explosive, with proposed changes you're well boned basically.

Could you have a look at dual turrets now? It would be nice if they acted more like 2x of there smaller counterparts including the tracking and signature resolution, but use 2x of the smaller sized charge.

This is a very valid point.

makeing reload time dependent on number of missiles missing would be a good thing

I think that this is a deeply misguided approach to solving what is basically a non-problem. You claim that RLMLs are "almost always the right choice", which I think is a pretty ridiculous assertion. There are two good cruiser-sized missile options at the moment, RLMs and HAMs. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, and they both see a lot of use in pvp. HMLs aren't much good, but that's nothing to do with the strength of RLMs, it's because HMLs are colossal turdpiles that are outperformed by just about every alternative, including the various long-range medium turrets, the other medium missile types, scorch M, and typing bad words in local. Breaking all of the current RLML use cases won't magically make HMLs more attractive, it'll just consign a currently useful weapon system to the scrapheap.

I think HMLs should be more attractive again then. Compared with other medium long range turrets - which got a boost recently - they feel quite subpar. If RLMLs get a more specific role, I'd like to use HMLs more (on a Caracal for instance). But they are just plain bad. Especially in terms of damage application.

Since sig radius is a radius but the ships size from a weapons pov is a surface, would't squaring the sig in the tracking and missile dps formulae increase the gap between the different weapon sizes? This, in conjunction with some dps balancing would fix the 'rapids', capital blapping and the huge competion between cruisers, bc's, abc's, bs'es and more.

I like the lateral thinking in going on between here but IMO, a 'real' small weapons platform, using small ammo and not very useful for equal size ships would be much nicer.

RLMs NEED a nerf. They're so good that all missile systems larger than them are not worth using.

I find this whole idea so utterly ridiculous that I simply don't know what to say or where to begin. I'll echo others though in saying that this "ancillary module" fetish you guys seem to have needs to go. Quickly. It was an acceptable mechanic on the tanking modules because they only used one kind of charge and you could fit them alongside standard non-fueled modules to cover the reload gap.

I'm almost completely sure this change wasn't thought through quite as much as you think it was. Much better to not introduce RHMLs than to do this. Or cut the damage increase in half and give them a 20-sec reload time.

By the way, Rise, I saw that little trick you did there using Fury-type T2 kinetic missiles on kinetic-bonused hulls to artificially inflate the DPS numbers. How about some numbers with T1 thermal missiles?