Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is a terrible idea.

1) Having a lot of downtime is just bad gameplay design. In a gang, you might stay on the field to provide point and webs, but if you are solo, you basically are going to kill 1-2 targets and warp out. And then nobody gets to do anything for the next 40s while you reload. It promotes non-interactive gameplay.

2) Its not intuitive. Its yet another thing that vets know that noobs dont.

3) Its not that people use rapid lights because they are really good. We use them because the other medium missile systems are utter trash. I would love to be able to use heavy missiles again, but there is just no reason since they are currently the worst weapon system in the entire game for anything but giant blobs.

4) There is no alternative. You can use normal shield boosters instead of ancillary boosters. You can use normal armor reps instead of ancillary reps. There are good reasons to choose each. For medium missile launchers, there isnt any alternative to rapid lights. Heavy missiles are too slow, do too little damage for the fitting, and apply too poorly. Heavy assaults are too short range, and apply even more poorly.

5) While roaming, its can be very difficult to make a 40s reload when going gate to gate. This will just slow gangs down, with no real reason to do so.

Making this change will basically just end the use of missile ships in small gangs. People will just go to other ships, instead of dealing with the possibility of being tackled and having to wait for close to a minute to return fire.

If you want people to choose heavy missiles, then make heavy missiles be something besides a trash tier weapons system.

This is a terrible idea.

1) Having a lot of downtime is just bad gameplay design. In a gang, you might stay on the field to provide point and webs, but if you are solo, you basically are going to kill 1-2 targets and warp out. And then nobody gets to do anything for the next 40s while you reload. It promotes non-interactive gameplay.

2) Its not intuitive. Its yet another thing that vets know that noobs dont.

3) Its not that people use rapid lights because they are really good. We use them because the other medium missile systems are utter trash. I would love to be able to use heavy missiles again, but there is just no reason since they are currently the worst weapon system in the entire game for anything but giant blobs.

4) There is no alternative. You can use normal shield boosters instead of ancillary boosters. You can use normal armor reps instead of ancillary reps. There are good reasons to choose each. For medium missile launchers, there isnt any alternative to rapid lights. Heavy missiles are too slow, do too little damage for the fitting, and apply too poorly. Heavy assaults are too short range, and apply even more poorly.

5) While roaming, its can be very difficult to make a 40s reload when going gate to gate. This will just slow gangs down, with no real reason to do so.

Making this change will basically just end the use of missile ships in small gangs. People will just go to other ships, instead of dealing with the possibility of being tackled and having to wait for close to a minute to return fire.

If you want people to choose heavy missiles, then make heavy missiles be something besides a trash tier weapons system.

For a start, this is more of a "links are stupid OP" issue than a problem with HAMs per se. More to the point, however, HAMs are close range weapons so anything you're shooting with them should be hard tackled already. In more realistic situations, their damage application is absolutely fine for the kinds of fights that you'd want to use them in. You wouldn't fit RLMs on a sacrilege or a brawling missile legion, even if their bonuses applied to light missiles because in the situations where those ships excel, the drawbacks of HAMs are easily mitigated and their strengths in terms of raw DPS become much more valuable than the superior application of RLMs.

5) Gangs can decide if they are willing to wait an extra 5-10 seconds sometimes on some gates. I think module repair is a much more likely culprit in this example.

Isn't this argument rather inconsistent with the one you make in the OP where you say that "[rapid launchers] are almost always the right choice"?

You can't simultaneously believe both to be true. If RLMs are already well-balanced against the alternative medium-sized missile launchers then there's no need for this change whatsoever, and if they're not then you can't just dismiss the statement that HMLs are trash by citing usage figures.

(most eve players take a looooooong time to react to shifts in the meta and will continue using ships and weapons that have become sub-par due to recent balance changes out of habit, so pointing to ~metrics~ about the relative usage of different ships/weapon systems doesn't necessarily tell you much of anything about their actual state of balance)

RLMs outperform HAMs on pretty much all cruisers, even if webbed.

HAMs would have OK application if it wasn't for links, but the fact that applying links alone reduces HAM damage by 50% while doing nothing to RLM damage just kills them. I'm pretty sure it's correct to fit RLMs to the Sac despite losing the bonus, you'll still do more damage. Tengu is best with RLMs despite losing a bonus too.

You're right it sounds like I'm taking both sides a bit. I think RLMs are not well balance, but as you say, people adjust slowly so the usage doesn't represent balance completely accurately. I'm trying to say that while RLM are out of balance and making HML a bad choice usually, they aren't so bad that no one would use them if RLM changed. Even though I think they are definitely behind, I don't think it's by as much as Michael does and the ~metrics~ were meant to support that.