Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Fleet is a very different subject, and yes there are Vexors out there because after the Caracal the Vexor is the second best anti-frigate cruiser, because of drones. But fleet Vexor, solo Vexor and anti-frigate Vexor are three very different ship, and you can't just talk as if each one of them had the abilities of all three in one. And anyway the Vexor is a combat cruiser, not an attack cruiser, and because of this the Caracal is way faster the Vexor.

Anti-frigate Vexor is the second best anti-frigate cruiser, behind the Caracal, at least it was before the RLML change. I think new RLML will still be an excellent frigate interdiction weapon, but for the Vexor, it's only because of drones and tank : it sport the same tank as an RLML Caracal and have drones to kill frigates. Yet drones are way less effective than missiles, because they are destructible. Be it in a fleet or in duel, you better have a lot of light drones if they start dying.

Then there are the differences between armor and shield, but as always you need to work on the strengths of your ships and compensate for their drawbacks.

And if you can't find any use for high projection, high resilience shield ships, you need to learn more.

And yes, gallenteans like to fly in gallente themed fleets, and with the rebalance they are better than ever, but saying caldari ships are worthless is uninformed. They only tend to not work so well in solo (with exceptions like navy frigates and cruisers), but largely compensate by scaling very well when numbers increase. Also keep in mind that gallente just come back from uselessness. A lot of the gallente current fame is due to this come back to business. But shield fleets can still be very effective, and caldari ships survive infinitely better in these than gallente ones.

Fair enough, but the idea that a cruiser weapon system that did 266 dps with 3 dmg mods needed a dps nerf, a fitting nerf, and a 40 second reload time is equally absurd to me. Where does it say dps needs to be exactly this or that or the weapon system is OP? There is just no way to know where that line is, it's all conjecture no matter how much you think you understand about the game and it's mechanics it will only ever be a matter of opinion and yours is no more or less valid than anyone elses, and that goes for CCP Rise and his arbitrary nerfs as well.

Yes, sorry - that was a poor attempt at humor on my part… I think the solution is to increase the ammunition capacity to 1/3 of the original (ie: 30 for Faction RLML and 45 for Faction RHML). Then the 40-second reload/ammunition swap isn't as much of a mitigating factor. Thoughts?

BLML: 30 clip, 40 reload, 5 swap
RLML: 5% RoF nerf, giev back
CHOICE

EDIT:

*cough* When? How many more wee... *cough* months are we supposed to wait for the heavenly sign, sitting in total darkness and looking at the sky?

That's his get out of jail free card, he won't play that unless he's forced to by some kind of player backlash. All he's doing is seeing how much he can get away with and when he pushes it too far he can just throw his hands up and back track a little, but he has nothing to worry about. Too many people would rather crawl up his arse to live in his intestines than ever disagree with him on anything important, it's much easier to just dump missiles and move into a different doctrine for most, so that's what they'll do.

The question here is not whether it will be adjusted, but when? There's absolutely zero chance he can get away with these numbers - only 18 missiles clip with 40 sec reload is ridiculous.

Thorax is an attack cruiser, and buffer armor Rupture won't tank a lot more than 10% of HAM dps.

By "combat", I meant the new ships designations.

But please show us numbers with fits, and try not to add links, implants and AB this time.

As you said, when you work for it, you can easily decrease missile dps. But you can a lot more easily decrease turret dps to nothing with TD.

And please, stop arguing that missiles should not have any counter because it's ridiculous.


Lower grade guns indeed have higher tracking, but it's far from enough to hit frigate, and that is to the price of range and dps. Dual 150mm Railgun base range is 15km for example...

And if you dedicate all your ship to hiting smaller targets, HML would be far better than low grade LR guns. To be an effective anti-frigate platform, range is very important.

Also, the only frigates you will blap with railguns are NPC ones. At 240km a Rokh have something like 2000 of alpha...

With RLML capacity of 30 and reload of 40 s, my spreadsheet say a Caracal has 74 s firing time during which it does 335 DPS. Adding in 40 s reload gives a sustained DPS of 217, which is basically identical to old RLML Caracal DPS of 218.

So, essentially this is the DPS of an old Caracal, frontloaded and with a long reload. It exchanges flexibility of freedom of firing for frontloaded damage.

I think the problem with this is that Rise had decided that RLMLs were too good and needed to be changed to become less flexible. I don't really agree with that - they were powerful but not excessively so, and I think fiddling with fitting requirements would have worked. But I spent a long time disagreeing with his Nos mechanic change on the basis that it would change nothing in practice and would serve as a nerf to the heavy Nos that most needed fixing, and I got precisely nowhere with that - the changes were made unaltered, and to no detectable change in Nos usage or popularity.

So I'm working on the assumption that Rise is not going make any alterations that don't involve a nerf to sustained RLML DPS. It doesn't matter whether we disagree with this, it's going to happen. Realistically, my opinion is that the best to hoped for is a decrease in reload time to 30 s, giving 195 sustained DPS, a drop of 10% from old RLMLs, relative to the present 20% drop, which also takes away some of the immense frustration of the excessively long reload time.

It's perfectly okay to use an AB on a blaster fit Thorax, it's not like you'll be able to burn after many ships to tackle them even with a mwd, and an AB is usually better in Scram range which is where you'll be fighting, more so if the other guy is ab fit with a scram, so that's just nitt picking.

Maybe it is just as well. It all looks like a bit of a love in over there, and thats fine. Whether I agree with these changes or not (its pretty clear I don't lol), CCP Rise is still just a dude trying to make his way in the world.