EVE General Discussion

I'm not against ECM, as I fly a Falcon and most of my kills (names on a kill mail to be more precise) are from this ship. There is always great debate about the way ECM works and I was thinking about all the EW skills and why ECM doesn't fit into the way the others work:

Target Painters - increase sig radius, known value, no counter.
Sensor dampeners - reduce targetting range, known value, sensor booster counter,
Tracking disruptors - reduce gun tracking, known value, tracking enhancer counter
ECM - removes target's ability to lock, % chance, 100% effect when it occurs, ECCM counter.

I had a think about this and realized that you could get a similar effect to the current ECM ability by reducing rate of fire. This would remove the % chance and bring in a known reduction, in the same way the other EW modules work. A large reduction to ROF would have a similar effect to being jammed, relocking, being jammed again, etc, but it would be a known effect. ECCM would then reduce the effect on your ROF.

Is this a sensible solution to the ECM problem or should I give you all my stuff and HTFU instead?

/edit Still leaves issues with drones and remote mods, such as neuts, nos, armour, shield and cap transports.

the issue about ECM is a little bit complex. it's not the mods that are overpowered, it's the mechanic itself. The mods work as they are supposed to, which is to be a force multiplier on the battlefield. Due to its nature, it's also limited to X-small to medium sized gang warfare (up to 40-50 people gangs), being large gangs a place where it's better to bring a dps ship.
However, because of how the ECM mechanic is (RNG-based "Yes/No" mechanism), this also means that any nerf you impart on the will make them totally useless. Likewise, a boost, no matter how tiny, will make them much stronger.
Because of these two points, ECM as it is is already balanced to the maximum effect (relatively to totally useless on non specialized hulls, but the specialized hulls are very good at jamming stuff), and because reworking the ECM mechanics from ground up means a total revamp of ECM and even maybe Ewar, doing anything to it is a pretty much daunting task that would probably require a too big ammout of work to make it worthwhile.


TL;DR: ECM is strong, maybe too strong, but it's impossible or highly inefficient to balance it further or overhauling.

There are millions of ECM general threads and most people read the OP and post their pet hate/love. I posted to discuss a specifc idea, so feel free to post a link in the 'oh, no, another generic ECM thread' to this post instead.