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Rockets, their use and their future
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Reicine Ceer
State War Academy
Caldari State
#1 - 2011-11-24 17:35:33 UTC
Oh hai!

The aim of this post is to discuss rocketry use in EVE, my opinions - which through argument I am willing to change - and how I believe they could be altered to make using rocket boats a fun and different way of fighting.

To begin, I feel that my view of them must first be explained.

I see rockets in their current form as tiny missiles with short range, low damage and useful for only a small part of the game. Currently they act like other missile systems, firing off a round, cycling, firing again. They have upgraded warheads of both the faction and Tech II variety, which is of course standard and good.

My suggestion is to change both the way they act and the way they feel when being used. What I'd love to see is rocket launchers becoming batteries that fire off all of their missiles in a much more rapid succession; so fast that their damage potential would be measured as a "DoT", or Damage over Time, rather than on an individual basis. This could perhaps be some sort of upgrade from the standard rocket launcher system.

I think as far as damage overall is concerned, it should work out at precisely the same as current - the launchers would perhaps hold, say, 3 times as many rockets, whilst also firing 4 or 5 times faster, to both display a cool torrent of missiles and balance out to equate to previous levels of damage. Perhaps altering the actual damage the rockets do would help; I confess to being utterly awful at math and therefore haven't done any sums to figure out what would work best here Oops

Why?

Because, Doc, because! I think it would add an interesting flavour to combat. Rather than timed blats against your ship, the damage inflicted would constitute a "drain" on whatever's being hit. I think that this would require pilots in combat to think differently about things like target prioritisation and a whole bunch of other things besides, when their defences are effectively being drained away rather than just hit. It could mean the difference between getting that rep in or losing your ship altogether.

Meh. Maybe im wrong but its something that's been in my head a lil while.


Anyways, whaddaya think?
killorbekilled TBE
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#2 - 2011-11-24 17:44:43 UTC
rockets have already received attention

ungroup your launchers and have a play with that and see if it enhances your use of rockets / missiles

also it looks cooler :)

:)
Reicine Ceer
State War Academy
Caldari State
#3 - 2011-11-24 17:46:30 UTC
I'm aware of the attention they've already received of course, and like everyone else i've had my weapons ungrouped for fun here and there, but its the mechanic of them I'd love to see changed - the concept of turning rocket use into something a little different, an alteration of flavour and tactical use to give pilots something new and interesting to play with and fight against.
Daedalus Arcova
The Scope
#4 - 2011-11-24 18:17:41 UTC  |  Edited by: Daedalus Arcova
Very interesting idea. I guess you're thinking along the same lines as rocket pods on attack helicopters, which are fired in strafing bursts?

This wouldn't necessarily require any new mechanics, just some spreadsheet changes. Massively increase the rate of fire of rockets to something like 2 or 3 a second (or just use the currently unused 'charge rate' attribute to fire more rockets simultaneously, which would avoid creating lag), and increase reload time to something like 2 minutes.

To give some idea of what that would be capable of, a single max-skilled T2 rocket launcher with a full load of 50 faction rockets and no ship bonuses, could do 2550 points of damage in the space of 16 seconds, firing 3 a second. For comparison, the full rack of 280mm artillery on a gank-fit Thrasher can do 3650 damage in the same time. So that would obviously be massively overpowered for a single frigate sized launcher with low fitting requirements.

Possible balances:
- Leave the existing rocket launchers as they are, and create a 'rocket salvo launcher'.
- Much smaller rocket capacity than existing launchers. Capacity would directly influence the 'slow alpha' of the launcher (total damage before reloading).
- High fitting costs, possibly even cruiser sized fitting costs.
- Limit one launcher per ship.
- A built in penalty to rocket explosion velocity and radius. Big salvo, bad aim.

It would require a lot of care to balance this to prevent it being massively overpowered, but I really like the concept.
Endovior
PFU Consortium
#5 - 2011-11-25 00:52:35 UTC
I also like the concept... though I'd note that it's not an especially valid concept until they change the thing where all missiles fired at one time are fired in a giant glob. Once we get individual missile launchers that shoot individual missiles, then we can get cool things like rapid-firing rocket bursts. Until then, this wouldn't have any noteworthy or interesting effect.
Reicine Ceer
State War Academy
Caldari State
#6 - 2011-11-25 11:36:03 UTC
Daedalus Arcova wrote:
Very interesting idea. I guess you're thinking along the same lines as rocket pods on attack helicopters, which are fired in strafing bursts?

This wouldn't necessarily require any new mechanics, just some spreadsheet changes. Massively increase the rate of fire of rockets to something like 2 or 3 a second (or just use the currently unused 'charge rate' attribute to fire more rockets simultaneously, which would avoid creating lag), and increase reload time to something like 2 minutes.

To give some idea of what that would be capable of, a single max-skilled T2 rocket launcher with a full load of 50 faction rockets and no ship bonuses, could do 2550 points of damage in the space of 16 seconds, firing 3 a second. For comparison, the full rack of 280mm artillery on a gank-fit Thrasher can do 3650 damage in the same time. So that would obviously be massively overpowered for a single frigate sized launcher with low fitting requirements.

Possible balances:
- Leave the existing rocket launchers as they are, and create a 'rocket salvo launcher'.
- Much smaller rocket capacity than existing launchers. Capacity would directly influence the 'slow alpha' of the launcher (total damage before reloading).
- High fitting costs, possibly even cruiser sized fitting costs.
- Limit one launcher per ship.
- A built in penalty to rocket explosion velocity and radius. Big salvo, bad aim.

It would require a lot of care to balance this to prevent it being massively overpowered, but I really like the concept.


This is darn close to what i was talking about! Thanks for playing around with the numbers lol :)

Some folk still dont seem to get it, but i reckon with the right love and attention, rockets could become something of a game-changer in combat; an effect thats missing in all but the massive hot-dropping fleet operations.

Somewhat disagree on cruiser-sized ships being the ones to use this, but perhaps the salvo launcher would force the pilot into fitting out their ship in a way that somewhat gimps it but still provides a useful battlefield component... kinda how destroyers are now ;)
Pinky Denmark
The Cursed Navy
#7 - 2011-11-25 13:23:33 UTC
Having rocket launchers given a much faster RoF adjusted with a longer reload time and possible a lower capacity would be fun. The damage is done similar to alpha except it's not true alpha but an intense bombardment for a short period of time.
I like this one amongst many other weird suggestions.

Instead of having 10 rockets fired with 2 seconds between and then reloading for 10 seconds we could easily fire 10 rockets with 0,5 seconds between and then reload for 25 seconds.

We could also just change the graphics and keep the current rocket launchers that seems to work fine. Afterall 1 shot from an autocannon also gives you the impression of multiple shots being fired.

Pinky