Player Features and Ideas Discussion

CCP's ship rebalance has certainly made the game a lot more inviting to players with less SPs, but there's still an issue with T1 ships where more experience players have a huge advantage and that is T2 ammo. Of course there's nothing wrong with more experienced and wealthy players having an advantage, but there's doctrines and tactics that are possible with T2 guns & ammo that are not possible or viable with T1 guns & T1 ammo.

I'm largely thinking about hybrid ammo here. If you compare antimatter charges to T2 void and javelin, then they share similar enough properties that you can form a fleet consisting of ships with both T1 guns and T2 guns and as long as you're using those short range ammo there's nothing stopping the newer players from participating, they will just be less efficient rather than useless.

But then if you look at iron charges compared to null & spike, that is no longer the case. Null ammo provides the option to get much improved range & damage on blasters which iron charges can't compare to. While antimatter is somewhat equivalent to void, iron is not equivalent to null. This is unsurprising because null ammo got a large buff some while back to improve the versatility of blasters, while iron charges were left alone. Furthermore, the superior tracking & falloff values of antimatter charges compared to void ammo provides them with some benefits over void, so you'll often see people use both faction antimatter and void in their cargoholds. But again, iron is not bringing much to the table compared to null ammo and you don't often see people bringing iron charges as an alternative to null or spike.

The difference is more pronounced with railgun fleets. If a fleet consisted of mostly ships with T2 railguns, then the FC might like to use spike charges out to their maximum effective range for sniping & kiting. Because players with T1 guns cannot fire out to that range they can't really participate in the fleet in the way they could if the T2 players were using blasters instead. So if iron charges got a buff, I think they should gain an increase in range as that's the point which can stop newer players from getting into fleets.

TL:DR Make iron charges into ghetto null/spike ammo so that a newer player can be told to use a T1 fitted ship to join a fleet, rather than being told that he has to train T2 guns.

The only thing i like to change in T2 ammo is remove some of the bad effects.
In most of the cases there is no point of using some t2 ammo as faction gives bigger dps applied when you take into consideration all the misses.

What role do iron charges fulfil?

Range without tracking penalty/cheap NPC shooting.

t1 non-faction also real good for cheap pos bashing. Know you are going to be shooting pos(s) all night long and in the grand scheme of things CN (or FN, whatever cheaper you would pick up to save isk) is not going to make it go that much faster....run the no frills ammo.


And have been away for a bit from pvp...when did t2 replace faction ammo as SOP ammo? Rarely if ever used the stuff a few years back. Hybrids anyway. Projectiles maybe some barrage for an appetizer at range but a switch to RF ammo was usually preferred at some point. Faction got better performance with none of the drawbacks. Times changed I guess.

Scorch/Barrage says 'hi'.

IOW, this is normal behavior for t2 ammo. Nothing to see here.

No. Sometimes t1 guns are acceptable. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes them not being acceptable is a function of ammo usage, but often it is not. Sometimes there are fitting alternatives, sometimes there are not. Nothing needs to change.



They already fixed t2 ammo's real penalties. Everything is fine.