Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Nice efforts in the right direction, but in your concern for not bringing the phoenix anywhere near the blapping capabilities of the moros and others, which are able to effectively hit cruisers, let alone battleships, you have made the explosion radius on citadel torps too large, to the point where the ship cannot even perform its intended role properly, to kill other capitals. The base explosion radius nerf wasn't needed, but if you are going to, go for 2400 or 2500, not 3k, that way they can at least hit all capitals for full damage, not the silliness that will ensue with 3k base.

Anyway, these phoenix changes are excellent. I'll be training into my first capital ship in about two weeks, and I'll be ecstatic about flying the phoenix after this; not only will it be extremely powerful against whatever structure or capital it tries to hit, it will be INCREDIBLY tough with that resist bonus.

Will these changes apply to complex structures shooting citadel missiles/torpedos?

After all the suggestions about how to improve the Phoenix and its XL missiles that have passed through these forums, you've come up with quite an elegant solution!I like these changes; we'll have to wait for feedback but looks very good. Applause! +1

This is more to do with the Moros' ridiculously overpowered range than anything inherently wrong with the other dreads. When you can do 8k dps at 70km with antimatter, there's really no reason to use anything else.

The DPS on the moros is fine where it is with balance, but it completely negates the advantages of other dreads in terms of range.

Why use a Rev when you can use a Moros to get better DPS at better ranges?

The best thing CCP could do to boost the never-not moros problem, is nerf XL blaster range into oblivion where it should be. I get it that they want you to hit pos's with AM for full damage, but that arbitrary point means pushing the ranges to absurd and silly levels.

when is subcap 'blapping' getting fixed?

As alarmed as I am at the sig radius nerf, I don't actually see this being too much of an issue as long as there are TPs on field lighting up the primary.

The problem is the missiles themselves, not the dreadnought, as far as I see it.

Wouldn't the solution be to remove the velocity factor from the equation on citadel sized missiles?

Any other dread will hit a stationary target, regardless of size ( even shuttles ) for near full damage. A citadel cruise/torp will hit a stationary shuttle for like 0.1 damage because of the sig radius factor.
If people are stupid enough to be sitting at 0 m/s ( sub-cap ) shouldn't they deserve the same punishment any other dread can dish out?

Secondly, multiply the missiles velocity by 10 or something.. If a Phoenix and a Moros decide to start fighting each other at 50 km, the Moros will hit the Phoenix twice before the first salvo of missiles hit.. That way the Phoenix is always going to loose. Delayed damage is bad m'kay..
Also because missiles are expensive.. You cannot stop shooting before your target explode and that means at least 1 wasted flight of missiles.. ISK right out of the pilots pocket.. A problem other dreads don't have.

And as so many other have already mentioned, TP's don't work on a sieged dread/carrier because of e-war immunity so reduce the sig radius factor a little

GMP has affected citadel missiles for ages, ever since it was applied to unguided missiles too. If you look carefully you can find a thread quote from Fozzie saying specifically that it wouldn't apply to citadel missiles, but this was omitted in the subsequent patch notes. I always wondered if it was accidental.

In general, the changes will make the Phoenix the undisputed small-gang capital killer. It will munch Naglfars. The price of this is the difficulty in blapping with it. This is the only really sensible direction in whih to take the Phoenix. The blap Phoenix isn't something that LS just discovered, it's an obvious consequence of the missile damage formula, and Fozzie himself alluded to it in a thread about the Phoenix last year. But with linked, bonused painters and the other support items, you can still start laying down crushing volleys. Actually, I haven't run the numbers yet but I suspect that the increase in raw cruise damage roughly makes up for the reduced precision...

Regarding the problems of damage application to linked capitals, the problem here isn't the missiles, it's the Evasive Manoeuvres link being massively overpowered.

You can't target paint sieged dreads or triaged carriers, and these changes make damage to subcaps worse across the board no matter how many TPs and webs you have.


I'm not sure if you understood his post correctly, because what he was saying was that this isn't actually a buff to application but a nerf.

With the current Phoenix, by stacking Rigors you can get your explosion radius down to 816 with Citadel Torpedoes. This is essentially what Lord's Servant does with his somewhat famous blap Phoenix, and it also means that if you have a paint and a web or two on a battleship you will hit it for full damage (ie. 136k something volley, which is pretty nuts). There's a couple of reasons for this that you need to understand to really understand what makes missiles, especially capital missiles, either good or bad:

1) It's easier to reduce the velocity of something than it is to increase its signature. In other words, velocity-reducing stuff is more effective than signature-increasing stuff as far as missiles are concerned.
-- In the light of above, low Explosion Radius is generally more important than high Explosion Velocity by a large margin. This means that Rigor rigs are much better than Flares, and it also means that trading Explosion Radius to gain Explosion Velocity in the base stats isn't worth it, even if you gain percentually more than you lose (assuming the current ratio).

2) In the missile damage formula, the Explosion Radius and Explosion Velocity are multiplied together. For example, imagine you're shooting a missile with 100 Explosion Radius and 50 Explosion Velocity at a target with a signature of 200 and speed of 100. (200/100)*(50/100) = 1, which means that you will hit him for full damage even though he "should be" speed tanking your missiles. A lot of people don't understand this properly.

Point 2 means that the best ways to hit something you "shouldn't be" able to hit are, from most effective to least effective, 90% webs, stacking rigors, regular webs, paints, using flare rigs. If you had to choose two, you would thus choose webs and Rigors: Rigors are the most effective way of rectifying your sigradius handicap, and webs are the most effective way of fixing the speed tanking issue.

These two points together mean that the changes to the missiles aren't actually buffing anything, they're an almost universal nerf to Phoenix when it's shooting at anything that isn't a supercapital or a structure. The shield resist thing and the ROF change are nice, though, but the application changes as currently proposed will do more harm than good.