Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Trinkets Friendly research laboratories has conducted research on Battleships versus Frigates using cruise missiles. The two contenders are the Raven and Typhoon.

The Typhoon gets a hull-based explosion velocity bonus. The Raven get some naff, useless missile velocity bonus.
The Typhoon can armour tank (if it wants) and can fit twin TP's. The Raven can't really armour tank, so it can't really fit a spare EWAR mod without being a complete joke at tanking.
Both can triple rigor rig and use Precisions, and attain a explosion radius of ~120m. The Typhoon gets a much more handy explosion velocity and can pump the enemy sig up 90% with twin TP's.

The actual performance of these two BS is starkly different. Sure, the Raven's missiles hit sooner, but the DPS is the same on paper, so who cares if your missiles hit sooner? Like, seriously, irrelevant. It's not like alpha with a turret.

The Typhoon can effectively alpha frigates (yes, including MWDing low-sig armour frigs) whereas the Raven has trouble killing anything. This is tested and proven.

Clearly the difference is that the Typhoon has a hull bonus on explosive velocity and can rig for explosion radius. The Raven can only do one of these, and it is insufficient.

The Phoenix is in the same position as the Raven. Sure, you can triple T2 rigor fit it (for 1.5 bilLOLions), but that just fixes half the problem.

Ergo, the solution is to give the Phoenix a explosion velocity bonus to the hull. Screw fast missiles.

Changes were great all up to the nerf that followed..Really? are you serious Fozzie?

Missiles hit like garbage and capital missile hit worse than garbage and we make it so the phoenix cant even hit sieged dreas and such for full?

You essentially buffed the phoenix back into garbage.

OK so I did some math and it looks like when fighting against a ship with a 2000 sig radius (fighting at a speed below the movement threshold to affect damage), the Kronos Phoenix will do slightly less DPS until training Guided Missile Precision 5, at which point it will have a slight edge. However, with 1 Capital Warhead Rigor Catalyst I fitted, it will do substantially more DPS to that ship. Given that perspective, I do still think a lower explosion radius nerf would be a good idea, but overall the ship has to be seen as being buffed. Therefore I'm happy. Thanks.

Edit: Well, Nevermind. You lose more DPS if you fit 1 Rigor and 2 Bay Loading Accelerator than you do if you fit 3 Bay Loading Accelerators. So basically the new Phoenix can't require a Rigor to feel buffed. Still needs work. Set the Explosion Radius for torps to 2,500. That will solve it.

yes a very long time coming but the buff fell short and it still sits in a solid last place and really isnt much better than before.

Its ok if minmatar gets it.. Though it magically becomes over powered and broken if caldari gets it.

Doesn't the Raven move slightly faster and due to the missile velocity, able to fire at longer range? Not that either of those two points would have much of an impact anyway, I pretty much agree with your statement.

This might not be the solution, but this is F&I so I'm just gonna throw it out there.

Rapid Cruise Launchers for the Phoenix.

This would allow it to hit moving objects much better than citadel weapons, at the cost of lower overall maximum damage, and of course you've got that 35 second reload to balance things out a bit too. Could be interesting

Question... why does the Caldari ships have lower scan res than their Mimatar counterparts? Isn't lore wise, Caldari suppose to be second only to Jove in technology. So you factor in lower base scan res with the flight time of missiles- it gimps the application of dps a bit.
And yes, i found out that the Phoon is potentially a much better torp boat than the Raven... Nice balance CCP.

Longer range missiles, like firing all the way across the grid, are useful only if your enemies are hard tackled and/or the Raven has a passive targeter to prevent the target knowing it's going to cop missiles to the face in 20 seconds.

Secondly, you need sebo's to pump your lock rangge up to 226km+ to make use of what you can achieve with a maxed out Raven (triple missile velocity rigs). That's more mids. You are also going to be fighting beyond the range of all EWAR save, perhaps, weak flailing BB ECM and Lachesis damps. No TP's.

Thirdly, why push for more than 120-140km range? If you fight beyond that range you can be probed down and your foes can be up your jacksie faster than a fox up a drainpipe.

If you want to kill stuff at range, you hop in anything with a turret, and apply your DPS instantly. 20 seconds for a missile to fly 226km across the grid if you compare that to a silly NApoc fit doing 400DPS (tachs with Gleam L and 3 sinks) at the same range, well, you're NApoc is already 8,000 damage ahead of you. If your Raven is doing more DPS, it's only catches up from +20 to +60s.

Missile speed and range of cruise missiles is excessive for almost all realistic combat scenarios, and the lack of DPS and damage application you get for that excessive range isn't worth it. This is going to be true of Citadel Cruise vs anything else - why sit at 200km from a POS so you can avoid being scrammed and shoot with Citadel Cruise? You'll be in siege anyway, so range is no real defence. In fleet battles, even ranged turret LR dreads out-DPS you significantly.

For a Cit Cruise Phoenix at 190km (no velocity rigs because you need 3 rigors) it takes 30 seconds for the missiles to hit the enemy capital/POS/webbed to hell Vindicator. Or whatever. It doesn't matter because an Artynag does 5600 DPS (ideally) at range for 30s, theoretically 160,000 damage.

That's 160 seconds of catch-up by the Phoenix before the (theoretical, but totally unrealistic) extra 1300 DPS of the Phoenix equalises out that 30s of firing the Nag got.

So, yeah, if the citadel missile velocity buff goes through, you're just wasting a little less of your time. Given there's already enough bad time-wasting "game play" in nullsec sov wars, this must be a buff, amirite?

Jesus christ, please no...I rather the ship be deleted from the game before that garbage gets put on the ship. That is one of the worst things ever to come from CCP, and would kill to get rid of.