Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So with a huge part of balancing done, there is still this one thing that in the whole history of EvE barely got used.

Defenders.

The fact that they only target missiles directed at your ship renders them completely useless, you might as well shoot something that hurts at your enemy.

I am not quite sure how hard it would be - coding wise - to make them target ALL missiles within their range(edit: yes, out of balancing reasons I include friendly missiles with this with the exception of other Defenders ofc),
but this would make it possible to at least get some noobs into Coraxes to start firewalling if you are facing a missile based fleet and take away some of their DPS.

(with the Mordus ships coming today I assume there will be quite a lot more missiles)

The corax pilot could ofc do damage as well which might be the better choice most of the time but at least this would give Defenders some sort of meaning.

Discuss or bring up ideas of your own if there is a way to make them worth carrying in your hold.


P.S.: I am fairly sure this got suggested a couple of times, just wanted to raise awareness for a poor little "weapon"-system that could need a helping hand :P

Defenders will be utterly powerless against new Mordu's Legion ships - those things have such insane missile velocity bonuses that a defender missile would never be able to catch a missile fired from one of those ships.

A very simple (far from perfect) implementation of how to only target hostile missiles is as follows: defender missiles would only go after missiles that are approaching your ship and would not target missiles that are moving away from you.

As a reply to the 2 previous posts:

Well, against Mordus: Defenders are pretty darn fast as well, maybe too slow for the Mordu's 21km/s cruise missiles, but missiles are not limited to Mordu ships.

And since defenders deal a certain amount of damage (afaik) and missiles have a specific number of HP a defender will not always kill a missile anyways, so i think the general "fire-and-forget" thing would not be imbalanced. As it stands today people already do this with Firewalling-Battleships that take position between a e.g. Drakefleet and their own and literally kill 90% of the missiles. Even if defenders would just attack any missile in a certain range, they would not decimate them in the smartbomb way but still be at least an option.

As of now you might as well remove them (which would be a shame since the concept is cool :P)

What would fix defenders:

If they could somehow target and destroy bombs and hostile drones, and used their own dedicated highslot module with various ship class appropriate sizes.

Think of them like single target smartbombs. Where you generally use smartbombs to AOE these kinds of targets, you need an uncomfortable number of them to do the job, and that sort of fit prevents people from fitting options like using a utility smartbomb. These would have a lot more value as utility highs than smartbombs specifically because a single module is much more likely to have a meaningful effect when used properly, delivering a big alpha to a single drone or bomb with a long cooldown is much more likely to save you from some damage than cycling a smartbomb for small amounts of AoE DPS. The flip side of this is that it's a tighter fit than a smartbomb, and its utility drops sharply the more bombs/drones/missiles you need to defend against wheras the smartbomb remains constant.

You could of course build firewall blobs with them that would be less effective than smartbomb based ones, with the downfall of module reloading, ammo consumption, and probably tighter fitting costs, but they might have a niche in fleet screen ops due to their selective fire nature.

Allowing them to go on anything with a missile hardpoint allows for some really creative fits like screen destroyers or "counterbombers" capable of suprise-screening a bombing run by popping out of stealth due to their ability to fit torp-sized defenders on frig-sized frames. You could also fit up a drake with them and have a pretty burly drone-busting boat I guess.

Not only that, these seem like the perfect sort of niche that a cal/min pirate faction ship could fit, as they're missile weapons with a sort of low-tech utilitarian style system. Give them bonuses to defender missile scanning range and smartbomb cycle time would fill a new role that no current ships are really designed for.

While we're on the subject, what about an alternate ammo option that allowed them to vent chaff or flares to intercept a turret volley, say one type of ammo per turret type so you can selectively defend against missiles, projectiles, hybrids, or lasers depending on your ammo?

Just making Defenders work in RHML and RLML would be an improvement.

Before we get to an anti-missile discussion, maybe we should have talk about making missiles powerful enough to be a threat in the first place instead.

After that we can discuss anti-missiles.

I have no clue why everyone says missiles are the worst weapon system. I never had problems killing any turret-based ship with missiles. At the point where you speedtank them a turret won't hit you either. Travel time? Lel.

Light Missiles are excellent, Heavy Missiles still fly further than most turrets could shoot while always applying at least some damage (at the point where a ship speed tanks HMs a turret ship won't hit it either)

HAMs are short ranged, better application HMs, some ppl think they are bad, some don't, i think they have their uses (on the right hull they are pretty strong even).

Cruises are outright ridiculous if used on the right ship hull.

Torps are meh without Painters.

Rockets I never used, but see lots of frigs and dessies laying waste to each other with them in FW lowsec.


So overall, they are pretty decent imo. They are not broken either, but are one of the most flexible weapon systems.


In the end tho: This thread was never about: are missiles good or bad. It's about:

"Why are there Defenders in the game, considering that they probably get used by about 1 in 10000 pilots and how can you make them more viable"



Edit: btw, have you ever seen a brawling rocket condor kill a daredevil in scramrange? I did.

Edit2: I see your point with the impenetrable missile shield. That would be easy to avoid tho: They will target random missiles and IIRC missiles have hitpoints. So to build said firewall you need a couple of dedicated firewalling dessies or whatever.

Again: This is already in game in the form of smartbombs. Back when Drake and Tengu fleets where a thing you have seen lots of firewalling battleships between the fleets, basically killing not just some, but every missile in their proximity. So i still don't think it will be broken. (just an alternative, maybe for lower SP pilots that do not want to park a BS with 8 Large Smarties between 2 fleets :P)

Just give them an AoE effect so they can blunt salvoes instead of just targeting individual incoming missiles. Problem solved.