Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Goal: Improve Defender Missiles
Tags: Defender Missiles, Missiles, Electronic Warfare

In the CSM9 Summer Summit Minutes, there were statements: (Page 25)

Beeing a missile fan myself i thought of the defender missiles and what its problems are for me and how to solve them.

Current Situation:

Currently defender missiles exist in two variants, Light and Heavy defender missiles. Wich can be fired from a variaty of Light and Heavy Missile launchers. They intercept missiles that are fired at you.

This leads to several undesired situations:
*You lose a valuable high slot in either dps or utility
*It only protects against missiles fired at you
*It does not allow you to select wich sort of missiles are countered.

Situation; If your fielding Defender missiles in pvp and your faceing a Rifter and Typhoon, if there shooting there missiles at eg your logistic buddy, your defender missiles can't protect him. If there shooting at you, and the rifter is for instance also shooting rockets at you, theres a high chance that the defender missiles actually try to take out the rockets instead of the far more dangerous Cruise missiles or Torpedo's.

Proposal:

What i'm proposing is changeing a lot of the defender missile situation. First i want to introduce a new Midslot item that fires them. I'll call it the Missile point defense system.

The Missile Point Defense System T1: (Mid Slot, Electronic Warfare)
CPU 40
PW 1
Capacity 0.72
Volume 20 m3
Structure HP 40
Reload Time 10 Seconds
Rate of Fire 6.48 Seconds
Activation cost 9 GJ
Charges per Cycle 1
Used with Charge Group Light defender missiles
Used with Charge Group Heavy defender missiles
Tech level 1
Overload rate of fire bonus -15%
Heat damage 2.40 HP

The idea is that you select your target and then activate the missile point defense system on that target. Then when it fires one or more missiles it will counter that by fireing defender missiles. The module itself is a mixture of statistics of the tracking disruptor, and the (rapid) heavy missile launcher. As a midslot and electronic warfare module, it has the CPU, PW, and Activation cost as a T1 Tracking Disruptor. It Mimics the Rapid heavy missile launcher in capacity, rate of fire, and overload bonus. It also has the reload time of a heavy launcher.

New Situation:

In the new situation you have an electonic warfare system designed to counter missiles in rougly the same effectiveness as a tracking disruptor

The improvements are as followed
*You keep a valuable high slot in either dps or utility
*It protects against missiles fired from a specific ship
*It allows protection from missiles for other people.

FAQ:

Why have both the Light defender and Heavy defender missile for this module as charges?

I envision that the light defender missiles will fullfill a slightly different role then the heavy defender missile. To me the light defender missiles should prioritize light missiles, rockets and defender missiles, while the heavy defender missile will prioritize heavy assault, heavy, cruise, citadel cruise missiles, Torpedos and citadel torpedo's. With Missile hp beeing looked at, i envision that the light defender missile should be able to destroy a rocket, light missile or defender missile (both light and heavy) at Lvl 1 and destroy Faction / T2 variants of them at Lvl 3 (high damage faction) and 5 (high hitpoint faction)

The heavy defender missile would be somewhat similar be able to kill heavy and heavy assault missiles at lvl 1, cruise and torpedo's at lvl 3, and citadel cruise and torpedo's at lvl 5 Faction / T2 variants ofcourse harder to be destroyed.

The Phoenix is already in a bad shape, and now you want people to easily destroy there missiles?

With the proposed changes, the ability to fire defender missiles at a target will be considered electronic warfare. This means that Phoenix in siege mode, and the Leviathan will be immune to defender missiles.

Every other electronic warfare system has specialized hulls, what about the defender missile?

Defender missiles are still missiles. That means that they benefit from some of the bonuses of other ship hulls already (Flight time, Flight duration, damage) as long as these bonuses don't specificly say a type of missile. You already have a good selection specialized hulls this way. Since its a new module however, rate of fire bonuses in this draft aren't transfered.

there are many options with defender missiles .. but they don't seem too care or listen too any suggestions that they have so far indicated anyway..

as a midslot
options
- anti drones
- anti bombs
- e-war warheads
- improve them as anti missile

I agree with the need for missile defense modules. However using missiles to counter missiles makes little sense while lasers exist. Point defense modules should use lasers as light hits damn near instantly, and tracking would be easy.

Hilariously, lasers have worse tracking than projectiles in eve. Go figure.

Which you can guess right was spot on the best thing to do when missiles didn't have bad tracking. Now that they do, we have no real use for them since you can only hurt a ship with light missiles anyway.

So instead of fixing nullsec they could, you know, ditch missile tracking and we would have a merry christmas.

I love the idea of replacing them as mid slot weapons, and I think that their should be micro sized auto-targeting auto cannons, and auto targeting lasers that fit into mid slots as well.

even if you wanted to incorporate autocanon / laser / hybrid versions of it, i wonder Why? you'll be makeing 3 or 4 (if your counting the missile variant as well) ways to solve the same problem, wich means a lot more work programming, balancing, and training skilsl for. Defender missiles skills, especially with these modifications, only needs one module to be programmed and balanced, subsequent ship bonuses and skills should already balance them out.

I think they should also require a launcher hardpoint. They'll be better used on ships with an extra launcher hardpoint or two. Missile ships may struggle more to mount these but they will potentially also be gaining bonuses to these.

Ships that have extra launcher hardpoints:
Armageddon
Abaddon
Scorpion
Rokh
Hyperion
Typhoon
Tempest
Vindicator
Prophecy
Cyclone
Hurricane
Gnosis

and plenty more...

remove them from the game than to desperately try to find any use for them.

I think the concept of defender missiles is salvageble, just not in its current form

Don't forget, this is Eve where artillery is also a light-speed weapon along with railguns. Missiles and non-sentry drones are the only weapons that are still burdened by such mundane things as "travel time" or "velocity". As it stands, I believe that cruise missiles from a Raven are about as fast as it gets, topping out around 12.5km/s which causes all sorts of fun when you're trying to compete with artillery boats at 150km+. Why wait better than 10sec for damage when your VW sized artillery shell crosses the distance instantly.

As for OP, I'm not sure I love the idea but it's far from bad. +1 for proposing a decent solution other than "throw it away, more tiericide"