Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Please, for the love of God CCP, get rid of this ancient, worthless bonus.

EDIT: not that I necessarily agree with all the bonuses you have listed, some might be too much.

i guess its an option , i did think about that but it seems a little odd as an role bonus on all laser ships and its not really a role.
i would prefer either improving cap regen on the ship hulls that use them or maybe a mixture of that and reducing cap use on the weapons themselves.

until they start firing you mean .. then they will burn through that extra cap

And what's to say that they will be firing lasers all the time...or at all? All of the things I listed above can be done completely independently of lasers.

Think outside the box. Unless you can guarantee that all of the extra cap only goes towards lasers, the hulls in question gain more ability to do other things longer. Imagine a neuting Harby with that much extra cap. Or a kiting Omen that can dictate range that much better by shutting down it's lasers for a few seconds.

See where I'm going with this?

then it needs too be weapon related .. just incase someone wants too fly a neuting harbi

Can you think of any other mechanism that helps the ships in question without changing their base cap, the base cap usage of lasers (which would cause balance issues of it's own), or wasting a skill level bonus like they do now?

Please don't take this as sarcasm. I'm asking sincerely. A role bonus is the only way I can think of to help alleviate this problem without creating other problems somewhere else, but there may be other solutions.

Oracle needs a tracking bonus for sure

Depending on which role you mean, it ends up either a somewhat superior sniper due to the native cap usage bonus on them already or a much worse midrange ship due to the significantly lower tank while maintaining a signature over that needed for cruisers to full damage most of the time.

Cap management is a feature of Amarr ships, the penalty to oppose the benefit of immediate crystal switching, never having to reload and awesome dps.

There are crystals that reduce the cap load, but most people just ignore them choosing Multifreq or the T2 ammunition. The simple fact is that a ship bonus that reduces cap usage for lasers, effectively amounts to a DPS bonus because it allows you to fire Multifreq considerably longer, rather than say switch to Standard Crystals (45% reduced cap need).

Last summer I took part in a series of sub cap POS bashes. We used ABCs and in a fleet of 20 with 5 of them Oracles firing T1 MultiFreq, the 5 Oracles consistently ended up as the top 5 damage dealers, with none of them needing to call for cap or use cap boosters.

I've taken part in some deathstar POS bashes and in these cases (when dreads weren't an option) the preferred BS was an Abaddon. Now these did suffer cap problems. Guards or cap boosters was usually the solution, but another option could have been to simply drop the DPS, by switching to Standard crystals. However, to most people the thought of dropping DPS just to preserve cap is unthinkable. But that is how the system is designed to be and when you realize that, a bonus to laser cap usage does amount to a DPS boost.

I use the example of POS bashes as these require sustained DPS over a considerable time - the worst case scenario for a laser boat and yet Laser boats are still the preferred choice. In shorter engagements the benefits of lasers are even more pronounced.

-1

I'm going to eat crow here for a moment and admit that, after seeing it explained like this, maybe the cap reduction bonus isn't broken like I had thought it was.

It's similar to how I like to point out that optimal range bonuses on Caldari railgun ships is actually a damage bonus because it lets you use antimatter ammo out to longer engagement ranges when other ships would have had to switch to less-damaging ammo.

Interesting....