Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hey everyone. Hope you've all had a great holiday season. Most of us are back at the office now, and we're putting the final preparations in place for the Proteus release next week.

One of the tweaks we are making in Proteus is to the scan resolution of Fighters and Fighter Bombers, both of which are being reduced quite significantly.

The primary goal of this change is to ensure that rapidly scooping and relaunching fighters and fighter bombers never gives a dps advantage. This practice has not been widespread thus far, but any possible advantage gained this way would both provide imbalanced DPS and cause significant server load so we want to nip it in the bud.

The changes will also have the effect of delaying the initial alpha strike of fighters and fighter bombers, especially against subcaps. Although it is not the primary purpose of the change we are not displeased by this effect, and we do not believe that it will make fighters or fighter bombers underpowered.

I know that some people who are hoping for a major nerf to assigned fighters will be unhappy that this change will only have a small-moderate effect on that activity. We have been keeping a close eye on the way fighters are used ever since our recent rounds of drone rebalancing and we aren't ruling out any potential future changes at this time. However we are not going to rush into any larger changes to fighter mechanics.

The new numbers are:
Type - Old Scan Res – New Scan Res
Dragonfly - 200 - 100
Einherji - 350 - 175
Firbolg - 250 - 125
Templar - 300 - 150
Cyclops – 250 - 27
Malleus - 300 - 29
Mantis - 200 - 25
Shadow – 225 - 30
Tyrfing - 350 - 31

Thanks everyone, and happy New Year!

Carriers are fine with sentries, Ishtars need to have sentries nerfed :)

+1 on the changes.

Damn those bombers are getting hit hard, but if it stops them blapping frigs I'm all for it.

NERF ALL THE CAPS!

Since I'd rather you not try it, I'll decline.

Hands off Ishtars!

Can you please give us an update on how Ishtar use has gone after the slight nerf several releases ago?

Since everyone is asking. Pulling your drones in resets their cycle timer.

ie:

Carrier getting tackled by a ship orbiting at 5 km.
Release ECM drones and their first ECM cycle fails to ECM the target.
Recall and relaunch
ECM drones will now cycle again, ignoring that they just did it
Repeat until succesful cycle and warp out.

(I'm using ECM drones as an example cause their cycle time is something like 20 seconds, but with above tactic you can pull a cycle off roughly every 5 second)


This is a bandaid fix for this, on a larger scale and just for fighters and fighter bombers. This is a known tactic that has often been used to defang POS' by the various super pilots across New Eden.

Fighter bombers got a ROF (rate of fire) of 15 seconds which means it can only fire once every 15 second. Each fighter bomber has between 10,000 and 20,000 damage depending on supercarrier and drone damage amplifers, but let's say they deal 15,000 damage each. 15,000 damage divided by 15 seconds is 1,000 DPS (damage per second) or 10,000 DPS for 10 fighter bombers which a supercarrier can field. By returning the fighter bombers to your drone bay and launching them again you rest the ROF timer. If you can pull your drones, launch them and have them aggress in 10 seconds, you'll effectively reduce your ROF to 10 seconds or 15,000 DPS for ten fighter, which is a 50% increase in DPS.



Also fighter assist is a problem right now because the meta hasn't adjusted to it yet. I myself just got a 100mn MWD Stratios which I'll use to bump carriers and possibly supers off POSes. The only nerf fighter assist should get is to make them scramable.

After ye fix it, would ye tell us?

I would be thoroughly entertained be a "Ridiculously mad broken **** that used to be in the game" devblog.

Missread

Good change.