Player Features and Ideas Discussion

1. Reduce hull HP from all minmatar ships and add the lost HP to armor and shields.

This change is similar to the mass changes for amarr. It makes the penalty of fitting nanofibers smaller and provides better base HP for armor and shield tanks. Also fits nicely with minmatar 'lore'


2. Projectiles = damage selection+falloff+no cap at the cost of lower base damage+long reload+mediocre tracking

I have explained this suggestion in more detail in an arlier post.


3. Make missiles the minmatar secondary weapon system.

Theoretically this is already the case, but Minmatar ships tend to end up with guns+missiles+drones. A bigger focus on just guns and missiles has a number of advantages: new players have less skills to train to fly minmatar, minmatar can do proper hit and run without having to worry about leaving drones, less server load, racial flavour, ...

How? Give a dual bonus to both missiles and guns (// scythe fleet). Make it balanced by not giving away launcher hardpoints. For example the stabber would have 0 drones and instead a 10% bonus to missile damage BUT with only two launcher hardpoints. Sure, now fitting a neut becomes a trade-off, but shouldn't it be?
Another example: the bellicose. At the moment it has big dronebay, its dronebay is so big in fact, that fitting drone damage amps gets you at least as much dps as fitting ballistic controls and they do that at lower fitting costs. Why not just up the base damage bonus? There has to be a better way than to just add drones to everything.

As one who pilots Minmatar ships almost exclusively, OP's entire post is terrible to the point where I suspect he does not even know what a Minmatar ship looks like, let alone fly any of them.

I don't know where to begin.

Danika and Orange Something, you both make good and quite similar points. I hope this reply goes some way towards answering your concerns.

To make it absolutely clear: I am not suggesting buffering or nerfing at this point. I am looking for ways to make minmatar more unique.

Do I believe minmatar need some love? Well, some minmatar ships yes (the rifter for instance), but others are in a good place. To bring it right back to one of the comments you both shared: whether "optimal > falloff" is true depends entirely on the strength of the combined bonuses (ship + gun + mods + ammo + skills) and how far away your target is. Keep in mind there would no longer be a need to switch ammo, so a muninn could be doing ok damage at 90km, then turn on the mwd and move in 25km to suddenly be hitting for considerably more.


By using other means to increase tracking. This may mean webbing, target painting, but arguably most of all, using minmatar speed cleverly so it increases your chances of hitting. Of course some ships will now really struggle against smaller targets, but I sure hope CCP give them other stats that compensate for this. Making t2 ammo tracking ammo could also work, but maybe some minmatar ships just need the tracking weakness because they'd be way too good otherwise?


CCP missed the boat on split weapons for minmatar entirely. Now we're stuck with 3 weapon systems instead of two. My suggestion of removing drones removes one weapon system! Of course, to maintain balance the ships need a buff to compensate for the loss of drones. This could come in the form of slightly higher hull damage bonuses to the main weapon system or by giving bonuses to both weapons types. Just look at the fleet scythe for a split weapon ship done right. Not to mention that for standard minmatar skirmishing doctrines drones are the absolute worst weapon system. You want to be moving around quickly and have the flexibility to warp and not have to leave drones behind.


It was an effort to make T2 ammo different from the T1 ammo changes I suggested (4x high damage+no falloff bonus, 4x lower damage + big falloff bonus). I didn't want the ammo to be a high-damage copy of one of the existing ones. With the changes to T1, it would seem dull to make T2 ammo just a higher dps "fusion". I quite liked the old split-damage emp, so that is what inspired the new T2 ammo. Anyway, the main point I wanted to make was about moving away from optimal/tracking bonuses for minmatar T1 ammo to falloff bonuses. In fact, maybe the new T2 ammo should give tracking bonuses?


I think there is room to nerf the hull even further in favour of boosting the others. Especially faction ships would benefit. I would like to see the choice plate + dcu vs plate + EAN be 50/50 or preferably 45/55, right now it's in favour of the DCU.

How about this:


Split Minmatar T1 Ammo into 3 categories.

Tracking Ammo:
Titanium Sabot & Depleted Uranium. Stays as is.

AC Ammo:
PP, EMP, Fusion. -75% Optimal, + 50% Falloff. Damage-Values stay the same.

Arty Ammo:
The 'rest': Nuclear (Explosive), Proton (EM), Carbonized Lead (Therm)
-75% Falloff, +50% Optimal.
Same Basedamage as EMP, Fusion and PP.


---->

Better application of Autocannons (imo, kinda needed)
Actual use for the 'sniper' ammo



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Maybe similar approaches towards other race's ammo.

How can you say you are not suggesting nerfing anything, then two paragraph later say that ships will now struggle to hit frigs, but that they need to.

What is a reduction in the ability of a ship to apply damage if it is not a nerf?


As for split weapons, every SFI fit I have ever seen focuses on one or the other. If I go 2/3, then I am not going to be using all of my weapons at the correct ranges, nor am I going to have enough low slots to actually fit damage/tracking mods for everything. I would use one or the other, with the spare high for a neut or something. Given this, why would we want the buffs the removal of split weapon systems gave us to be reversed?

Arty favours optimal bonuses. ACs like falloff bonuses. Removing one or the other of these bonuses completely from either ammo or hulls would also be considered a nerf to that weapon system. Projectiles aren't exactly popular anyway, so why make them worse?

1. Hull is part of armour tanking. It can be your buffer between rep cycles on active armour tank. Dip into structure and hope those reppers kick in real soon. You are hurting armour tank here basically in prolonged fight scenarios.

2. What did arty do to you? It already has slower recycles and in my experience are analogous to shooting craps at a casino. When the dice are hot its nice as shots connect. When the dice are cold....man...those misses roll in hard and fast. I have found those dice for minmatar go hot to cold real easy.

3. many races have split weapons with no bonuses to the secondary (or tertiary) system. My usual example...Rokh. it has missile hardpoints...no bonuses for them. The drone rant....ccp gives drones to everyone. For the larger ships these tend to be your attempt at anti-frigate work. Success in this area varies ofc...buts its there. Pick the ship you want for the bonuses here basically. Want turrets, run turret boat. Want missiles, pick a missile one.

Yes, all tanks are part of your tank. But more base shields or armor provide a bigger boost to your main tank EHP. The wolf can be a nice example of this. By not fitting a dcu you can create a better resist profile for active tanking. You do however lose EHP that way. If the wolf had more armor and less hull, this would not have to be the case. Imagine you do not want to brawl with the wolf, but want to kite.. Well, fit nanos, plug the most obvious armor resist and maybe fit a small ancillary rep.


Again, falloff based arty could be just as strong as optimal based arty. Just depends on the amount of falloff or optimal you get. More falloff also means the quick hot to cold progression you experience should be far more gradual.


Yes, you noticed the same I have noticed. I just want minmatar to be different from the other races.