Player Features and Ideas Discussion

noooooooooooo.... but i like railguns so much. magneticaly accelerated charges of anitmatter rock.
but i would be ok with lowest damage but highest versatility and highest application of all ranged weapons. I hope this still applies.

why not buff everything that is underused by 1% rate of fire or another unique attribute over several iterations/patches until it is used again? BigData will help :)

It definitely isn't. A 7% reduction in dps still leaves these as the most effective suicide gank fits in their class, they just will be a bit less effective for low SP pilots.

I have mixed opinions about this. I agree that rails were a bit too strong, but a flat reduction in ROF may be a crude way to deal with the problem. The real issue is that rails have really good DPS that projects extremely well over great distances. While on paper, their tracking is the worst, in practice they track much better than arty, which has to shoot at closer ranges.

Maybe anti-matter charges should have the same damage output, but a shorter base range, and then tweak all of the rail ammo range bonuses so that long range ammo still has a range bonus over arty and beams, albeit with much reduced DPS. If you did this, railguns would actually suffer from the tracking nerf when they try to go for super-high DPS, so using anti-matter would be risky, while still allowing them a range/kiting advantage over arty and beams. Alternatively, you could just nerf tracking even more.

Another thing that could be done to nerf rails would be to take a close look at Spike ammo. When you stack an 80% bonus to range on top of the longest range turret based weapon, on a ship bonused to range, the range overmatch gets a little ridiculous. I agree that Caldari rail boats should have good projection, but they shouldn't have a 100km advantage over their peers.

Why does this need to apply to all railgun boats b/c Tengus are overpowered? Does the Deimos really need this kind of nerf?

This also takes away a good chunk of the buff that the arazu/lachesis recently got.....

Although I'm pretty happy with the Ishtar changes, but this recent attitude of "Nerf all the things! Swing the nerf bat hard in every direction!" is maybe a bit overkill.

The problem with this change is that it will essentially kill numerous medium rail platforms that are not widely used, but still have certain roles while solo/smallgang/fleet (such as: rail thorax, rail deimos, rail vigilant rail exeq navy issue, and even the rail moa and rail eagles which are just barely viable and even then because BNI fleets are generally SP limited, so cannot use tengus etc.). Yet the change is probably not good enough to kill the rail tengu fleet meta as people will still just bring more, or only undock if they have 7%+ more people post-nerf.

So basically what this change will accomplish is: it will virtually kill about a dozen medium rail platforms, while only moderately reducing the effectiveness of the rail tengu (a reduction that can be fixed by bringing more people in the fleet).

Mostly that just says to me that its not so much the rails that are the problem as the insane optimal range bonuses on the caldari hybrid line and the proteus having a range bonus also along with a massive tank.
I just fear that such a large change to the weapons rather than the boats will make railguns unviable on ships such as the thorax/deimos.

In short I feel that, while the nerf is probably needed, its a bit harsh on other Hybrid platforms not listed where they are not so clearly overused/powerful and that a less severe nerf to the turrets combined with the alteration to optimal range bonuses would help bring them into line without rendering them useless on non-optimal bonused Hybrid hulls.

Seems everyone agreed that Tengu is the problem not the rails. I m against this nerf.

Very much indeed, CCP Plz. R.I.P. Deimos.

A good bit of this is wrapped up in kiting vs brawling. Rail Thorax, rail Deimos, rail Proteus, and rail Brutix are all just better off than their blaster cousins because of the speed and projection of common ships out there these days. Part of why rails are used so often, even outside of big doctrines, is largely because brawling is in such a bad place.

Train all guns / missiles / combat ships to T2 , and your problem will be solved.
Only T2 hvy drones left for me.

Nerfing rails will be bad for whole line of ships that don't need this , as they already not used.
I always loved Ferox hull, but never had real reason to fly one.