Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With the announcement that fighters will be losing their delegation ability, it would make sense to bring back their scan resolution to the pre-nerf status.


Why?
Now they can no longer be delegated, the way fighters engage becomes less of an issue.
This will be because to get any use of the fighter they will now not only need to be on grid with the target, but will need to be within drone control range as well.


But what about the carriers dropping and scooping their fighters to get a dps increase?

Current fighter RoF : Dragonfly 6.38s Einherji 3.75s Firbolg 5.25s Templar 6.0s

Standard drone RoF is 4 seconds.

Now keep a few things in mind, currently we do not see sentries and heavy drones getting pulled in an out to shoot people/structures to get a damage increase as 4 seconds with everything factored in does not give a damage increase and likely lowers it.

With that being said, it eliminates the need for Einherji to have a lower scan res as its RoF is lower to drones that already can't achieve the RoF bonus from scooping and redeploying.

So that leaves mainly the Dragonfly at 6.38s ( as it has the highest, we will use it to test just how much extra damage it could achieve)

To test this we will use Pyfa ( 3rd party fitting program) to see how long with a scan res listed from CCP's forum thread with all the fighters pre-nerf scan resolutions.

Dragonfly - 200 scan res
Einherji - 350 scan res
Firbolg - 250 scan res
Templar - 300 scan res

Now even though we can mostly rule out to a large degree how effective an advantage would be from scooping and redploying Einherji will be, as it has the highest scan res we will roll with that being what we test with.

At 359 scan resolution these are your lock speeds for varying ships:
7.3s pod
6.3s interceptor
5.9s frigate
4.3s destroyer
3.6s cruiser
2.8s battlecruiser
2.5s battleship
1.5s carrier

This means that before any damage can be applied to a target the fighters need exactly that amount of time to lock ( if i am not mistaken all will go to the closest server tick making a minimum of 2s lock, and any non exact second amount EG 4.3s for a destroyer will actually take the full 5 seconds.

If we assume that's the case it takes 2 seconds for the fighters to lock a carrier.

it takes a full sever tick to register that the drones are agressing the target.

Then there is the scooping/redeploy time of 1 second each.

That brings the total to 5 seconds IF you are sitting at 0 on the target already.

Now remember, this is using the scan resolution of fighters that have a rate of fire of 3.75s.

Making there being close to 0 chance to "game" Einherji to get extra damage from this scoop/deploy tactic.

But what about the Dragonfly with a 6.38s rate of fire?
A dragonfly has 200 scan res (pre-nerf)

The following shows the amount of time to lock the same targets as the Einherji

12.6s pod
11s interceptor
10.3s frigate
7.4s destroyer
6.2s cruiser
4.9s battlecruiser
4.2s battleship
2.5s carrier

So the quickest lock on a carrier takes 3 seconds off the entire cycle time, because you can't get around the fighters having to target lock.
This leaves 3.25s left with which you have to:
have your fighters aggress (1second)
1 full server tick for scooping and another for deploying this leaves .25s on the chance to "game" your fighters to get extra dps.
This assumes again that you are at 0 on the target.

Remember this is the OLD scan res, they have half that now.

Screenshots showing the locking time in Pyfa with the scan resolution mentioned :
Einherji : http://puu.sh/ge1Cv/efa38f5af4.png
Dragonfly : http://puu.sh/ge2kS/356de75e7b.png
Devblog about fighter scan res : https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=396274

So now fighters won't be assignable to anyone else and we have just worked our way through why they can't realistically be "gamed" to gather extra dps, why do we still have them handicapped over something that realistically can't be done?

Feel free to add your thoughts.

The post is mostly to show that even before the nerf that the fighters could not realistically be used in the way they said they could, and were subsequently nerfed because " they might be able to".

With the upcoming removal of fighter delegation it removes the last major bastion to problems a fighter can cause :
Being assigned to an interceptor and being able to lock up and kill targets quickly.

When they remove delegation to be able to try and kill ships with your fighters you will need to be on grid and within drone control range, bringing back the risk of using them.



*Edit* this thread is purely for the removal of the scan resolution nerf on fighters only.

Disagree. The changes were made regardless of skynetting. The fact that they were prominently used for skynetting just escalated what would of been changed already.

my pp agrees

Which was never working with fighters, only fighter bombers. The maths are in the OP.

There is no time for them to be able to exploit cycle rates with fighters.