Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I like this idea, but have some issues with some of the proposed implementations. I'd love to see the multiple guns in the name of some weapons reflected in their stats, but for longer range weapons, they would normally be fired in battery. My real hope is to get dedicated weapons for this, rather than rebalancing existing underused weapons, with a quad 650 flack cannon, dual 250 bofors, hex 125mm rails, and similar amusing, large battery, small bore weapons for battleships and battlecruisers to do fairly consistent damage to smaller targets at a cost to range and raw DPS.

I can't not support this idea, seeing as I've proposed it myself. +1

However, a 15% tracking advantage over weapons with a looser target sig isn't necessarily adequate for an anti-support role. Another downside to anti-support ships is that they can fit extra tank, which they really don't need for the role. I would prefer to see the fitting requirements increased, but boost the optimal range along with the tracking. Overall, despite the higher damage application, the overall damage should be significantly lower than you could otherwise achieve against same sized ships. In an environment that allows oversize ABs, it probably isn't adequate, whereas without them, it probably is.

Ideally, the tracking of a quad light beam should be about a third to half of the way between the slowest frigate sized small laser, and heavy beam lasers. Any hull with a tracking bonus becomes a natural anti-support platform.

In terms of making the smallest change possible, a 15% target sig reduction coupled with the 15% tracking bonus might be enough to differentiate ships, especially with an optimals/falloff buff and a damage multiplier reduction. The complement to anti-support fittings could be interesting as well.

Giving the heaviest tier of weapons a 15% target sig increase along with their 15% tracking deficit could make them really interesting for gunning up. Whether or not they can ably surrender range really depends on the weapon system and the state of things like webs. A punisher might really enjoy shooting cruisers and destroyers with higher damage small focused pulses in a tight orbit. A range reduction might not be appropriate for a 280mm artillery though. Ideally, we just want to make weapons like the 280mm artillery the inferior option for shooting other frigates. The compensation is higher overall damage, at least against targets they can hit.

One crude option we could consider for making target sig and sig more significant is by increasing target sigs across the board, but increasing the damage multiplier by the same quantity. The goal would be to increase the miss rate, but keep the overall damage the same. Ships with more turrets would enjoy a natural advantage in hit rates, but might not be competitive in all situations. It really depends on how the hit and damage formulae are linked. Some people treat them as simple multipliers, while other treat them as a logistic curves with a gating function. I suspect damage RNGs mainly compensate for the server tick rate, but can't think of a way to test that particular hypothesis. The purpose of this would be to create a natural disadvantage for larges fleets of turret users in a way that was more reflective of how missiles are segregated in target selection.

The overall goal here is fleet stratification and fitting diversity. This should disincentivize the practice of calling primaries in a simplistic way, and emphasize filling out a lot of fleet roles in mixed fleets. It is simply a better experience in a large fleet to have subset of players on the field by your responsibility to deal with, rather than just going down the list in a race against logistics. There's a lot of weapon systems that get only marginal use, and giving them clear roles should bolster that usage. Role-based fitting is simply a lot more interesting than PG/CPU based fitting, and it gives us clearer goals in tweaking systems.

I had forgotten about this little gem - thanks.

Could be converted to a Flak Artillery cannon for the Glorious project.

Make the lazers run on 2 types of ammo at the same time, a crystal and a coolant that runs out after lets say 30 shots or so. Then enter a 35s reload for the coolant. Crystal swap would remain instant. I think this would make most sense for the lazer rapid like weapon equivalent.

Pweese, no more ancillery bollox! Those are neither fun gameplay, nor do they require any resembles of a tactic. May I remind you that the assault missile launchers were never really worth mentioning until you could fit 3x ballistic controls on a Caracal?

Only after overnerfing my heavy missiles, people started looking at another useful long(er) range missile system and found one.

Hurr durr, yolo ancillery everything - it needs to stop.


The second you undock a battleship in highsec and make your way to lowsec, you will have been reported by scouts, alts of scouts, intel spy alts, alts of intel-spy alts and a yolo-swag kiting gang with 25 Guradians, 16 Falcons and 18237847272 soopers will be there to pop you - doesn't matter what you fit.

The only thing this ancillery bollox is doing is encourage people to blobb to decrease the shortcommings of the reload time. You either blobb or you bail or outblobb the blobb.

I don't think that blobb online is good for the meta - only good for CCP

Being able to fly turret BS once more will be fun.

I like this idea.

As to the 35sec reload thing, I don't think it would be very appropriate, because reloading time (or lack thereof) is a distinguishing feature between turret types. So just tweak the dps (downwards) so that appropriate sized guns remain superior against same sized ships.

Yep. Reasonable sustained DPS is the concept that I subscribe to in this case.

We don't need even more ways to make frigates obsolete. There's already drones and webifiers.

I agree that frigates would fall out of use even more with such a proposal, as being the only platform disadvantaged here. Although, depending on the final signature resolution metrics, destroyers of all flavours could become the ultimate prey for cruiser-sized weapon systems.

Delete RLML/RHMLs from the game, tbh.