Ships & Modules

The conundrums I see (and as seen by others in this thread:)

a) TDs will affect MGCs (and MGEs?). Will that make TDs the new ECM? And it would be "omni" ECM without the hassle of having to pick/guess/refit the flavor of racial ECM to use.

b) Avoiding stacking penalties. TPs and MGC/MGEs (and webs as well) affect the missile damage formula in mostly the same way, but since they don't stack with other, the multipliers can potentially be insane. (E.g. CCP wasn't amused with Dreads and Titans blapping sub-caps, IIRC.)

c) Ships with lots of mids or (mids + lows) can potentially benefit greatly from the reduced stacking penalties, e.g. a Typhoon with a mix of TPs/MGCs/MGEs could potentially apply missile damage as effectively as a 4 Bonused TP Golem.
Balancing ships with a plethora of mids/lows versus ships with limited mids/lows can potentially be difficult. If you nerf missiles to keep the Typhoon under control, then you potentially screw over missile frigates and cruisers that have fewer slots.

d) However, if you nerf the missile bonuses on larger hulls (those with more slots) then you are making the use of a certain amount of MGC/MGE modules "mandatory" to get back up to par (which is a net negative.) Plus, "mandatory" fitting of a MGC/MGE forces you to be vulnerable to TDs.

e) How do you balance Solo versus Fleet work?
Solo folks are most likely to use whichever module provides the best bonus. Probably not an issue.

Fleets, however, would probably benefit from having bonused TP (and/or web) hulls (e.g. Hyena, Rapier, (and Loki)) working with MGC/MGE equipped missile ships.

* Do players want to be "forced" into that kind of fleet management? Is the EVE GUI adequate (i.e. provides enough ease and/or information) for FCs to coordinate fleet TP usage? Meaning, the GUI got a few tweaks to make managing Logistics targets easier, is something equivalent necessary for TPs?

* Are TP hull bonuses now too powerful? What about ranged Web bonuses? I.e. are there unintended consequences or synergies that will need be balanced?

f) TPs are affected by skills. MGCs/MGEs probably won't be. It's a 14-20+ day slog with optimized attributes and/or implants to get Signature Focusing to V to maximize the TP bonus. Do you balance MGC/MGE values against "All Skills V" TPs?

g) Faster Missiles. The Mordu's Legion ships' 200% missile velocity bonus has put a bit of a dint in the "missiles are bad because of Delayed Damage" argument. Is CCP's goal to encourage faster missiles to encourage greater use? If CCP is too focused on missile velocity, then they may overlook edge cases (i.e. abuse) involving battleship or capital missiles clobbering small ships.

h) Short range missiles reaching out to long ranges. The risk here is that certain hulls (those with lots of mids/lows) could make long range missiles "obsolete." A Raven with its 50% missile velocity bonus and seven mids could possibly do something edge-case-y with torpedoes, i.e. are we creating a new "Sentry Ishtar" but with missiles situation?

Not least because effective target swapping to annoy logi isn't remotely effective...borderline impossible really.

Even at 10km/s at 100km you've a full 10 seconds to broadcast before the first rounds even hit.

This. Kind of nullifies a missile doctrine when you can firewall 70-100% of the enemy fleets dps. To counter this... MJD to get around the firewall (unless set up encircling the fleet, or if every ship has SB). But still a lot of hassle that turret ships have no problems with.

Firewalls were a bigger reason for the retirement of drakefleets than the nerfs to the hull.

That's two one dimensional thinking, i.e. the worst case scenario where the missile launcher, the firewall ship, and the target are on the same plane line.

If we go 3D, then:
volume of 19.4km sphere = 3,823km3
volume of 12.0km sphere = 905km3
Which gives a (3,823 - 905) / (3,823) = 76% chance of the missile getting through in the random angle case.


With 3xmissile velocity rigs (substituting for the MGC/MGE for now,) we're looking at 29.8km/s for cruise/heavy missiles on a Mordu ship.
2D worst case: 40% chance to block.
3D best case: (13,856.3 - 905) / 13,856.3 = 93% chance to get through.

Obviously, the "realistic" case would be somewhere in between. Someone better at maths could probably compute a probability chart based on how far "off plane" the firewall ship is.

Its no more assumptions than this whole thread is based on, but yes it assumes the smartbomb is in direct missile path so the missile have to travel the whole distance. Lets just call it worst case scenario or that the firewaller is good at what he does and that missile location is only updated every tick. Worst case scenario firewalling against best case scenario missile speed (not taking into account when a SB actualy pulse its dmg)

If you are firewalling a missile fleet, you dont sit still waiting for that 1 volley of missiles to pass your SB range, you cycle several smartbombs and hope/assume they kill some of the missiles as they pass. There is no situation that a fleet of missile ships will have all its missiles in the same location at the same time :P

When you're decloaking something with a sabre (and got links huehue) and going more than around 4km/s, you end up burning straight through the supposed victim without decloaking it. Guess missiles should do the same, flying past smartbombs.

Wouldn't explosion velocity be a more desirable attribute to improve instead of explosion radius? Target painters already help with the latter but the other is much harder to control without webs.

For completion, I'd like to add that there is a power. If the bracket ratio evaluates to 15% or 17.6% more than nominal, that does not translate into 15% or 17% more damage.

For a DRF of 2.8, the log ratio is 0.6.
1.176^0.6 = 1.1

Also the function output is subject to the minimum argument logic. In the event that your missile explosion speed is higher than target speed and hence dramatically increases the magnitude of the ratio, the second argument is likely to be the smallest of the 3 arguments.

Unfortunately, Rigors are still better in any case, because sig/missile radius contribute to both arguments.
The only other detail is the rate at which damage increases - should the second ratio be smallest of the 3 arguments, the damage per rig increases at 17.6%, if the 3 argument is smallest it increases at a rate of 10%.