Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Many eve players complain about remote reps making fights into battles where one side loses next to nothing and the other loses everything, but is nerfing remote reps the best solution? Remote reps already have a built in weakness in that they can only repair one target at a time; the problem is that this isn't actually a handicap as damage is normally applied to one ship at a time.

Fleet comps are built around having enough logi to counter incoming damage (and remember this is applied to one ship at a time making the calcs easier) and enough buffer to last until reps land. This directly leads to N+1 being the best offensive and defensive tactic for larger fights. This is also the reason for the archon blob being so powerful; the archon hull has high native buffer and en-masse can provide enough reps even out of triage to cope with almost anything that can be thrown at it. (Can be fixed by making capital remote reps no better than large without triage)

I would propose a new AoE weapon line be introduced or perhaps missiles repurposed for the role. The weapons would fire on a target and upon landing would detonate similar to a smart bomb damaging all ships in an area (dictated by size of turret/launcher) including the target. These weapons would have much lower paper dps than the current focused weapons we have now so as not to obsolete single target weapons. Damage would need to be low enough so not to allow for a "remote pipe bomb" of sorts i.e not close to competing with bombers.

The effect I see this having is fleets could choose to fit for AoE damage forcing primaried targets to either notice their allies are being ground down by the AoE damage and fly out of the blob or allow an attacker to overcome reps by spreading damage. Skilled piloting does mitigate the effects of these weapons however I believe counter-play is important. Equally, skilled target selection allows an attacker to keep damage on a group of enemies by switching targets.

Sounds like bombers to me...

It more than sounding like lol.....


They are trying to avoid bombers can be squishy. They are kind of copycatting the recent page 1 post of the anti-capital BS bomber. Just in this case its not spelled out as clear....only archon mentioned briefly. And is aiming for smaller logi as well.


They want something bigger and tankier I would gather. Since bombers either die if fast locked and engaged fast as hell or spend a fair amount of time if they clear warping out to realign to come back in.

Which is kind of the intended tradeoff really. can put out some pain, but if it hangs around too long it will go boom.

Their new slant also seems to be damage based by hardpoint mount size. Probably to avoid the issue I brought up in that other thread of how to make this AOE not wipe everything op style. However the solution is an overcomplicated mess really.

It be either be 4 new types of ammo that magically work the same across all weapons sizes. Want to smash the frigate roam with frigate logi my say scorpion would have a large launcher that fires, with no penalty, the small bomb to smash it.

Or we get N+1 again. As you have to bring the frigates fit with this to deal with frigs, the cruiser with medium "bombs", the bs' with large. and hell....caps for x-large.

Or....you could just bring some damn bombers now lol.

CCP doesn't know how to optimize square root and sin/cos functions properly. :-(

I am not part of a "they" and I am not trying to propose an anti capital bomber hence why I suggested the damage be so much lower than existing bombers so not to replace them. My biggest concern with the idea is that after a point one side could have enough AoE to alpha a group of ships before they can react but by fiddling the numbers I think it could be doable.

I'd also like to clarify how I picture the way these weapons will work. You first choose a new AoE-weapon sized suitably for your ship. You select your target, fire the weapons, and on a successful hit he and everything within X metres takes damage . The main target takes the brunt of the damage (say 60%) and enemies around him receive the rest. I hadn't considered battleship sized weapons being able to AoE down small ships but this could be resolved by comparing the AoE'd ships sig to the targeted ships sig.

I picture this giving attackers a way to either force a target to peel off from the group or to spread damage over several targets and overwhelm reps.

RTS players understand that AOE is the best way to counter blobs. For as smart as Eve players usually are, why do you people continue to have such problems understanding this?

I dont mean wild, haphazard, bring-back-the-old-DD, grid-clearing AOE; bombs are great. They take skill and they work perfectly at countering battleship blobs. In fact, bombs are one of the reasons that people dont use battleships in large fleets anymore. Apparently it's easier to switch ship doctrines than it is to teach fleet members to do something other than "orbit anchor at optimal"

Bombs are great at countering battleship blobs... now if only we could come up with something to counter cruiser blobs and cap ship blobs... then maybe people would be forced to split their fleets up into smaller groups flying around independently instead of mindlessly orbiting anchor and spamming F1

My thinking is that conventional weapons and logi in it's current form work fine for small scale fights, only on large scale does the ability to stack as many logi as needed on a single ship cause problems. It causes problems because weapons in eve only apply damage to a single target and therefore all a ship needs to survive N enemies is enough buffer to last until reps land and enough logi to counter N players. This leads to fights being binary and this is not very interesting gameplay.

As Sigras points out AoE is used as an anti-blob weapon to great success in many other RTS games and I believe it is only due to the poor past implementations of AoE in eve that people don't like it. Let's try using some numbers, pulled from where the sun don't shine, as an example:

Team A is a group of 150 single target fit cruisers and 30 logi
Team B is a group of 100 AoE fit cruisers and 50 logi

Team B has less dps on grid due to lower numbers of damage dealers and due to AoE weapons having less raw damage. However, team B brought enough logi to keep ships up through team A's single target damage. Team A picks a primary and applies all dps to it, either it has enough buffer and catches reps or it doesn't and dies. Team B picks a target in the centre of A's blob and even though the target will be easily reppable for team A, nearby targets are also taking damage and team A's logi is struggling to spread reps as needed. Either the target notices he is getting his friends killed and moves out of the blob exposing himself or he stays in and team A begins losing ships.

I don't see these weapons as a replacement to single target weapons or a replacement for bombs but an extra strategic tool to allow for more interesting fights.

They could make the damage flat across the entire AoE and it would still be terrible to work with for the server just because of the sheer amount of damage events being generated.

Mines would be interesting seeing as how you would need a minesweeper class of ship to clear them unless you want to use your ship instead.

NPC's should also have the ability to lay mines as well as clear mines laid, lets say for example in an asteroid belt, by a Capsuleer.

Any large fight already has a chance of being throttled down by the server because it has trouble keeping up and you want to add a large number of calculation on top of it?