Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Just had this idea and I'm gonna spit it out.

Kamikaze drone: a drone which attacks ships by raming them, being destroyed in the collision.

Damage type: using malfunctioning Slepeer technology, the kamikaze drone disintegrates itself and the surrounding matter, causing damage to armor and hull regardless of shields.

Damage calculations: the kamikaze drone will remove a fixed amount of mass, proportional to its own mass. The amount of mass removed from structure and armor will be split accordingly to the resistance gap of those.

For an instance (not actual numbers):

Say drone mass it's 1,000 Kg. Removes 50x it own mass. Target ship haves a mass of 500,000 kg armor and 250,000 kg structure, expressed as 10,000 hitpoints and 5,000 hitpoints respectively.

The drone will remove 50x 1,000 kg = 50,000 kg out of 750,000 kg of mass.

Average (4 damages) resist of armor is 70%. Average (4 damages) resist of structure is 40%. This leaves a "damage gap" of 30+60 calculation points= 90 points of which 33,33% belongs to armor and 66,66 % belongs to structure, thus Armor will take 33.33% of the drone damage and structure will take 66.66% of the damage.

Thus 16,667 kg of mass are removed from armor and 33,333 kg of mass are removed from structure.

The last step is to convert mass to hitpoints:

16,667 kg out of 500,000 kg is 3.33 % of armor thus armor loses 3.33% of 10,000 hitpoints = 333 HP.
33,333 kg out of 250,000 kg is 13.33% of strcuture thus structure loses 13.33% of 5,000 hitpoints = 665.5 HP

As I said this are not actual numbers, just an instance of how would be done the calculations.

The net result would be that kamikaze drones could soften a target early, before removing its shields and armor by conventional means. Also they would always cause damage regardless of all other factors, making their destruction before impact a top priority.

As a completely new way of inflicting damage, they would require much testing and balancing but could open interesting venues of gameplay, like "bleeding" a supercapital by a thousand cuts to its structure or allowing a outnumbered ship cause certain damage to its agressors (lost by lost, take some of their structure with you). This could work specially if kamikaze drones were authonomous, like a mine. They would try to hit the target after launch even if the launcher ship was destroyed, until exausting their flight time.

The ability to kamikaze, maybe. But surely not the part with disintegration of mass, HP damage calculated as factor of the mass destroyed and the rest.

If I have a drone that does 1% damage to someone's structure, and 100 of my friends have the same drone, literally anything we face, no matter what we're flying in, no matter what they're flying, no matter the support fleets or the tank involved, is dead.

Seems a little OP to me.



Also, mass has nothing to do with hitpoints. At all.

Price is not a method of balance.

Using mass as a factor in structure HP, and then allowing damage to bypass shields entirely, is an enormous nerf to shield tanking. Please justify this. (Hint: armour plates add mass. Shield extenders don't.)

How would your mass as HP thing take MWDs and warp disruption field generators into account?

-1

The worst part of this idea has already been covered by Danika Princip and that is the ability to bypass a ships shields and apply damage directly to armor. I think she is kind when she calls this an enormous nerf to shield tanking, in reality these would render shield tanking totally irrelevant in the PvP side of the game. Your facing a shield fleet no problem simply whip out the kamikaze drones and be done with it.

And you are wrong, cost never has been and never will be a balance factor, all high costs do is ensure that only the large / rich groups would have access to these. And how do you justify giving more power to the large / rich groups when CCP is trying to reduce the influence those larger / richer groups and encourage smaller groups and trying to make those smaller groups more relevant in the game.