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I don't see any need for this in the current meta.
Sure, defender missiles are pretty useless right now, but making bombs useless just to make defender missiles useful is a very bad trade.

The physicist in me is triggered.

What if a defender missile is going after a bomb and that bomb gets blown up by another defender missile, does it retarget to another bomb?

Excellent change, long overdue.

Hey CCP,

I just want to urge you to think about this question: when was the last time you have seen a bombing run evaporating an entire fleet? They instantly get posted on reddit, and you can see it happens perhaps once in a month, if one is to give an optimist estimate. There has been plenty of large fights during past months, but no proper bombing runs anyone has ever showed off. This means bombing is already close to be eliminated from meta.

Now I will say this and I will get downvoted to hell as every time, but someone has to state the truth. I believe you have all those nullsec people as CSM and overrepresent them in the feedback you keep hearing, and they keep telling you how there is no counterplay to bombing runs. But this is because they have rarely been behind one, or if they did, they don't represent bomber interests as much as interests of nullsec fleets. The main challenge of a bombing run today is setting it up, and finding a proper fleet to bomb. I would safely say more than %70 of the doctrines people are using are not bombable, because it simply takes too many waves for fleet to die, and they can simply warp off. Furthermore, it is not like that %70 does not represent a big variety of ships or it is because these ships are not bombable they get taken out more. If a doctrine is bombable it does not stop people from taking them out. Hurricanes or feroxes are all over nullsec fights, which shows being bombable does not significantly limit people to not to use those doctrines. So here is already one counterplay; warping off. Here is another: having 5-10 ceptors circling your fleet trying to decloak people. Here is another: Never standing still. These are all simple enough.

Thus there are already huge countermeasures to bombing, but they are all indirect, thus people are not aware the relation between these and countering bombruns. And then when they die to that bombrun they complain how it was impossible to evade or counterplay.

I get that these changes give alphas meaningful gameplay, while also giving people chance to directly respond to bombruns, which are in themselves interesting. BUT PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD do not push bombing out of the meta even more. It is one of the most fun, most interesting combat mechanics in Eve, such that you featured it before everything else in This is Eve. Now you are making it so that nobody takes out bombing fleets anymore.

If you really want anti-bomb missiles so much because they are an interesting mechanic, you definitely need to buff bombing to keep it inside meta. This can be done in the form of increasing the amount of bombs you can explode next to each other, enabling ewar bombs to be exploded next to damage bombs, introducing t2 bombs, or combinations of these, or further ideas that I didn't think of here.

Moral: You have to care about meta and balance as much as you have to care about giving people interesting gameplay. Else the interesting gameplay you are spending to code becomes redundant. E.g. if nobody brings bombs anymore defender missiles become redundant as well.

I hope you can hear other voices at times over those null people you keep listening to a lot.

(I FC bombers)

What if I want to just play a balanced game, and make my opinions about what makes it better heard, but and not make the game a huge deal in my real life? Or what if I don't care about achieving a huge organization, or just don't want to play the game in that way as a part of such an organization? Because this is how the majority who is not a part of NC/PC/Goons feels like.

I think everyone appreciates the effort to make the defender missiles and their skills actually do something. But as a dozen people have already said.... nobody bombs anymore. Bombs are so lacking in utility or efficacy, this is the gravestone of bombing as a whole. Unless this release is PAIRED with a whole new suite of bombs, "bombing" will be all but forgotten.

Here is a list of crazy new utility to bombing that you could include:

High speed bombs that travel (and detonate) faster
High range bombs that go faster with the same travel time
Proximity bombs that detonate when a ship is within 50% of its explosion range
E-war bombs that produce a single use of effects like the supers aoe projections
Shrapnel bombs that do enormous damage to drones, but very little to ships
High radius bombs with lower damage and better application
persistent effect bombs that produce an aoe affect bubble that travels with it during its entire flight time

If you're going to let people shut down bombing runs, you need to make sure people want to bomb.

This will be the fourth or fifth nerf to bombing runs in what, one and a half years? It seemed to me on CSM X that the signal radius, warp speed, bomb flight time, and input broadcasting nerfs succeeded in reducing abusive bombing runs.

As other users pointed out, it doesn't seem bombing runs are so oppressive that they need a fourth nerf. Perhaps this would be the time to consider rolling back one or two of the previous nerfs? Doing so will actively encourage more Defender Missile pilots anyway.

"No one" bombs any more because the entire game flies T3Cs, or other sig-tanking doctrines whose primary benefit is resistance to bombs. Providing counterplay other than training Strategic Cruisers opens up quite a bit of room for other ships to actually get used in nullsec.

So vote, and be the change you wish to see.