Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I know there are some, perhaps many, who will disagree with this, but right now, I don't think EWAR is in a good place. Most EWAR scales extremely badly with the size of the conflict. In small fights, EWAR is dominant. Everyone knows "because of Falcon" because ECM is really that good in small fights. In a small gang fight, if someone jams you and your drones don't auto-aggro to the jamming ship; you're completely screwed. Though it's not quite as dramatic, the same rule generally applies with damps and TDs. If you get triple damped, or triple TDd in any kiting fight (and most small gang fights are kiting fights to some degree), unless you're a drone boat, you have effectively been removed from the fight.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have large fleet fights. For these, ECM, damps and TDs are near-useless.

- ECM commits pilots to ships that can only do one thing, and die nearly instantly. T1 suicide tackle frigates are arguably more useful.

- You can't TD every enemy damage dealer without putting TDs on a large percentage of your own ships, which generally means you're sacrificing something that you probably need more than TDs.

- Only damps wind up being sort-of useful for denying an enemy FC the ability to lock (if you know who the FC is) or denying offensive EWAR (points, webs, target painters). Against logisitics, additional DPS/alpha is almost always more useful than a damp ship, and damps are really only worth it because newer player often can't fly a ship with the required damage range to even shoot in a fight.

How about this instead:
EWAR works sort of like D-Scan. You aim your EWAR module at the enemy fleet (probably with the same lock/activate module mechanics as you have now), set the degree of width that you want your cone of EWAR to be, and activate the module. All ships, friend or foe, in that EWAR cone are impacted by the EWAR. If you make the cone narrow, it has a long range, and therefore high strength at the target, but as you expand it, the range and therefore strength at the target decreases.

This way, a single EWAR ship could have a profound impact on an enemy fleet, or be rendered a lot less effective if the enemy fleet is smart enough to spread out a bit. Since there are stacking bonus, it wouldn't make EWAR super overpowered where everyone flies it; only the first few ships would provide much value. It would also reward individual piloting, since as EWAR, you would have to be careful not to EWAR fratricide your friends, and you'd have to carefully adjust your EWAR in order to continue to impact the enemy as they move. Finally, it would allow EWAR ships to be balanced a lot more aggressively for small gangs so while they can still be strong, they're not so oppressive, because they would have a useful role outside of this niche.

It's called projected ecm and supers already have this?

.... normally these threads nerf ECM into oblivion so at least you mixed it up. crap idea is still crap but it was refreshing.



please try to gain at least a rudimentary understanding on E-war before posting how to fix it

First off, 1-5 degree cones would be completely useless at on-grid distances, since you need to be pretty damn far to catch more than one ship in such.

Second, it doesn't really matter that jam strength would stack poorly, when you can stagger jams (just like you can command bursts) and permajam the entire fleet.

TL;DR: Griffins > everything.