Ships & Modules

So I tried this module, and found it to be extremely impotent. CCP stated that in order for this to be effective you need "A LOT" of active aggressors. I tested it with 18, and that only consistently yielded a 33% success rate, oddly though 100% of the time my lock was broken.

So even if 33% is reasonable, the major issue I had with this is the fact that the NPCs that you'll most likely want to 'lock break' are tacklers...and these have a pretty darn high scan res.

On top of that, the mod is designed for a mid slot. Now, if you're going to fit this to a Blops, or Marauder you'd want this in a high slot. As there is room to spare when doing PVE. For a Battleship, maybe... the point is, the med slot this mod takes up hinders your tank and if properly fit you wouldn't need this mod anyway.

So, I like to come up with a thought process of a person or group of people when I see something that falls short/fails epically. So here goes:

Enter Guy 1 and Guy 2:

Guy 1: "Hey, lets have a meeting to discuss the idea of a 'lock breaker mod'!"

Guy 2: "Sure, lets make this mod ONLY available to Battle Ships...their size makes them really easy to target by tacklers. So lets add a minor inconvenience for those small ships with high scan resolution."

Guy 1: "Great idea! Now lets make it so it will break your own lock too, but penalize your scan res so re-locking your target is SUPER difficult."

Guy 2: "Love it! Should we set this up so it makes your tank worse by making it a mid slot item? Rather than using a high slot?"

Guy 1: "Of course!! Better yet, lets allow Marauders to use it too...they have free high slots that should be used for tractor beams."

Guy 2: "Now that you mention it, Black Ops could do well with this. They already get a penalty to scan res from their cloak, and have a poor tank to start off with. Lets set it up so they can attempt to PvE!"

Guy 1: "But wouldn't Black Ops use this in PvP, since that's sort of their thing?"

Guy 2: "Nah, the effectiveness is terrible for a small group of PvPer and will only keep the black ops from fighting back."

Guy 1: "Great! Should we have a follow up meeting with other intelligent people and get feedback from the community?"

Guy 2: "Nah, lets just load it and get back to work with making awesome turret animations."

Exit Guy 1 and Guy 2 from their adjacent bathroom stalls.

I'm pretty sure it's aimed at large fleet battles, not helping you break NPC tackles. Get it tested in a proper fleet fight with 500+ people and then get back to us?

EDIT: and to be honest the Black Ops and Marauder inclusion is probably for consistency since they're the only other BS-class ships out there, not out of any misplaced hope that they'll frequently fit them. It would be more odd if they couldn't, tbh.

I seriously doubt you've even attempted to use this mod. And if you have, you haven't seriously used it in a fleet battle of 500+ people. And if you have you are lying about it being useful in such a situation.

At any rate, this is my review. I hope someone (other that these two) can provide me with something to prove me wrong. I would like to see my ISK worth something. I'd be happy to see a fit and a situation where this would work well.

I have tested it, and I provided my parameters for the test. If you can test it with 500+ people (and prove it) I'll listen to something you may have to say.

Other than that, you have nothing to provide that's useful.

The only situation I can see it being really useful, is on something like a bait scorpion?

lol

the lolz would be when you use this in PvP...I dare you :P

Seriously, fit a BS up with this thing and head to 0.0 space. I would love to see the result.

You could go to VFK

You mean like how one intended use is on marauders?
How does that make sense?

When I first saw this on the test server I misunderstood it and thought great how does the game need more ecm. But what it really is is a gtfo option to possibly avoid being alpha'd by artillery module. Now I have not tested it in a fleet battle. But I'm sure it will get tested in this way.

So there you are with an overview of yellow boxes. You could hit it at that moment and congrats when they do turn red you may survive the first volley as quite possibly a majority of the enemy may not realize that they lost target on you when you were the secondary or tertiary. They may be stuck trying to reaquire you as a target while your logis are enjoying a chance to rehabilitate your hp or you are already warping out.

Alternately, sometimes in fleet fights you can guage when your numbers been picked. Not every yellow box becomes a red box at the exact same instant. So oh look on your watch list or over comms someone in your fleet just went down and you just saw a couple yellows turn red. Click. Now fewer yellows in overview can start turning red. Again this may or may not be enough to allow warp out or your logis to pull you back.

Tbh, this probably beats the alternative of nerfing artillery alpha in a lot of people's minds. I still think alpha and slowed rof on arty was overdone, but this is a creative solution to the alpha fleet problem. So I have to commend CCP on this one despite my initial horror at seeing what looked like a new ecm module.

And, OP, this was obviously not intended as a pve module. I think the inclusion of Marauders was simply to include all BS classes in the ability to use it for consistency sake.

So, as for pvp whether it will indeed perform as intended we will know in a month or a few weeks or so. I don't think balls will have anything to do with a decision to fit it. It will boil down to whether it can actually paritally counter an alpha fleet- whether it performs as a percent chance to survive an alpha from the get go, or instead operates as a method to speed up the threshhold of reaching a point where your fleet has killed enough alpha maels to no longer die instantly to the alpha strike. Will be interesting to see if it's stats as presently set work as intended, or not enough or too much and whether it gets altered once it has become apparent which is the situation.

edit- There you go CCP. Here's some overdue praise for your introduction of this module. o7 I'm ashamed of my flame post in the test server thread.

edit 2- also, OP, you seem to think there is no tank but a mid slot tank. There are ships that low slot tank. And their logis reps activate at the end of the cycle so putting it as a mid slot is fine. Other than a DC or armor hardeners I'm presently drawing a blank as to any other active low slot item. This mod obviously need to be highly energized like most ewar (all midslot) to have an effect, and thus it is midslot.