Assembly Hall

Warning: verbose

tl;dr version:

CCP please remove ship based penalties from T2 missile ammunition. It creates an imbalance especially among frigates and cruisers in that missile ships most often have to choose faction ammo for PVP or worry about signature bloom or reduced velocity.

These are concerns turret ships do not have. It creates an imbalance and needs looking into.

Extended version:

As a result of the not so recent T2 ammo rehaul, CCP Chronotis removed all ship based penalties from T2 turret ammo. The same penalties that either reduce a ships velocity or increase its signature radius when T2 ammo is loaded was unchanged with respect to missiles only.

At that time, I made several post in that thread and others decrying the imbalance this would create and most of those complaints went unheard.

I finally got CCP Chronotis to respond to my question of why the penalties were not removed from missiles the same way the had been with respect to turret ammo. Following is his response:



Source Post #101:

http://community.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1421235&page=4#101

His response suggested that the popularity of T2 missiles implied that no further balancing was needed at that time. In essence, the fact that people bought as many T2 missiles as they did at the time of the balance and significantly fewer bought T2 turret ammo was a driving reason for the decision to leave the penalties on T2 missiles.

The T2 ammo blog was released 2010.11.26 during the start of the upsurge of the use of Drakes and missiles in PVP. Both then and now, the majority of people who use missiles for PVP use faction missiles.Therefore who do you think was and are buying so many T2 missiles? Mission runners.

Raven variants and Drakes were at that time among the most used ships for missions and T2 heavy and cruise missiles became popular for use in PVE once they were buffed in damage a few years before and the capacitor nerf was swapped for a signature bloom penalty.The ships that used them (Drakes and Ravens) were already fit to have the signature of a small moon. So of course they were used quite a lot and still are in PVE.

His metric for determining usage took into account the overwhelming use of the missiles despite their penalties. The fallacy in that is it does not account for the vast amount of purchases that were intended for PVE.


A more eloquent balancing solution would be to remove all "ship based" penalties from T2 missiles. {FULL STOP}

Then, if you still think T2 missiles are too good and/or out of balance tinker with their range, explosion velocity or explosion radius. Keeping punishing ship based penalties on one class of weapon system is not balanced.

Many of these and other arguments have been debated in the thread linked below:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=130521