EVE General Discussion

Artillery is fantastic due high volley damage, selectable damage type, no capacitor cost, and the ability to reach out far with high optimal and falloff. With the tracking enhancers buffed, Artillery can do solid damage past 70km using the shortest range high damage ammo.

It is balanced out by low overall sustained dps, poor tracking, and demanding fitting cost.

But where does that leave Railguns and Beam lasers?

These are currently lacking and broken in many ways.

Both Weapon systems require capacitor to fire and have a fixed damage type. Both weapons have trouble fitting on medium and smaller class of ships.

Beams see use with the Tachyon Beam laser. The Tachyon Beam Lasers has good range, best tracking for long range, and DPS close to Mega Pulse lasers.

Balanced out by high capacitor usage and extremely demanding fitting that prevents an sort of tank to be put on the ship, unless your sacrifice fitting mods to do so.

Tachyon Beams are powerful, but fairly limiting weapons. These weapons are supposed to be a class above 425mm, 1400mm, and mega beams.

The rest of the beam lasers are not fantastic however. Regular beam lasers are rather paltry when you can use pulse lasers with scorch crystals. The high pg requirements make them rather difficult to fit, the loss of tracking, dps, and more cap usage for an increase in range make them only good for very niche situations that rarely occurs.

Now lets talk about one of the worst weapon systems in the game: Railguns (aka Failguns)

Railguns are in most cases meaningless. They do least volley damage out of all the turrets in the game, and have one of the lowest dps, about 10% better than artillery for several times less volley)

They wield the weakness of both Artillery and Beams, but has the strengths of neither.

The only advantage they have is range. Railguns requires ships that have range bonus to truly shine in that category. But that range difference between railguns and artillery are minor thanks to tracking enhancer buffs.

Sniping mechanics have been rendered mostly useless thanks to ongrid probing and 150km on-grid warp range.

Beams and Railguns IMHO should get a look at and be adjusted to provide another trait besides longer range. (Artillery has Alpha and Range, Beams and Railguns have only range)


TL:DR:

Beam lasers need more reasons to fit than better range.

Railguns need some seriously help.

What can we do to fix these weapon systems?

Being able to fly all races gets you a feel how certain things are far better than what they do compared to other things in the same category.


Gallente frigates are one of the best in the game where close range brawling is common. But their cruisers and battleships suffer due to the increase in engagement range where blasters scale poorly along with nonsensical racial philosophies(slow, fat armor tanking ships with the shortest range weapons in the game).

Extend maximum range. Remove on-grid probing.

Yeah fighting minmitar does suck.

Confirming railguns are in bad shape and need some sweet, sweet lovin.

I mean, come on, just look at commonly used fleet set-ups or tournament fleets, how many railboats do you see?

Yeah... rails suck and need a buff... vindi could use some love too. I want 100km targeting range and 10% more dps.... and another mid slot to web ever moar.

I want to field Tachys on my Apocs and 'geddons without shitting up half my low rack with RCUs.

It is my take on this that the turret itself should be it's own balancing factor. Indirect "challenges" like inflated fitting requirements are not effective neither appropriate balancing methods. Really, 425s and Tachyons fighting within standard tackling ranges? You're going to miss damn near everything every time. Why the stupendous fitting nerf and cap usage annoyance? At that point, nobody care if you can or cannot fit a tank as well; you'll just die slightly slower anyway.

Fitting requirements have no business being higher for the sole reason they boast higher optimal and alpha numbers. The turret itself (tracking and sig. resolution) require preparation and favourable situation to be effective. That's all the balancing they really need. Obnoxious fitting and activation cost accomplishes little for balancing but worsening them; makes them unattractive to even think about outside of the very few hulls that can field these type of turrets without major fitting wizardry.

Fix? Relax fitting requirements. All 5 fitting skills? Let us go nuts. The attributes, by themselves, will decide what's hot or not. Artificial overdone fitting reqs needs to die.

Probably fitting issues with disapear when the tiercide rebalance reach battleships. Until then we have to cope with this minor issues. Its not like as temepsts can fit 1400mm T2 much more easily than an apoc can field tachyons....

Rails are the weapon by which TEST's conquest of Delve, Querious and Period Basis was wrought, you know.

I don't understand how many threads have to be made on this topic for ccp to listen.


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