Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You obviously never tried a railgun ship... Cruisers orbiting at 30km are a pain to kill, and the drones do most of the job, even with 2 TC.

Djego, the thing you need to do to be compelling is post up sound fits for other racial T1 PVE BS' and contrast their performance with the T1 Apoc. Otherwise people are always going to have reason to find your examples doubtful. Up to you if you want to bother, but remember that my criticism is not that pilots cannot rat in an Apoc, but that the alternatives are better: therefore new pilots wanting to PVE should avoid Amarr BS.

WRT tracking vs sig bonus BTW. The formula for applying tracking bonuses appears to be

t*(1+(0.075*b))*(1+(0.05*m))*(1+(s))

t is turret base tracking, b is Battleships skill, m is Motion Prediction skill, s is stacking penalised module bonuses. Example for a Megapulse II with lets say a single T2 TC tracking scripted and skill levels all of IV is 0.03375*1.3*1.2*1.3 = 0.068445. It kind of means the tracking bonus is also a bonus to any TC, TE, or EMA rig fitted on an Apoc hull. My view moves toward suspecting that pilots will find it a bit better of a bonus than it at first appears.

Just because the bonuses are multiplicative doesn't mean that one bonus is a "bonus" to another.

I was thinking in contrast with say the resist bonus on Abaddon. Since the tracking bonuses for skill are multiplied together, a pilot with higher BS gains more tracking from adding a TC than a pilot with low BS. Whereas for the resist bonus the benefit is flat: a pilot with no Amarr BS skill leaves a 25% hole after fitting a T1 hardener, and a pilot with BS V leaves a 20% hole. Thus a flat 20% of the hole (whatever was remaining).

For a T2 TC say, a pilot with no BS and no MP gets 30% more tracking for fitting one, while a pilot with both at V gets around 52% more tracking. It's true that it's still only multiplying the former values by 30%. But whereas the value of fitting a hardener remains flat. The value of fitting the TC amplifies.

As to whether that matters. More tracking won't increase damage when the target is at rest relative to you along the transverse axis. But it will increase damage by some amount whenever the target is not at rest. A flat damage bonus would be better of course; because the amount of the increase from tracking tails off quite severely with range between you and the target, or if the target is very large or slow. Hence, it's a bonus that probably counts most against Zealots using Scorch.

Yet again the golden fleet arms itself for war against... itself. I wonder if this is some kind of subtle CCP hint about future backstory?

The best contender are missile ships and maybe the new Dominix, because the other have either not enough tracking or not enough dps at range unless you take a faction ship : only pulse have this much tracking AND this much dps at long range. LR weapon tracking is bad ; blasters have poor range ; and AC can hit at range, but in falloff it's nowhere near what pulse can do.

And in fact, the question can be returned to you : what ship would be better than this one for this task ? Of course there is plenty of ships with more cap life or more tank, but I think they won't have even comparable damage projection, except for the Dominix with its godlike but immobile sentries, and the cruise missiles BS (which I don't know how they will hit smaller target).

@Samas

Armor HACs, ARMOR HACs, ARRRMOR HACS!!!!

The new navy apoc is very similar to the normal apoc, the difference is the extra low slot(used for a 4. HS) and the extra sentry drone what adds up to a extra 90 DPS, it is a bit faster and got better scan res and the extra 3k armor that was never utilized at any point. Overall the new Apoc and navy Apoc are pretty good if you look at the hole package instead of just being focused on the 1-2 more cap mods you need more or ineffective permarun fittings, because they combine a high speed, high tracking with her good range now. Similar things made the poor Tempest actually a impressive solo/small gang BS, while it already had the speed, they doubled the range with the projectile changes(in nano fittings with 2 TEs). A nano pest is a fairly good ratting BS, because it got ok dps at ok ranges and is fairly quick on the feet, meaning less trouble if you run into pvp(I ganked a fair amount of people with it during ratting) and can fairly well use range to deal more damage, to range tank or simply keep the hell away from warpins to avoid getting ganked there. For L4 the new speed, tracking and scan res make the Apoc and navy Apoc a very good option for all around performance(where it was before just meh compared to many good Abaddon fittings, and pointless compared to the Paladin and NM) and even creates a new niche for it where you can speed up some missions considerably, because you don't fly a brick like every other amarr BS and the NM are. I think the movie is a very good example how to utilize the speed in the same way the mach does it and just use the mwd to get within 30km in a couple of seconds, deploy sentry's, nuke the spawn and move on instead of slow boating or being unable to move if you want to use sentry's.

I played a bit with it in eft, decided what to do with the ship and thrown a bit of money on it to fit up the ship and take it for a spin(a bit over 12h in total for now) and I like what I see, a lot actually. I know I can't convince any of you that the new apoc actually is a lot better now than it was before, but I guess the changes will convince at least some people to fit her amarr BS properly and maybe in a year or so, they will actually agree that the change was for the better instead of the worse.

As explained a few page ago, the alternatives are not better at low SP levels, they are not better at high SP levels, at least if you look at the hole thing and if it is good enough for me, it should be good enough for others to.

For tracking you can study this: http://mcc3d.com/game/EVE-Online:Formulae

As you can see you have 2 therms. The second one can be ignored since it simply handles the falloff penalty and the first one is simply transversal/(range * tracking) * sig resolution gun/sig of the target. It doesn't matter if you add a simlar sized bonus(-27,3%) in the second therm or 37.5% in the first. The result will be exactly the same.

Speed, it is actually very simple. A slow ship has to engage from the warpin, the new apoc can actually move fairly quickly to a preferred range(while being able to apply turret dps) and go there into sentry mode(pushing dps without having the big issues with drone agro). The high tracking and massive range of the guns give you the option to put your sentry drones at big stuff while you focus on smaller hulls with the guns. In a lot of plexes and anomalies the warpin is a pretty bad place to be, not just because somebody could land right on top of you but because you will take a lot damage there, while a quick hull that can move out of this position fast has a lot less issues.

The choices you got, if you look for fairly mobile hulls that can also push out 1k+ dps at non comical ranges are fairly limited and I like what I see if I look at my navy Apoc. The domi or geddon need to go into siege mode(full stop on the movement) to deploy reasonable dps, while on the Apoc it is just a extra option, it can do good dps on the move, while using the optimal and tracking bonus(compared to non turret bonus hulls), doing the same thing as the drone BS is just another option you have.

The amarr BS line up was dominated by pure gank and tank bricks, with the new apoc it gets a surprisingly mobile option and this is actually something I, while having played amarr for years, enjoy a lot.

Again, if you don't care about any of the amarr strength but only care for your capacitor, fly minmatar ships. If you spent time for skills you have no use for, then you just made a mistake.

Your situational bonus theory is wrong BTW : the formula is maths, and a TP have the exact same effect of a tracking computer with higher number, but is range limited. Using a TP when your signature resolution is bonused does nothing more than using a TC if numbers were equals. Numbers are percentages, and they multiply themselves. Multiplication is associative. And percentages mean that whatever the amount, the effect is the same. The play does not change, because the game only cares about the numbers.

Wait, people actually think they consider how well a ship can shoot red crosses when they balance these?

lol...