EVE General Discussion

It is possible that a satisfactory hybrid rebalance will remain unattainable for CCP. I'll be using blasters as an example, since they're the main point of my concern.


TL;DR - Blaster boats are too slow, and will always remain that way.


Let's go over the flaws of blasters:
-Barely any extra DPS compared to other weapon systems (Can be fixed, of course)
-Terrible range (This is by design, and thus must be kept short)
-Awful tracking for their operational range (Can be fixed)
-Absurd fitting requirements (Simply reduce blaster powergrid requirements, or buff the powergrid of blaster boats)
-Armour tanks and Gallente are slow, and enemies may simply kite them to death

Note the last point. I don't think CCP are willing to change it. I will list several options below, as well as an explanation as to why neither of them are optimal:
-Buff the range of blasters? No. Blasters are designed as close-range weapons, and not even pro-hybrid buff supporters want AC/pulse laser territory trodden on.
-Reduce the penalty of armour tanks? Dangerous! This will affect half, perhaps more, of the ships in EVE! In my opinion, the shield/armour comparative sacrifices are well balanced, and this option will skew it.
-Make Gallente faster! Seems obvious, right? Apparently this cannot happen.... CCP want Minmatar to be the fastest race, because they would like to keep the "racial stereotypes" of EVE intact. IIRC, this was said in the May CSM minutes.

There are several reasons why that last point is particularly insurmountable. If CCP were to make Gallente ever so slightly slower than Minmatar, then the armour tanks will slow down Gallente and the nanos will speed up Minmatar. There will be a large speed difference, and blaster boats will be kited, perhaps even by Cadari ships as well.

In order for Gallente to be able to get into range of all the other shield nano ships, blaster boats will need to be much faster than Minmatar so that once the armour/shield modifications come in, the gap is not as large.

Gallente could shield tank, but then where would the webs go? Furthermore, we'd basically have 2.75 shield tanking races, and then Amarr and a tiny portion of Minmatar
Gallente could receive specific bonuses to reduce the speed penalty of armour, but there are more problems.
If blaster boats all receive a a free bonus, then other ships will be missing out.
If blaster boats have one of their bonuses replaced with an armour penalty reduction bonus, then there is effectively a useless bonus there for the sole purpose of covering the flaws of a ship which shouldn't be there in the first place. Minmatar will get their double damage bonuses, Caldari will get their damage-shield resist bonuses and Amarr will get damage-armour resist bonuses. All of which are useful.

Hybrids and Gallente are incompatible by design.

Not as such no.

Blasters just need to be on a different platform — something fast and agile that lets that short range come into play — and they need to have the tracking to support that short range.

Rails are more problematic. They have a niche, but that niche is irrelevant in today's fleet doctrine. Perhaps they should simply be turned into the “blasters” of the long-range weapon systems: shorter range than the others, but more damage (or at least more DPS).

And yes, there are also issues of fitting space and cap draw and the like, which are especially tricky to get right since two races use these weapons, and they have quite different fitting space layouts (Gallente has more grid to fit armour tanks; Caldari has more CPU to fit shields; hybrids use up a lot of both, but giving both races more of both would make them a bit too versatile).

While it's true, that tracking, PG, and other minor adjustments could be done to improve hybrids themselves, it's the ships that are the main issue.

Why wouldn't it be possible to start tweaking the Gallente blaster ships and the Caldari gunships? Why wouldn't it be possible to tweak the T2 ammo?

That being said, the best way to fix the Ferox would be to give it a bonus to medium autocannon falloff.

Rails: I think Rails should have a DPS role like Lasers do, but because of the Pulse Laser Range (up to 80km with T2 ammo on BSes) even using Short Range T2 Ammo in a Railgun is inferior.

At the same time Railguns are Long-Range guns but the really long range is not needed in todays fleets (Especially Rokh Ranges at 350km+ which are not useful at the hardcoded 249km lock range max).

In my opinion the aim should be: For everything above Pulse Laser Range Railguns should have the most DPS.

Blasters: Need more tracking to support their short Range. Other than that: They are not really suited for Work on BSes due to the Speed. that is a Problem, and one that cannot be solved easily. Speeding up Gallente would be weird. Shield Tanking them as well. So I am out of ideas there

To 'really' fix blasters CCP will probably have to bite the bullet on one of these points: either overhaul the blaster boats to be faster or more agile; or increase range of blasters. No amount of tweaking the tracking and wacky ideas about alpha are going to solve the simple issue that blasters (hybrids) are themselves not the whole issue.

You're looking at this the wrong way. Blasters aren't supposed to always be good anymore then autocannons or lasers are.

Minmatar are supposed to be able to kite the other races, its what they do.
Amarrians are supposed to be able to outrange the minmatar to cut through their kiting.

Its rock paper scissors, don't look at making blasters good against everything, that'd just make them OP, look at making their ships useful and able to take on about 2/3 to 5/6 of the ships in eve if you're flying them well. There are all sorts of ways to go about this, here's just a few examples of how you could shuffle the bonuses around on Gallentean ships to make them ideal blasterboats:

*Give a huge bonus to MWD speed but spike its cap usage enough that if it can't run it for more then a cycle or two, allowing the skilled Gallentean pilot to suddenly go from being helpless and trapped under your guns to charging you down throwing on webs and scrams. They wouldn't be able to kite with it, cause they'd cap out too quick and wouldn't be able to do sort of important things like fire their guns but it'd give enough of a burst of speed to run down someone whose trying to keep at range.

*Give bonuses to plates on Gallentean ships so they don't hurt their speed as much, allowing them to go fairly quickly while plated.

*Give bonuses to webs, enough to put webs back where they were before the web nerf on certain Gallentean ships.

That said, blasters do still need a huge tracking increase as well as a bit of a DPS increase, to the point where if pretty much any ship of equal class or smaller manages to get trapped inside a blasterboat's optimal, it just melts.

Honestly, blasters shouldn't be that hard to fix once CCP sits down and starts working on them. I'm much less sure how you'd go about fixing railguns. You can't give them the most range, because in fleet fights and sniper situations you sit at the range of your least high range weapons. You can't give them huge dps or volley cause that starts to encroach on arties or beams. Blasters have a role and a place where they fit. Railguns seem to have much less of a definable role.

Set the optimal for blasters to

Small: 5k
Medium 10k
large 20k

and you win EVE.

...They've gone plaid!

Had minmatar had hybrid weapon stats, it would have made more sense.

are you sure about this?