Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I can. MWDs.

Is this a sandbox ....No its a controlled sandbox ....Point the nos at someone and drain cap that's all it should be ....the amount of cap you drain depends on your ship and the size of your module .

No, it doesn't make any sense on a mechanical level. Nos is a defensive mod, designed to help prevent you from capping out and provide a defence against neuts. There is no need to account for the size of ships' capacitors in this, the percentage method is perfect.

This proposed change is stupid because it doesn't change the ability of small Nos to keep cap up under neuting and because it flat out nerfs heavy Nos, the size division which most needs help. It is not a solution to any problem that exists, and only creates additional ones.

+1 to adjusting the fitting for noses. Maybe even just apply wu/awu to them.

Edit: Also maybe add a nos amount heating bonus to the current rate boost, sort of like how armor reps work when heated

Because EvE is a realistic spaceship simulator?

Really though, NOS needs to have some pretty severe restrictions placed on it. Maybe you weren't around when NOS was an overpowered god-mod. Or perhaps you just don't remember it very well. But that shiite was broken on so many levels. I used to fly around in a NOS-Domi all the time, so I'm pretty familiar with how badly it can be abused. NOS needs these "arbitrary rules" to prevent that from happening again. the balance is just too fine, either it's overpowered or it has a very limited niche use. And in that case, it's better to have the mod suck (lol pun).

They used to be overpower because they always returned cap no matter what, even when the other ship didn't have any. No one has proposed anything near that change, so lets not justify bad changes by propping up that strawman argument.

When no other module has arbitrary size restrictions to even use the module when the alternative module (neuts) works 100% of the time on any ship class and are significantly more useful for med to large ships in every scenario, I'd settle for it making a lick of sense let alone being realistic. The whole point of changing NOS's was to encourage their use more than they are now, this change does nothing like that other than on frigates where they were already viable. Can we stop defending this turd of a change without acknowledging the imbalance it creates usage wise among frigates and BS's which is entirely avoidable with some of the suggestions in this thread.

Ok, after thinking about this for a while, I am no longer sure what the point of this whole change is.

If I fit a NOS, I could have one of the following two intentions:
A) I want to suck my enemies cap dry!
B) I want to prevent my own cap from being emptied by either enemy neuts or my own cap-hungry modules.


ad A) I have learned that this does not work. I might have in ancient times with limitless NOSes, but not with the percent-based ones. The only chance I have to completely drain my opponents's cap is if I ruin my own cap. Drain myself to 0 percent, then he'll drop to 0 percent, too. Only I can't hold tackle then.
What does it change when I go from percent to cap amount? Nothing.
To suck an enemy completely dry, I would have to go to 0 GJ cap which means empty - like before.
Tiny exception: I might not be able to get the enemy to 0 GJ, but to something less than 25 percent where he is no longer capstable and then kills himself with his modules, because he does not notice quick enough.
But after that, he'll still be able to keep the most vital modules alive by micromanaging them.

ad B) lets assume I am in a frigate and have a 500 GJ cap. Currently, I have 50 percent or 250 GJ left. I am fighting a BS with 5000 GJ cap and that BS has 25 percent or 1250 GJ left.
Now I activate my NOS.
Currently nothing happens as I have 50%, but the BS has only 25%.
After the change I will be able to drain cap, because I have 250 GJ and the BS has 1250 GJ.
But that does not change the long-term stability, does it?!?!?
In the current environment, I might lose cap until I am at 25 percent, too - but then the NOS kicks in and I CAN drain cap!
So the frigate does not gain anything.
(again, there might be some fringe cases where my frig would be cap-stable only with peak recharge rate + NOS and I am thus not cap-stable when trying to suck from a BS at less than 25 percent cap OR where one or the other version lasts a few secs longer - but that should not really matter)

It is important that neuting someone "a bit" does not help at all! Either he's empty ( less than activation cost of some mods) or not.


In fact, the proposed change is not a buff for smaller ships, but a NERF for bigger ones!
Because if I aim my heavy NOS (if for whatever reason I fitted one) at a frigate, I might be lucky and drain at least SOME cap. While after the changes that will almost never happen, because the BS will nearly never have more GJ left than a frig.

Entirely correct. Now, since no-one uses heavy Nos anyway, you could argue that nobody cares. But we don't balance ships by saying, "Oh, nobody uses the Eagle, so it doesn't matter if we nerf it some more". Instead, we fix the Eagle...

The contrary side is that of Nos on small ships. With the proposed change, it will let small Nos suck cap for longer from large ships. It's important to note that this sounds a lot better than it actually is. Because it's very little real use to suck cap for longer when you've fit Nos as a defensive module to prevent yourself from capping out and to hold tackle. You either have cap and have tackle or you don't - having a bit more cap buffer is nice, but it doesn't directly alter much.

On the other hand, you could use small Nos on a frigate as a more offensive module - because it will suck cap for longer, your target's cap will fall lower before the Nos deactivates, possibly enough to have some detrimental effects on the target. I'm uncomfortable about this for two reasons. Firstly, so what? Cap warfare is only really effective if you are able to switch off an opponent's modules - but the mechanic of Nos still prevents this by making it impossible to directly cap someone out - you have to hope that they mismanage their own cap and cap themselves out. Secondly, fundamentally, Nos shouldn't be an offensive cap warfare mod. We have neuts for that, and they work just fine.

So, to summarise, this proposed change is stupid and ill-thought-out because it doesn't really alter the ability of a tackler using small Nos to keep tackle under neuting, while absolutely nerfing heavy Nos into the ground, all with the added extra of smearing out the clearly-defined separation between Nos as a defensive mod and neuts as offensive ones. It doesn't solve any problems with Nos and only creates new ones.

Some people have argued that the change in the OP, while clearly not being enough to fix Nos, should still be applied along with other changes to fitting requirements, cycles times and drain amounts. I would argue that the change from a % level to an absolute cap level is a bad idea regardless of any other changes, and I give heavy Nos as an example.

It's being fairly uniformly acknowledged now that this proposal is a serious nerf to heavy Nos. While this strengthens the case to changes in fitting requirements etc. of heavy Nos, I would argue that, with the change to from % cap level to absolute cap level, heavy Nos will become impossible to balance - it would either be underpowered and useless, or it would be simultaneously overpowered and underpowered.

Consider the targets that heavy Nos will be able to draw cap from under the proposed absolute cap level. This will consist largely of other BS and capitals - no other target will reliably have enough cap to activate the sucking effect of the heavy Nos. It's now generally understood that this will make heavy Nos close to useless (even more than it is now!). But what if we were to change the stats of heavy Nos to make up for this?

We could change the fitting requirements, but this doesn't alter the effects of the heavy Nos itself. So we need more. How about cycle time? Again, this is still no use if the heavy Nos isn't able to suck any cap. How about drain amount? Again, same problem...

How about all of these changes together? Now we have an absurd dilemma - the heavy Nos is very powerful at sucking cap, but only when it works - and it works reliably only against other BS and caps. It is underpowered in that you cannot rely on it to do anything in a general mixed PVP situation, while being overpowered on the occasions that it does work, particularly in its ability to rapidly destroy the capacitor of a hostile capital at no capacitor cost to the Nossing ships. This is a recreation of the original, awful and fundamentally broken Nos mechanic, and one that obsoletes neuts in a similar fashion to the obsolescence of neuts in old-style Nos mechanics

This is the dilemma of a how a module can simultaneously be overpowered and underpowered, and demonstrates that heavy Nos is fundamentally unfixable if the change in the OP, from % to absolute cap levels, goes through. The only answer to this is to maintain Nos in its clearly-defined defensive role, and to not implement the capacitor size-based effect of Nossing via absolute cap levels.

Staying at max cap? The very best deadspace large NOS gives 10 GJ/s which isn't enough to keep 2 Tach 2 turrets firing let along keeping you at max cap. Heavy Neuts drain 300% that of NOS's so it wasn't the fact they drained ships to zero. I believe CCP has admitted in OP that what made them OP was their continuing to give cap while the opponent had zero to give so I'm not sure what you're defending.

I agree this change does nothing towards their goal of increasing NOS use overall, so lets not make it and actually make one that addresses the overall problems of NOS's instead of buffing the popular platform and nerfing the non-used platform.