Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Good morning space adventurers!

IF YOU WANT TO CRITICIZE THIS PROPOSAL PLEASE READ THE EXPLANATION BELOW FIRST <3

Okay so I'm going to give you the numbers first, then do some text walling below to try and explain why we arrived where we did.

Medium Rails (all sizes and metas):
+15% Rate of Fire
+15% Damage Multiplier
-15% Tracking Speed

Medium Beams:
+25% Damage Multiplier
-10% Tracking Speed

Medium Artillery:
+10% Rate of Fire
-5% Tracking

So the basic idea is that we're increasing damage by quite a lot for all medium long range turrets, while also lowering their tracking a little bit.

From a high level, the goal here is to make long range weapons valuable enough that people are able to use them for both PVP and PVE without being laughed at. This is hard to accomplish without stepping heavily on the toes of either large weapons or short-range medium weapons. We felt that a large damage increase was absolutely necessary for there to be any chance of seeing increased use, but the higher damage goes the more pressure gets put on other weapon systems. By making tracking speed a bit worse we preserve a lot of the advantage that medium short-range guns bring, while also making medium long-range guns a great choice verse large guns in many situations.

To understand why that last part is true, its VERY important that you understand how tracking works in EVE. I want to use an example here to help illustrate:

The tracking speed on a standard Neutron Blaster Talos with Null loaded is .0794
The tracking speed on a new 250mm Railgun Deimos with Antimatter loaded will be .0304

It looks like the Talos tracks 3x as well as the Deimos. In reality, because of the role Signature Resolution plays, the Deimos will actually track moving targets about 19% better than the Null Talos.

A real tracking number that combines tracking speed and resolution would look like this:

Real tracking on standard Neutron Blaster Talos with Null loaded is .0001985
Real tracking on a new 250mm Railgun Deimos with Antimatter loaded is .0002432

If you want to make this kind of comparison for other ships and situations, divide tracking speed by the signature resolution of the gun and compare the resulting numbers. If you want to see an awesome in-depth explanation for tracking, I recommend reading THIS BLOG by Azual Skoll.

One of the discussions we had with the CSM on this topic (there were a lot) revolved around a situation where you get to choose which ship to bring to a fight where you will be shooting at Talwars. Do you want a new medium long-range gun ship, or an Attack BC with large short-range guns. So I made a DPS graph here showing three fits: a 200mm Rail Thorax, a 250mm Rail Deimos, and a Neutron Talos, all of which have 2 tracking enhancers fit. The situation shown would be if the Talwar has MWD on and is moving at full speed at an angle of 60 degrees (hopefully fairly average, though it will vary a lot). You can see what that looks like here: DAMAGE GRAPH

There are of course a lot of other reasons to bring medium long-range ships over large like price, speed, resilience, and the option to shoot to much longer ranges. Overall we are still a tad worried about power creep here, but hopefully this will put medium guns in a healthy place in relation to their competition.

Be sure to check out the HEAVY ASSAULT CRUISER REBALANCE as well as many of those ships are affected by this change and vice versa

As always, looking forward to feedback.
CCP Rise

brb refitting ferox

also. Are you going to de-crap heavy missiles now? Before the reason you nerfed them was because you thought buffing all the long range turrets was too much "power creep". Fozzie? Any say on this?

I don't thing there is such a thing as a "standard" ship fit, that would imply you are balancing around a specific fit and then using anything but that means you can't compete.

I also believe comparing 2 different charge types is a bad idea, null charges have a 25% tracking penalty.

mmkay so why are all the comparisons ignoring T2 ammo? ..... who uses antimatter on rails? .. anyone?

T2 ammo needs a buff on long range guns .. -75% range makes it unusable...

It's funny how short range guns are basically entirely about their T2 long range ammo. I thought T2 was supposed to be niche, specialist ammo, not what you use all the time. Can you imagine trying to use a blaster ship without carrying a large pile of null and having it loaded all the time by default, because it's plain better in 99% of situations? Anyway, you should probably be nerfing the obviously overpowered things (ABCs, scorch, null and barrage). It's insanity that you're balancing stuff around a shield null talos of all things, one of the most broken things around. I'd probably go with a -75% tracking penalty on null scorch barrage, instead of 25%, and/or just reducing the range.

It'd be nice if you could look at low-tier long range guns, because they're much worse than low-tier short range guns. It'd also be nice if you could do something with range bonuses. Amarr optimal bonuses are great, minmatar falloff bonuses for ACs are great, but artilleries and hybrid guns are all half optimal half falloff, meaning they only get half the benefit of a range bonus that lasers or ACs do.

If you want to move the game away from being entirely about t2 ammo (no diversity, bad for new players, etc.), you could slow the damage reduction on t1 ammos as you go up the ranges, and make it so projectile and hybrid ammos have bonuses/penalties to both optimal and falloff (some number jiggling would be required), so you could load longer range t1/faction ammos into falloff/s weapons

Edit: You should probably stop testing gallente ships with shield tanks on them. It's supposed to be possible to armour tank gallente, it's supposed to be what they do best. If I load up EFT and find that it's impossible to rail fit anything unless you load LSEs instead of 800mm plates, I'll be quite disappointed.

OP AS HELL

Would abuse

Happy.

Edit: played around with - 15% tracking stats and, um, unhappy now. It doesn't work well. Also, armor?

Swap the arty RoF buff to a 20% damage bonus instead. Artillery is for alpha strikes, this risks making all weapon systems a bit too similar which is boring.

Its very intentional that it gets ROF and not damage. Alpha on Arty is already plenty high, making arty Hurricanes and Muninns both viable before the changes. We wanted to make sure the dps kept up with rails and beams somewhat without overbuffing alpha which is working fine currently.

Good i thought that was intentional as Arty does have excessive alpha right now