Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Doesn't work in low-sec unfortunately.

You're certainly right that this is a FOTM fit, it's just one that likely won't go away until CCP change the mechanics on drone assist. Spider tanking Sentry carriers/Dominixes is pretty damn scary as things go and while changing drone assist won't change that it will at least mean someone besides the FC needs to be at the computer for the fight >.>

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

I will continue dualboxing Proteus/Loki and Deimos/Rapier and mock everyone who thinks rails are bad.

I will continue dualboxing Proteus/Loki and Deimos/Rapier and mock everyone who thinks rails are bad.

If it's such a big deal it's fairly straightforward to remove drone assist completely. It's unreliable anyway.

Just because a thing is difficult does not mean it should not be done. Neither does it mean that it should not be done without delay.

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.

Hot drops need to be fixed if we want fun fights. Its pretty easy really. Make every ship that cynos or bridges to a beacon land in a random position in the solar system, rather than on the beacon.

Q. how does this help?
A. the small gang people being hotdropped have an extra 40 seconds to evade the drop if they know they are outnumbered.

Q. how does this help?
A. people won't hot-drop unless they have to for political reasons. If they want a fight they'll have to escalate it carefully.

Q. how does this help?
A. It means more fights will actually happen. People will be more inclined to risk fleets on roams. They types of roam fleets will be broader (you are no longer limited to nano-only).

easy.

Next problem?

It actually does not penalise attackers. It helps them.

I assume you mean in a fleet context?

it would actually allow attackers to stage themselves with somewhat more precision than everyone simply arriving in a humungous blob on top of the cyno beacon.

A few well-placed cloaked scouts could serve as warp-in spots in order to assemble the fleet at the combat site at correct ranges.

Thinking forward to on-grid boosting, initial ship placement will be an important consideration.

Except that generally "in a huge blob and all in one place" is exactly where you want people. Dropping everyone all over the system gives an even remotely prepared enemy time to scan down half your capital ships, tackle them, and pop them.

Dreadnaughts take about 30 seconds to align and warp, if you have probes out when the fleet hits the system you can have people on-grid with these ships before they can align out without even taking into account the time for orders to go out for them to assemble somewhere. It wouldn't even be that hard, just have probing ships outside a staging POS in command of pinning squads, they start furiously scanning as soon as the Cyno drops and with the size of a Dread or Carrier they won't even need to be very tight in their probe formations in order to get a lock. Immediately warp the squad to the signal, tackle, and drop a kill wing on it (which is easy because it's capped out from the jump and trying to regen with cap-boosters). Now the attacker's have lost half their capitals before the fight's even really started.