Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I agree with everything Cade Windstalker says. Remove the turret bonus and consider another drone bonus for heavies (or hell, in general) with either more speed, tracking, or range. I mean, if you're going to pigeonhole the Eos into heavies drones, then at least make them viable for combat, since opponents will be pretty much expecting Ogres to get dropped after the changes.

Perhaps contemplate boosting Heavy drone health as well, since they're easily tracked and destroyed.

ahahahaha, yes!

So i would say:

Eos:
-bigger dronebay or something in that way like ur changes now. (maybe drones in the eos dont need full cargo/bandwith...)
-better drone bonuses like trackingspeed for heavies but if you plan to rework drones, then hope its quite good in this way too

Damnation:
- DONT change the 10% hp per level OR create something really shiny like reduced damage over a perid of time like small siege mode or someting, ofc with fuel etc.
- dont nerf pg wtf (rip 1600plate)
- let the ship be a tank ship and dont try to force some bad missiles bonuses plz, same for other tankships like vulture, claymore etc.

Astarte:
-pretty beast with the changes

Absolution:
- not enough dps and/or cap in comparision to the astarte

= important notes to the changes, but plz LET THE TANK CS TANK CS AND DPS CS THE DPS CS !!!

So, I was curious how true some of these claims actually were and what the various drawbacks and penalties were to Medium Lasers vs Medium Hybrids. I didn't want to get into Projectiles because, well, those are just a bit too different from one or the other of these weapons and a lot of the contention here is about cap use, which doesn't apply to Projectiles.

Thankfully in terms of range and cap-use the ammo for the two is pretty much lock-step, at least in Tech 1. So Multi-Frequency has the same effect on Optimal and Cap Use as Antimatter does, ect. The damage is a little different but that's to be somewhat expected.

Anyways, here's the spreadsheet. It's a lot more basic than my drones one but that's partly because I didn't want to start drawing erroneous comparisons, like between, say, fittings and tracking, where I'd have to bring in the ships to make it a really fair comparison. The second column of calculations takes into account the 50% cap use reduction from the Absolution but only for the lasers so the hybrids columns are going to be identical. The last column is the tracking multiplied by the optimal range. This precise number is used in the tracking formula and represents how effectively these weapons track at their optimal. The higher the number, the better the tracking at the weapon's optimal range.

First, yes, the cap use on lasers is pretty lousy, especially for the largest sizes, but the tracking at optimal on Blasters doesn't hold up very well either, meaning they need to fight in falloff to come close to the tracking efficiency on Lasers, which severely reduces their DPS (or get an optimal bonus, but no one's yelling about Blaster Eagles yet so I'm not touching that one).

(all numbers without mods) Plus lasers, especially Pulse Lasers, get a lot more variation in engagement range than Blasters do. Medium Blasters, cut off around 15k Optimal + Falloff while Pulse with Scorch stretches out to a grand old 28km. Beams have a bit more overlap with Rails but still manage to have comparable ranges but with the better tracking to apply damage better at those ranges (seriously, rail tracking sucks).

Last, I fit out two Myrmidons in EFT with the largest medium Blasters and Pulse Lasers to get base damage with max skills for 5 turrets. Then I multiplied by the respective damage bonuses for the Astarte and the Absolution to get the damage for these ships.

• Heavy Neutron w Null- Base Damage: 203 Astarte Damage: 383.796875 Optimal: 6.3 Falloff (with bonus): 13
• Heavy Pulse w Conflag- Base Damage: 232 Absolution Damage: 435 Optimal: 7.5 Falloff: 5

Result: Void wins out to 5.5 km which should be expected. The Conflag does better damage than Null without taking tracking into account out to around 9.5k, then the falloff bonused Blasters win out to about 13 at which point Scorch kicks in and wins the rest of the way.

Moral of the story, don't pick a fight with a Blaster boat at 0, it's not going to end well.

Other thoughts:

Lasers in general could probably use a glance over from CCP. They trade lousy cap for a lot of bonuses but the trade off itself may be too steep, especially if every ship running them ends up needing a cap use bonus. However, I don't think they're in as bad of a spot as Hybrids were back before the Hybrid buff and they're certainly still useable and have a role to fill.

To everyone complaining that the Absolution sucks: stop looking at situations that blatantly favor the ship you're comparing against and start thinking how to fit and engage your target in a way that benefits the ship you're using.

No, they've said they don't like how dominant it is but they are not planning on taking it away, they are planning on changing boosting so it's no longer necessary.

Pay careful attention to the bold bit.

So I am on Sisi right now.
Been fitting up the various Command Ships.

Finally got around to the Sleipnir.

Has anyone combat tested one?

I am, in-fact, almost done with developer school :D

I'm taking that to mean that it's probably going to be re-evaluated but may or may go away. Either way it's not going anywhere right now. At a guess whether or not it goes away in the future is going to depend on whether or not the ship is still extremely dominant after they institute the OGB changes or if drops off sharply in popularity. If it drops off it'll probably get a buff, if it remains extremely popular over other command ships it might get a nerf, or it could kind of fall into line and nothing happens with it if the bonus is still deemed popular and useful to the meta without being game breaking.

Either way though this is all months out and we'll likely see a lot of other changes between here and there.

Cap is a word used by the player base to describe the content of a ships capacitor.

No one say I'm running out of energy please send me some.
No they say I'm running out of cap please send me some.
or my ship ran out of cap
or I didn't have enough cap to activate my guns.
etc
etc


I don't think I have ever heard anyone on comms describe cap as energy in years.


So cap transferer seems a better name, its now in line with other engineering modules that directly affect cap.

It's quite magnificent. Mostly like the old sleip, but dual S-large ASB isn't attractive anymore, though classic X-large with dualcapboost seems to be the new way. For gangs, more the dual-med-neut / single ASB/LSE seems to be useful.

regards

Here's a random drone idea to make heavies really useful that CCP hasn't thought of before.

Change the turret tracking bonus on the EOS too.....


A drone signature reduction bonus. :)