Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It's such a wonderful mechanic and is certainly one of the most interesting to use in EVE. Let's not forget the designers believe in it as its here already! If you love ECM please share your thoughts and avoid trolling our love of ecm thread with counter opinion. There are many threads for ECM hate so leaving this one for the ECM lovers isn't that big of a deal!

My personal love for ECM stems with the nuances of choosing the right ECM type or a balance based on your suspected opposition. The wrong choice and balance will see your ECM ship completely useless and destroyed in seconds! Risk versus reward!

And there's just something sexy about giving up raw offense for damage mitigation/reduction.

It also provides tons of adrenaline as you are almost always the primary target. The saving grace being a heavy interdictor!

Who can deny stopping a logistics chain cold doesn't garner the praise and affection of your bros in fleet?

Have you ever been in a ecm duel where amongst the fleet battle you and a rival ECM pilot are trying to jam each out? It's exhilarating!

If I haven't won you over at this point you must absolutely be incapable of comprehending!

Mad? Never! Once I realized it was an agenda driven sounding board I opted to create my own!. Be careful sir! Your post could be censored as it contains no content and purely insinuation.

Stay on topic!

ECM doesn't need to be changed at all. Every ship should get increased sensor strenght though. +10 across the board should feel okay.

As someone who flew blackbirds/griffins/etc very extensively in this past alliance tournament both in matches and in practice I'll share some of my views on ECM.

Even though it was nerfed quite heavily in the past few years, ECM is still a very very potent tool, especially with the much-improved EW cruisers and frigates. If a hostile gang isnt prepared with ECCM/Info link and your jammers arent completely wrong you can easily jam what seems like a disproportionately large number of their key ships. For example, in both our matches vs Agony Empire me and my wingmate in blackbirds were able to consistently jam 7+ of the enemy team, even with armor bb's which have considerably less jamming power than a full-on jam fit.

Like I said, a big reason ECM is so potent in these somewhat unrealistic fights is the EW cruisers, and how they can project their respective EW easily across the entire arena without much danger to themselves since they simply jam anything that tackles them or gets close (nearly 100% jam rate on AF's). Sentry drones are an obvious counter but that's only becuase of the slightly broken drone assist mechanic.

ECM has the unique benefit of being the only EW module to have a module that upgrades its effectiveness, which combined with the fact that it also has 2 rigs for range/str make it so that dedicate jamming ships are very very powerful in these small scale engagements which I have the most experience in. Compare ECM to the "underpowered" target painters, and notice that the only thing that a TP ship can fit to improve effectiveness is add on optimal range and targeting range.

In relation to damps I would probably place ECM on the same or even a slightly lower level. Damps are always effective, dont have to worry about ship race, and with the celestis and maulus the way they are can easily shut down an ECM ship permanently when he drops a jam.

All of this being said, it only really applies in that artificial 250km ball that is the AT arena. On TQ, jams are really quite well balanced (I would rather see a 10 man gang have a falcon alt than an unkillable T3 5 link booster), especially when said jammers are placed on unbonused ships like you sometimes see on AHAC legions and tengus. ECM total effectiveness also sharpy drops off as gang sizes get larger, to the point where you rarely if ever see ships like the Scorpion (for various reasons, not just because of ECM mechanics). In terms of general EW changes I would like to see damps nerfed overall but make SDA also affect damps to somewhat near the same level as current so dedicated damp ships must choose between lock range and damp str to some extent. Damps are also too strong right now imo on unbonused ships so this would help to fix that as well. SDA should probably also affect TD and TP, but that's not as big of a deal in my opinion.

TLDR: ECM (and damps) are very strong in small engagements but in real TQ PVP they are decently balanced. The 20 second jam timer is still incredibly annoying/distressing to fight against esp when you get permajammed but I honestly haven't heard an alternative I prefer. Realistically there's no difference between that and being damped forever to 5km by a celestis so yeah.

ECM mechanics as they are right now, are probably the worst thing in this game (not the potential of what ECM can and should be).
That being said, any ECM thread is good, regardless of what you post in it.
Just the fact that people are feeling the need to defend so actively in every thread, shows enough imo.

Smartbombs kill ECM drones pretty fast.

We seem to be in a time of EVE where everyone just wants to fight with lots of gank and very little tank, kite anything and everything, and else complain as soon their strategy fails.