Player Features and Ideas Discussion

When a cruiser is scrammed, dual (possibly triple) webbed and target painted even cruise missiles are going to apply nearly full damage. The only thing you've shown with that kill is that fury heavy missiles do full damage when a target is scram/webbed and painted, yet not how little damage you apply even with cn or precision vs a target that is not scram/webbed and painted compared to hams and light missiles. You generally don't go scram/web on caldari hulls with hml because you don't have the damage to make up for throwing away your ability to tank which is why if youre going to be fighting in web range you bring hams. Hams give you the damage you need to make up for having far less tank due to requiring scram/web. This is why you rarely see solo hml boats because the majority of them cant afford to sacrifice their ability to stay on field in order to apply damage.

As far as missiles able to swap damage type that is exactly the reason the current iteration of rlms and rhml are considered worthless. They can't swap damage types when they need to (which is generally in the middle of combat) because they have a 40 second reload.

On that kill, the HML shines in comparison, you have a combination setup that guarantees, that if your target is caught, your HML will apply full dps. Truth is, that that HML still isn't the only, or best choice, of medium sized weapons. Hams, Beam Lasers, and Artillery would probably been even more effective.

Like i said earlier, against slow large targets the HML performs good, its the fact that in an average scenario they will be performing less then what you would want.

What i'm pleeing for is the ability to be able to apply 100% of damage against an average cruiser sized weapon (sig 125) That wouldn't have changed the damage on this particular kill, but would make the heavy missile launcher workable in more scenarios, wich would reduce the amount of people feeling they have no other option then useing RLML for applying damage, and wich would in return make a lot of Frigate and destroyer sized pilots happy.

The key question to me is why LMLs and SB torps launchers are the only missile systems in the top 20. I'm still waiting for the "missiles are fine" crowd to come up with an explanation for that beyond the "usage isn't everything" argument.

Javelins improve damage application at short range, at the expense of zero damage further out. So that's a trade-off which the missile launchers do not have to make.

A deimos does not get the tracking bonus. It will apply a great deal less damage than the proteus.

I chose the proteus because it gives rail guns the best possible chance to work well.

Yes, I am still failing to see that long range medium missiles perform any worse than long range medium guns.

They perform differently, but against a similar target employing best available tactics they actually come out ahead.

When the target is fully compromised, railguns can deliver full damage, as can heavy missiles. Missile users have nothing to worry about - we're not suffering discrimination. We're just getting the same as us gunnery users.

The comparison I put forward did not use any damage application mods on either the railgun ship or the missile ship. These can be added. and the numbers recalculated.

It's fair to say the the cerberus lacks the option to fit damage application modules in lieu of ballistics. Rise has already hinted that modules like this are on the agenda. However, the cerberus can fit target painters, rigors and flares.

Against the original AB stabber moving at 922m/s:

Result:
Cerberus with 2 target painters, 3 ballistics, HML, navy scourge, a T2 rigor and a T2 flare is delivering 59% of its 485 dps at all ranges.
So constant DPS at all ranges = 286

The above deimos with javelin and tracking scripts in the tracking computers:
peaks at 55% hit chance at 18km, with 0% chance below 6km and under 20% chance beyond 34km.
so max dps = 270 within a narrow band.

with spike:
maximum hit chance is 36% at 56.5km, zero chance below 30km and about 10% chance at 80km.
So max dps = 110.

Summary:
You're doing more damage, more consistently in the cerberus if the stabber pilot is trying to stay alive.

Do we have any more uninformed assumptions about missiles v guns that I can help anyone with?

So your cerb has 2 painters, a point and a prop mod, with 2 rigs designed for application. This leaves you with a single lse and 0 em resist outside of your dcu. We are forced to assume the fight starts on 0 because if it does not then you are ble to easily kite the stabber and win regardless. However you has what is likely a dual lse scram ab stabber on 0 with you and you have no tank outside of your single lse and a gaping em hole. Unless you get absurdly lucky with ecm drones you are going to lose that Cerberus to the stabber.

If the deimos has a defensive web (and its quite easy to get an armor tanked kiting deimos with 200mm rails and a defensive web to fly much like a Navy Omen) you basically load short range ammo and the stabber dies.

As far as he proper gunnery response to a proteus the ship you are looking for is the oracle, it can project north of 800 dps past 60km with reasonably good tracking using scorch and manual piloting. Unlike rails it does not run into the problem of hitting the proteus in its highest resists.

I am not arguing for rlm to be able to do everything, in fact let me go through what rlm was bad at before the 40 second reload change. Rlm was bad at fighting ships that had substantial amounts of buffer, and failed miserably against the popular dual rep sfi as well as many other dual rep cruisers. In a gang you were very easily ignored by enemy gangs with a single t1 logi, the reason for all of this is that rlm did about half the damage you would get out of an omen or a rail thorax.

The solution to this problem was to bring along ships designed to just provide large amounts of damage, main 3 ships being the oracle with megapulse and scorch, the typhoon with precision cruise, and the Ishtar with sentries. When solo you often had to force the opposing cruiser to chase you until it potentially capped out when using the dual lse cap booster fit. Most of its low dps problems were ignored by fitting a third lse which gave it enough uptime to just brawl with rlms, which was clearly absurd and has been fixed.

What I am complaining about is the same thing many other solo and small gang pvpers have said, 40 second reload prevents you from responding to any change in the fight and having such a high damage until this reload happens is potentially massively overpowered against light tackle. Changing it back to its previous iteration and gives light tackle more uptime in a small fight and lets you actually adapt to a new ship landing on field. As long as you keep the pg increase so triple lse and lse/xlasb cant be easily done then everything should be fine.

This has been an interesting side discussion… Without agreeing or disagreeing one way or the other, I did want to offer a few points for consideration…

• Armor tank always beats shield tank. Armor gets a penalty to speed which can be offset with a nanofibers, but shield gets a penalty to signature which makes it easier for basically everything to hit - and there is no counter.
• Armor tanks can run twice the buffer as shield tanks, which can then be further expanded through Slave implants; Shields do not have a comparable implant buffer.
• Armor hulls typically have more capacitor, more grid, are faster and have a lower signature; Shield hulls (and let's just say "Caldari") are slower with larger signatures.
• Armor tanks benefit from passive adaptive plating and reactive armor hardeners, and there are no 0% gaps in any armor resistances. It should also be pointed out that if you add up the respective armor and shield resistances on any hull, the total for armor is always greater. Armor tanks have the option of running active or passive fits, where shields are almost always active - making them highly susceptible to neutralizers and vampires.
• Armor tanks have basically all of their mid-slots free for EW, and many armor hulls receive bonuses for stasis webs, warp disruptors/scramblers and target painters. It's ironic when one considers the dependence on EW for missile damage application that Caldari hulls have zero target painter or web bonuses outside of the Golem.
• Armor tanks get a shield buffer with passive recharge, with the option for an active hull repair; Shield tanks rely on an active shield recharge, and are basically screwed once they go into armor.
• Armor hulls typically have larger drone capacity and bandwidth over shield hulls (*cough*, Caldari).
• Armor hulls that receive missile bonuses aren't pigeon-holed to a specific damage type (*wheeze*, Caldari).

Basically, any armor hull that can run missiles will smite a comparable shield hull. So maybe it isn't entirely a question of damage application - maybe Caldari hulls just suck outside of PvE. It would be interesting to see how Caldari ships would fare by trading a few mid slots for lows, more grid and larger capacitor - while retaining any shield bonuses.

But to be fair, that is an entirely separate argument.

On the subject of missiles, I am 100% convinced that I am at no disadvantage when using them when compared to equivalent gunnery systems. Missile boats would benefit from the introduction of a missile version of the tracking enhancer. It would not increase damage application, but would leave shield missile pilots the option of fitting both a damage application mod plus 3 shield extender rigs, which is something they cannot currently do.

I have always favoured armour tanking (even when it really sucked) so I can't comment on the comparison of shield and armour tanks. However I would say that if you ask any fleet logi pilot he'll tell you that the fact that armour reps land at the end of the cycle has caused them to lose ships they were trying to save.

The shield (sort of) equivalent to slaves is crystals. These are often used in conjuction with blue pill to create unbeatable shield tanks in solo fights and small skirmishes. When I take a hyperion to a firefight I can only dream of having a armour boosting implant set...

Eve is swings and roundabouts. You have to take the rough with the smooth. But you should at least take comfort that the balancing team have done a pretty good job of balancing missiles and guns.

Now if they could only bring themselves to remove the silly RLMLs, all would be well again.

The damage projection of HML missiles compared to other long range weapons is abysmal, the cerberus with all its bonuses, can't even keep up, and is the lowest in damage projection vs an Eagle, Muninn, Diemos and Zealot, but is still able to do 4x the damage projection as another HML bonused heavy assault cruiser, the Sacriledge. In addition to this poor damage projection The Cerberus gets trumped by all in terms of effective hp, sig radius or speed. Many times by multiple factors of this.

The sacriledge, even with a 50 Mbit drone bay, and 3 midslots dedicated to painting still doesn't do full damage projection, to achieve that you still need a 4th Target painter!

And this all is against a Cruiser sized target.
Against a Assault frigate, the guns remarkably are still able to achieve 3x (worst possible transvesal) to 8x (no transversal) the applied dps than that of the missile counterparts before taking in webs and paints.

Against a Assault frigate, the missile users need 4 webs and paints to be competitive against the gun useing heavy assault ship if they can just keep their transversal down.

Haveing to apply 4 webs AND paints for a weapon system that is predominantly used by shield tankers vs keeping your transversal up, haveing a comparative weaker tank, sig radius or speed, is not balanced.

Yes on the cerberus the Heavy missile potentially has better ranged damage projection, but this is only after 83 km, a range the sacriledges Heavy Missiles can't even reach!

Its this flaw in mechanics for medium sized weapons that made everyone go to RLML's in the first place. Now with the 40 second reload time, even that system is useless in many scenarios. So missile users are limited to either crosstrain to a different weapon system, or forget about medium weapons as a whole

Leave my hookbill alone!!!!!!!!

Oh wait... my hookbill is armor tanked :D