Player Features and Ideas Discussion

What would be interesting to compare is the actual nominal sales of RLMLs compared to similar sized alternatives such as HMs.

RLMLs are dsigned to be a niche weapon, not a general purpose weapon so it's reasonable to expect to see higher nominal HM sales. How much higher will depend on how big the niche is.

By way of example, if (hypothetically) 10% of missile launcher sales were HM and 90% RLML and then this changed to 50%/50% the headline could be reported as "HM missile sales increase by 400% - HM OP, RLMLs suck". Whereas in reality all the numbers would indicate is the fact that HMs had become equally as desirable as RLMLs.

The questions is, how big is the niche for RLML designed to be? People here have been using them as a substitute for HM because they felt that HM were not performing well (wrongly as it turns out, my simulations indicated that HM work as well as long range medium guns) and this has skewed the baseline sales numbers.

It seems to me that, given that RLML use is a niche activity in eve, HM sales outweighing RLML sales by 4 to 1 could be considered reasonable, even a little excessive.

Unless my understanding of the term "niche" is in error.

EDIT: just adding an informative comparison
Back when I started Eve, one of the most desirable and expensive meta-4 weapon drops was the 'Arbalest' heavy missile launcher. They used to sell for 15 million each in jita because of the popularity of mission and WH drakes.

Today, arbalests are ISK 3.5 million each which seems very low in comparison. However, the equivalent meta-4 railgun, the "250mm Prototype Gauss Gun" sells for 650,000 isk. So it could be argued that heavy missile launchers are 700% more desirable than 250mm railguns (lets assume that the drop rate is the same for both).

Taking one's cue from the market prices alone, one might conclude that HMs are still more desirable and powerful than the equivalent railgun. It would be a naive conclusion to draw since in reality its more complex than that, but I wanted to highlight the danger of drawing conclusions from arbitrary and incomplete data.

currently the most expensive meta 4 laucher is the light missle one the pretty high price on meta 4 heavy shouldn't be such a supprise to you since with the removal of rapid lights from pve were stuck with heavys as the go to weapon for l3 and early l4 for the new pilots

This is the undying thread!!!

I do not feel disrespected and I agree that it's a difficult comparison. Some pages back I compared railguns (both 250 and 200) on 2 hulls vs HMLs on 2 hulls, using EveHQ as the computation tool. The outcome was that peak dps is higher with guns (as you'd expect, since it requires some work on behalf of the antagonist to attain) but overall dps when (simply) integrating gun dps for all target directions was very similar. Notably, there are many areas of the curve in which missiles outperform guns - the most notable being at short range where guns find themselves unable to apply any dps whatsoever. T2 long range ammo in guns almost always leads to reduced DPS if there is a significant radial velocity.

i.e. vs a railgun on a similarly bonused hull, heavy missiles do on average the same applied damage if the gunnery pilot does not maneuver aggressively and compensate for range by changing ammo.

You may argue that it's unfair that guns users have the opportunity to maneuver for better performance, but they could as easily argue that it's unfair that missile users don't have to. Gunnery users may also cite the fact that tracking can be disrupted and missiles may not, that a kiting missile defender with a following attacker gets a range bonus (since velocities of ships and missiles are additive). Missile users may counter that they can't one-shot a frigate, gun users can counter argue that if the frigate gets in close orbit they will never hit it.... and so on.

With respect, I do not believe my statement is misleading and I stand by it. Guns and missiles have different characteristics, favouring different styles of pvp. That's all. Missiles are not deficient and I encourage their use in the small squads that I command.

A little less well now that you have to choose between tracking and range, which is probably desirable. Having said that, one long range web or painter on a sentry target is equivalent to a tracking computer on all sentries, so a well organised fleet will fit for range and suffer no ill effects.

If the FC is in a rapier, boosted by an Eos , he can still rain down 100% thermal Hell on anyone within 70k.

ECM may be overpowered in a skirmish, but the counter is that every squad should have one, in which case it simply exacerbates any imbalance in fleet size.

The dominix/ishtar sentry hedgehog tactic is very difficult to counter since it favours the defenders who already have their drones slaved to the FC while the incoming fleet is still launching theirs. Siting inside a warp disruption bubble field can ensure that most attackers arrive nicely at optimal range.

The downside of course is that moving a sentry fleet quickly is lossy (you'll leave a lot of drones behind) and if the attacker can infiltrate the perimeter with an AoE weapon he can neutralise a good deal of the sentry fleet's offensive capability. One interceptor (or T3) could do this, fitted with a cyno generator with spectacular results.

It's extremely difficult for me to visualise how to even begin measuring the relative power of a sentry fleet vs other types. The problem space is somewhat large.

Excellent point. The campaign to have all cruiser hulls capped at a maximum drone bandwidth of 50 mbit and to lose all bonuses that apply to heavy/sentry drones starts here!

I hate drones.

This is going to sound weird, but I've had a bit of a play with RHML on a golem, and I think they fire too fast. The T2 RHML I was using hold 23 missiles a piece and fire once every 5.18 seconds. If my math is right then it will take just shy of 2 minutes till I need to spend 40 seconds reloading. So far so good. The problem I found was that since my missile velocity bonus is not being applied to RHML's I end up with so many fish in the water that the target often dies while 2, sometimes 3 volleys of missiles are still in flight. That adds up over the space of 2min, and when you only have 23 missiles per reload then any wasted missiles hurt that much more. Yes, some of the onus here is on me, a good missile pilot switches targets early, but when you have 2 or more volleys already in flight that can be a little bit difficult to judge.
On top of that the damage projection of RHML is actually rather poor. Because they don't receive any of the native bonuses from my golem, I actually receive better hits and damage on small targets by fitting a second target painter and using cruise missiles. In addition, because they don't receive the velocity bonus the range for RHML's is only around 50 - 60km, about 20km better than if I was using torpedo's with the same fit.


I've tested and compared with the L4 mission Buzz Kill, one with an excessive number of frigates and cruisers. If ever there was a "right choice" for the RHML I would have thought it would be this mission, however I've found this to be very much not the case. My time to completion has been significantly worse when using RHML as compared to cruise missiles every single time. In its current iteration I don't see myself ever using RHML's again.


If it were up to me, I would increase rapid launcher capacity by 50%, lower RoF by around 40%, and reduce reload times to 20s instead of 40s. That, or allow all ship bonuses to apply to all rapid launcher types and increase capacity by around 30%.

And that's a good place to stop… Rate of fire is ideal at the moment for both launchers. They're just lacking with ammunition capacity, so the exact number is a 1.5555% increase (28 for T2 RLML, 36 for T2 RHML).