Ships & Modules

Eagle still doesn't have enough PG to fit rails properly, if you compare how much PG is left after fitting biggest long-range guns to other race HACs the Eagle has the least PG left by a large margin.
Here's a cool thing - with new fitting with 250mm railguns and MWD Eagle will be short 10 PG, Deimos will have 120 PG free. Eagle still blows and I got 3 of them stored from ye olde times

Well, couldn't link to the thread directly. Forum didn't like it.

Proposal was: remove range bonus/penalty form hybrid ammo, add tracking modifier instead. This way Caldari get excellent damage projection and Gallente better solo potential.

Highest damage ammo on:

425mm Rokh: 108+30
Neutron Rokh: 14+13

425mm Mega: 72+30
Neutron Mega: 9+13

As you see, Caldari still have issues competing with Mega for sniping. Solution: increase range bonus on Caldari hulls, while reducing gun optimal a bit to differentiate more between both races.
Then Caldari would do better damage at range, and Gallente rule at short range.

The tracking bonused ammo closes the gap between super longrange rails and short range blasters.

And with two lines of hybrid ammo (therm bonused for blasters, kin bonused for rails) one would have a bit of damage selection. You could fire the therm type ammo in rails, but miss out on the 10% damage bonus and vice versa.

Oh, now it is a nerf if you get options and 10% more damage. Options to use ammo types, that are now totally useless.

And you get a bit more range on blasters. But here we may agree, that range and tracking of blasters would need some tweeking with the new ammo.

Yeah, and how likely is that? Let's be honest, for all the wonderful ideas in this thread, it's all just pie in the sky.

On CCP's to-do list, 'Hybrid Rebalancing' is 'Done'.

I just want to say, I'm glad Daedalus Arcova understands my fears with regards to giving Caldari turret boats a straight damage bonus in light of how they currently work.

Er.

The point of the bonus is that it makes shield tanking easier. So you need less mods to fit a good shield tank.

That therefore gives more space to add a MWD and EWAR, etc. Coupled with Caldari ships having more mids than other races on average anyway.

Caldari are perfectly capable of fitting MWDs, just as capable as Gallente are. They have lower grids, true, but this is because shield tanking requires less grid than armor tanking and more CPU (gasp, they have more CPU than Gallente boats!)

The fact that rails are so grid intensive is a current problem with Caldari ships (and to a lesser but still painful extent, Gallente ships), which is why the base usage stats are being reduced.

To say that Caldari ships were designed to not use a MWD is just an erroneous statement. People have been doing it on almost all PvP ships just fine. It's not always easy, true, because fitting is a challenge. But if it were easy they'd be Minmatar :P

The fact that the biggest short range guns (425mm) and biggest launchers (HAM) fit so easily on a shield Rupture (a freaking CRUISER) I find a bit of a joke, seeing as you can't even do it with blasters on a damn Brutix at the moment (a BATTLECRUISER).

I kinda derailed myself there. But it highlights how the problem is with hybrids and not Caldari specifically.

-Ed

Keep your dirty Caldari hands off my rail-fit Megathrons and Deimoses!

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Gallente need rails for their ships to be worth flying in medium-large fleets. If you gimp the hell out of rail-fit Gallente ships by making their damage bonuses blaster-only, they'll just become even more niche (and therefore practically useless) than they are now.

By all means, Caldari should have the upper hand in long-range rail combat, but Gallente need those same guns for mid-range. Rails and blasters are not totally separate weapon systems, and shouldn't be treated as such. Both races need access to both weapons, or they'll be unfairly restricted compared to Amarr and Caldari.

You wouldn't give artillery-only damage bonuses to a Tempest, would you?

Because obviously there's no inherent problems with rails when you're saying they need up to a 25% damage bonus to be worth using in a fleet. And obviously nothing could be done to affect fleet dynamics once you're actually able to specialize specialist weapons and hulls. And obviously you can't have a race with some ships being bonused for short-range combat and some for mid-long (gee, there's only one gallente battleship now? What's with all those potatoes I see everywhere... stray asteroids?).

Yes, both races need access to both weapons. I'm pretty sure I said that. By your own admission, Caldari should be more effective further out, by extension Gallente more effective closer in. That doesn't mean the best blaster ship around should get to be the best rail ship around simply because "they're needed at mid-range," it means that ship should probably be "decent" with rails and another ship in the lineup gets to be better with them for that race. If you need to have the hardest-hitting rail-ship out there (which the mega currently is, not that it matters too much because its rails) just to be worth having you tag along with a fleet, that doesn't mean the ship's correctly balanced/bonused and should be left alone, that means rails suck in fleets and need to be looked at separately.

Bonuses should be just that- bonuses. They're what make ships shine in their "intended" roles/ranges with their "intended" primary equipment. Want face-melting blasterboats? Expect them to not be *as* better with rails than an unbonused ship. Want your bonuses to apply at all ranges? Don't expect to be as good at any range as a specialized ship. *NEED* a specific bonus to be at all competitive? Fix the real problem.

Addendum- fix the forums, while you're at it...

Hello o/

Why not add specific Railgun Damage Bonus? so only the Rails get slight dmg boost?

greetings

I don't really want to be sitting 200+km out these days, like you said, it flat out doesn't work.

Apologies for lack of attribution, the rest of the quotes are all Onictus



One thought I had as a result of this discussion is the possibility of turning hybrids on their heads. It throws out some of the "rails = long range" flavor to the weapons themselves but a) makes the Caldari range bonuses potentially quite significant (rather than just a bit of a nice touch to get that last little bit of reach for your AM) and b) leads to somewhat less impetus to make HUGE changes to a lot of the ships (like the Domi you mentioned, which "should be" a nice "sit back and shoot" platform combined with drones to punish anyone who gets into control range. If drones weren't completely hosed, that is):

Make hybrids work "backwards" compared to other platforms- as the gun gets bigger, the range gets shorter. Then even the rediculous ammo variety might make sense, with people fitting "big" guns wanting to carry some long range ammo so they can still do "some" damage further out, and people fitting the smaller varieties hopefully using some of the lesser-used "middle" types as their primary ammo (so they're getting decent hits and they don't *need* to extend their reach, but they also wouldn't want to "always AM" because that *should* gimp their range to the point of being too close). 425's and 250's would become squarely middling-range until you were using at least "neutral" ammo on a range-bonused ship, but there would *be* a solid mid-range contender. Neutrons would put that tracking bonus on the mega to work as they'd now be operating at electron ranges, but electrons would give you a balance between still hitting "blaster" hard, while still having a *little* reach (and plenty of fitting space). Might even be worth considering making all sizes have "similar" ranges, though that could be *really* problematic with small guns (or large, depending on where you go overboard).

Still a little hard to be convincing about people not going right for the biggest guns all the time, and sorting tracking out would be a pain in general (flat tracking within each size of each type, maybe?), but possibly a starting point. Would definitely require a LOT of changes beyond just flipping the ranges, though, so before cries of "think about the megathrons!" there'd need to be a lot of toying with the gun stats, ammo stats, ship bonuses, and probably the core concepts of how the two affected ship lineups actually work (not that this would actually be considered by CCP anyway).



Again, if you've been ignoring ship bonuses, why the fuss over a hypothetical situation that included restricting one bonus on one ship and how that would "break" a whole race for fleet actions?



ok, I was wrong, that's Daedalus Arcova.

The idea I was going for wasn't to nerf the mega, it was to allow for some serious improvements which would benefit the mega, but which currently aren't feasible because they'd be too wide-reaching. The assumption is that the mega is designed to be a superb *blaster* platform. This is also part suggestion, and part off-the-cuff example, so some of the... discussion... followig my first post is entirely my fault on account of poorly articulating my full idea. However, one thing I strongly disagree with is that such specialization of (in this case) the mega is anti-sandbox (or indeed blunt). By that line of thought, any weapon bonus which isn't "bonus to all damage" or "bonus to all turret tracking" is anti-sandbox. There's nothing wrong with designing hulls to be better with some things than they are with others, and even without going to the rediculous (tying bonuses to one type of weapon or another... thus megas giving +25% to projectiles) there's plenty of precedent (EWar ships are all bonused for specific EWar. Most of the missile boats have at least one bonus for a specific damage type... isn't that anti-sandbox?).

Sandbox doesn't mean everything can do everything. It means anyone can do anything. Adjusting the ships so they actually reinforce stated racial design goals isn't restrictive, it's immersive. (It can be done in an overly restrictive fashion, but for me at least that isn't "one of the bonuses is blaster/rail only," it's "this ship can only mount blasters/rails").