Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Do you see fleets of Drakes? Then no, probably not...

Considering that even a pair of medium smartbombs is enough to deal with most missiles damage-wise, this change doesn't seem to affect firewalling that much.

So far the only improvement that is consistently reported as making a difference is that missiles are better in PvE now since they don't care that much about defenders. Which isn't quite that impactful on EVE universe as you can imagine.

The flip side of the firewall coin is nerfing firewalls. One strategy used in ESO was a small group using AoE that could wipe out any opposition simply because AoE was so powerful. So Zenimax reworked AoE effects to apply to a limited number of objects within the AoE zone. At present I think each AoE pulse will hit a maximum of six objects.

Something similar could be done to smart bombs, such as dividing the pulse amongst all the targets in range, or limiting the pulse to a maximum number of targets. This would also mean that stacking ships inside smart bomb range of each other will be counterproductive.

Thus smart bombs actually become "smart" in that they will deliver a certain amount of firepower to a set of targets. This set could be determined by target range, IFF, least HP first, or some other criteria. I favour the "closest first" approach since this matches the "lore" explanation for how these things work.

As for defender missiles: here's where you can re-invent the firewall, and have defender missiles seek out enemy missiles to target, rather than only shooting down missiles targeted at the pilot's ship from a selected target. Thus activating a firewall would be as simple as turning on the defender missile system. It will launch one defender each cycle, which will auto-acquire a target if there is one, otherwise it will fly to the end of its maximum flight time and then expire.

The end result is that more missile spam will ensure that at least some missiles will get through a given sized firewall.

As far as missiles go in general, it would be nice to halve flight time across the board (meaning that Mordus ships end up with missiles that are four times faster than present, that fly for a quarter of the current flight time). If this will break things due to missiles from Mordus ships going too fast, perhaps find some other bonus for Mordus ships like 50% improved missile velocity, bonus to missile HP, missile damage resistance, explosion radius/velocity, etc.

given that you intend to put ecm for missiles into the game, given the flight time handycap for missiles, given that using ewar with missiles negates the missile range benefits, making missiles immune to in-flight destruction is the only thing that is going to move missiles beyond anything but micro-niche pvp use.

Either make them immune to destruction or dont bother wasting coding time.

Perhaps it's because they're the only ones that don't suck at present.

Now take your reload times into account in calculating that DPS, and you'll find it looks pretty different.
The real issue is how much HM's & HAM's suck. Their explosion velocity is 30% the BASE SPEED of their target hulls. That's base speed before any kind of Prop mod enters into the equation. With only about a 40% increase in range for Heavy missiles over light (Cruise is more than double the range of heavies), while HAM's are massively shorter ranged and still have bad application compared to light missiles. It's the base stats on the missiles that is the issue, primarily the base stats on the medium missiles.

Damage application for HAMs and HMs is abysmal, which is why RLMLs are the medium of choice for most. The same holds true for RHMLs which are preferred over cruise missiles and torpedoes outside of PvE. The bottom line is that heavy missiles suck; heavy assault missiles just suck less.

It's not just that heavy missiles were nerfed - its that they were nerfed while all other medium weapons were buffed. So the recent 5% damage rollback might seem like a lot on paper - but the damage application is so horrible that it really translates into about a 1% damage gain. Torpedoes are a mixed bag of snakes; they work fine for groups of bombers with the huge range boost but otherwise have a terrible time applying damage to anything smaller than a stationary battleship.