Taisuke Black
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Posted - 2011.01.22 06:30:00 -
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The Current Setup: Electronic Warfare in Eve is effective, varied, and very well-conceived. It is also very simple, and limited to a small set of ships and situations. You can be an elite shooter(90+ days worth of SP), you can be an elite logistics or command pilot, but you can't be an elite Ewar pilot in the current system.
The Opportunities: 1. Electronic warfare has to be very carefully balanced because it scales differently from other things like damage and RR. An Ewar ship that shuts down the enemy completely is no fun in 1v1, powerful in small gangs, and relatively useless in large-scale PVP. If you try to balance it for one arena, it becomes unbalanced for the others.
2. Electronic warfare is very specific about which ships can use it and which ships are vulnerable to it. While this makes sense and adds variety to the battlefield, for a "dedicated" Ewar pilot it means training all 4 races and being able to switch ships on the fly. If your curse runs into a drake gang, the only thing you can do is get another ship. This is why there are very, very few players who call themselves "Ewar Pilots."
Now, I want to address issue #3 first and work my way back.
Proposal #1: Vulnerability by size It is difficult and chaotic to track what your enemy is using and line up your Ewar accordingly because you don't know what race ships the enemy will be flying. 2 HAC gangs of nearly identical configurations can have completely different Ewar vulnerabilities. So what if the vulnerabilities were based more on ship roles? I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and what if CCP introduced a high-slot module for battleships that either blocks or weakens Ewar effects? After all one would expect a large ship to have a much bigger sensor suite than its smaller peers. Larger ships already have higher sensor strengths in response to ECM, and in battle it is generally easier to disrupt a battleship's performance (for example, tracking disruptors) than that of a smaller ship.
As a much less radical change, I propose that combat recon ships receive 1/2 the applicable bonus to all other forms of Ewar. This way only the Rook would get the full ECM bonus, but another combat recon ship would still use it better than any T1. Give Ewar pilots the flexibility they desperately need and they'll give you a more dynamic game.
Proposal #2: Advanced Scripts I propose that CCP introduce a new script for each type of Ewar only usable by players with level 5 of the appropriate electronics skill. This script will grant a substantial bonus (75%?) to both effects of the Ewar but prevent the effects from stacking. There are 2 options for this: either only 1 Ewar module of that type can affect the target vessel, or the effect has a hard limit (say, 5 or 10km for sensor damps). This would encourage players to spread out their Ewar and/or allow them to affect enemies with only 1 module so they still have room for tank.
Finally, I have some special ideas for Black Ops which will be in a separate post. Expect to see the link here soon.
To anybody who actually read this entire post, I sincerely thank you.
----- This post is part of my Giving Eve a Tune-Up series. If you are interested in reading more, go here: [Giving Eve a Tune-Up] Introduction and Links
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