Although everybody is talking about cruisers and battlecruisers, I want to divert attention to another point that seems to be overlooked.

What will these changes mean on battleship level. Will torpedoes have longer range with TC/TE's now. Are we going to get torpedo ships that can actually hit smaller stuff by using TE/TC's. Did you guys consider these parameters when thinking about TE/TC for missiles?

Everybody is talking about the 20% damage nerf which is just one part of the nerf hammer.

"-At the moment Fury missiles at Light and Heavy sizes have a faster explosion velocity than precision missiles, we'll be fixing this defect as part of the changes.
Fury: Increase damage, increase the severity of penalties to explosion radius and velocity"

T2 Fury missiles were actually very efficient missiles for their job and they were adding a lot of DPS. Many tengu/drake pilots were using them as default as they are cheaper than their faction counterparts. With the new changes I doubt they can be used against anything cruiser sized anymore.

I liked the fact that CCP actually has balls to go with this type of change. It may make the high-sec crowd cry a bit. It may even result in some loss of subscribers. But it will make eve much more playable and (more importantly) enjoyable in the long run, thus generating more subscribers in the long run.

Go Fozzie!!!!

And this is supposed to be our problem why? All you are really proving here is that those caldari ships you're flying are stronger than all the other ships you could be flying to earn your keep.

What is your point, friend? I still don't understand what you're trying to prove here. If a vindicator earns you more, why don't you use that instead?

So leave things unbalanced and add more **** to the mix to unbalance it even further? They add content, you whine about balance. They balance, you whine about the lack of new content. Can't please everyone.

Highlighted a keyword for you.

So you want us to not nerf the drake and the tengu because the nighthawk is ****? How about we nerf the drake and the tengu and then wait for the dev blog about command ships before we start making hasty comments.

I assume you're talking about the Arty Loki and Arty Sleip? Those... are not really common fits. Even still, they're kinda underwhelming. The Muninn would matter except for the whole LRHACs not mattering at all. The Absolution and Legion both need some buffing.

And the HAM NH is actually getting a pretty massive buff. And the HML NH is getting a relative boost next to the Tengu, which I personally find to be a good thing.

-Liang

All missile ships are getting a boost via the TE/TC change. The Arty Loki and Arty Sleip weren't common because they're underwhelming, not because they were particularly hard to fit.

-Liang

I actually can't wait. The HAM Drake will be utterly ridiculous, and every other Caldari ship is getting a pretty massive boost as well. :)

-Liang

It's totally blasphemy that someone would want to get better damage application instead of better EFT damage.



-Liang

5 or 6. All of them posting in this topic over how its horrible their Op ships are finally getting a nerf. Also, buffing everything else up will result in exactly the same result only it will take far far longer to do.

Haters don't seem to be capable of presenting any sensible arguments.

Anyway, Drakes and Tengus are the single anomaly, their overwhelming popularity dwarfing anything else in the game. Why do you think rabalancing this would lead to a similar ridiculous spike, when the other ships are more or less balanced?

Embrace the change, winter will be awesome with a huge number of revamped ships, which will lead into a much more varied field of gang compositions and tactics.

<3

Its the missiles causing the problems.

I meant BC. Apologies.

You can go back and look for all of the rage quit posts if you want. It will number around 5-6 with about 10-20 "I want my skillpoints back!".

Now as for the nerfs, in order to balance something the better option is to nerf two things rather than rebalance an entire game around them.

Only if the nano nerf happened well over a decade ago.

Now I do fly missile ships and if you took even the slightest bit of time to look at the base stats of the long range med weapons then you would see that HML are around 25% better ranged and around 20% better at DPS than everything else before ship stats are even applied. But I guess looking at actual stats of these things is harder than trying to talk down to me

That would leave HML still overpowering the other med long range weapons. The drake and tengu are also going to get a revisit when they get teircided.

Blance it a great thing untill it happens to a ship you like

No, that post is from me. The guy expecting close range damage from a long range weapon was you by stating a tengu does 800+dps, which it does not.

How does this compare with Rail Astarte, Arty Sleipnir, Beam Absolution?

Range? Hit quality? Why are you ignoring the other two command ships? Is it because you've got nothing sensible to say? Long range damage platforms are supposed to be weak, in favor of a larger range to produce the damage in. Artilleries have a longer range, but a lot of it is fall-off, which means the quality and accuracy of the damage will quickly drop to a point where you'll be wishing you'd brought heavy missiles instead.

You can't have your cake and eat it. There will ALWAYS be trade-offs, now missile boats will have to deal with having to make a choice, too.

EDIT: I just read the drone DPS bit. Aside from the fact that you can't even control drones past 59 kilometers, they won't even be applying any sensible amount of damage since they'd be spending 90% of their uptime trying to reach a target instead.

What do you mean I have to make choices? I can't have tank, range, sustained damage and alpha damage in one ship anymore?

With 3 navy bcu and the full rack of t2 hmls I get nowhere near 800dps. Where on earth are you pulling these numbers from? Not everyone is running around with 3bil tengus.

65 pages, i so do not envy the CCP Fozzie for having through look through all of this to find the good comments..

I really do hope they don't back down on their changes just because people are afraid of having their **** nerfed.

Especially since the TE/TC changes more than make up for it on most missile ships really...

I was up to page 36 when I logged last night. Damn sleep! I got a lot of reading to catch up on!

Or we can solve a huge number of issues in a single change.

Still have the problem of HML being so much better than the rest.

I think the new changes to missiles are okay. I have flown a drake for over 3 months withs heavy missiles and they really were tooooo good.
BUT. What the devs maybe forgot: Hunting down a frig with large or medium turrets at long range isn-¦t that big problem. Heavy missiles dont-¦t have that advantage. They always suck when chasing down frigs and that is especially with the drake because it lacks a missile velocity bonus. Frigs with HM and caracal maybe doable but Drake had always probs with frigs and will get even more problems. 20%less damage maybe too much. To be realistic 15% would be okay.
But heavy assault missiles REALLY need some love. With these changes Drake will be really frig fodder.
What CCP may consider is maybe really nerf the damage down 15% and give heavy AND heavy assault mssiles something that has really a chance to kill a frigate. Drams and Daredevils actually really scare a Drake Pilot to hell.
Also the range nerf: toooo much. Artillery is even better.
Please buff HAMS a bit. Would like to see them more in eve.
Nerfing Cane is also great. TBH it was even more overpowered than drake.
So good job CCP. I really admit it. But 15% less damage and 15% less range plus something that can hit frigates for heavy missiles would be okay. HAMs would also need some 10% or 15% more range pus something that can hit a frig.
The pwg and cpu requirements for HAMs are actually toooo high for that performance.

Reading through the complaints, and praise both seem pretty equal in numbers...

CCP must be doing something right.

Also tells you something is either wrong with the Tengu or the wormhole design or both. If only one ship allows you to run a pve site that is bad design. I don't like Tengus, but thanks for bringing up the wormholes. Because the AI is heavily selecting one type of ship and one weapon system. This surely can't be "intended," can it?

So while we're all focused on the ship and weapons systems CCP might also want to revisit that entire pve environment and think about how it could be made more open to other weapon systems and types of ships.

Here is MY PERSONAL feedback:
Two accounts cancelled - You lost a more than 4 years paying customer!

In addition to the missile nerf CCP will also bring an AI boost for NPC's in missions. These NPC's will switch targets. At the first look it seems to be a good idea. At the second look it is a typical darft idea from CCP. Mission "Buzz Kill" and "Stop The Thief" are just two of more missions where every pilot will have problems with his drones. (ELITE) Frigs are at 65km+ at the beginning, you start your drones but they will be destroyed before they reach the enemy frigate. If you call back your drones they are to far away to reach your ship befor they are destroyed. What have we than? A scrambled ship without drones and less damage with missiles or more damage with the stupid TE+TC but horrible less tank. Good job CCP.

As Caldari pilot I end my career in New Eden.
From a RP point I could say I grab my ISK buy me a planet or at least a little moon somewhere and can live like a god for the rest of my life.
From a RL point I MUST SAY, that CCP do never think about changes and their consequences. And ever ask the wrong people who do not have skilled what they intent to nerf next.

Bye folks. It was a pleasure for me to be part of this community for 4.5 years. But now it is time to travel on.
O7

P.S.: No! You can not have my stuff. Remember? I want to buy me a planet or a little moon.

Yeah, but my concern is pve really.

Right now the tengu is the most efficient missile boat in pve.

This IS in part due to the OP nature of the tengu, however, the tengu is outperformed by t1 and t2 bs' without missile specialization in pve.

So, this is to say that the rest of the missile boats capable of lvl 4 missions are quite lack luster.

I'm willing to lose my tengu as my mission boat, however, I'd like to get a missile boat bs that is as capable as the current tengu before this nerf bat hits.

Wanna bet?

Hi again everyone. I said before that I would read every post in this thread and I'm not backing down from that. (Well if someone necros it in a year or something I may miss it but you know what I mean) Thanks once again to everyone who is providing constructive feedback.

I wanted to address a few more concerns:

• Is it true that this change is being made to reduce lag?
Nope. Those of you who experience large fleet warfare on a regular basis know that the lag production from missile has been vastly reduced thanks to Team Gridlock's efforts behind the scenes. Although it would be possible for us to make missiles a problem again through design (If I were to increase the ROF of heavy missiles 10 times over CCP Veritas would probably poison my coffee), the game design department has received no pressure at all to nerf heavy missiles for any server performance reasons.
Considering what causes the majority of lag nowadays if we wanted to design away more lag we'd have to nerf docking games.
.
..
...
Hmmm


• What about NPCs that use TDs and Defenders?
This is an excellent question and I really should have been more clear about it in the OP. We won't be changing NPC TD effects in this pass. Any adjustments to how NPC ewar works would require a more comprehensive balance pass on NPCs themselves to ensure it doesn't break anything. So even if we go forward with the TD change, Sansha TDs would not touch your missiles.


• Why aren't you considering Delayed Damage/Firewalls/Defenders?
Another excellent question and the answer is that we have not forgotten them at all. Missiles are very different from turrets in a lot of ways and that's both a big part of their appeal and part of the reason that the arguments in this thread seems to be going in circles.
Aspects like the delay on damage, vulnerability to firewalls, defenders, using their own formula instead of tracking and selectable damage types are all hard to put on paper since their importance changes greatly based on the specific ingame situation.
"Bringing in line" may not have been the best choice of words since it can be misunderstood to mean that everything will be the same. Missiles will still have certain advantages and disadvantages inherent to their mechanics, and part of the compensation for those differences is the fact that even after this proposal heavy missiles would continue to be by far the best cruiser weapon for damage projection at mid to long range. I am not proposing making heavy missiles match guns in damage or range, I'm proposing reducing the advantage they have over guns slightly. That being said this is a tricky balance area since so much of their performance is dependent on all these other factors. We're not taking the challenges here lightly and that's one of the reasons we're reaching out to you all for your feedback on the proposal.


• Are you trying to make all weapons the same to make the game more simple?
No, far from it. TE/TC/TD effects are the least of the differences between missiles and guns, and we are committed to providing players with interesting and distinct choices thorough our designs. The goal here isn't to trivialize the choice of missiles or guns, it's to make those choices matter more. We would be failing if after our changes guns are the obvious choice to train for, we would be failing if after our changes missiles are the obvious choice to train for, and we would be failing just as much if after our changes the choice between missiles and guns does not matter.
It's a delicate balance but we're going to keep working with you all until we get it right.


• Are the notes from the CSM 6 winter summit minutes a good guide for what will be done with Drakes long-term?
Nope. CSM minutes tend to be full of spitballing and random brainstorming that never makes it past an early design review. The idea to give the drake more range in exchange for its resist bonus is another one of those ideas that never made it past the brainstorming stage.


• Why don't you guys buff HAMs instead/as well?
Buffing HAMs slightly is an option on the table, but if we do it will likely be through fitting requirements instead of damage. The TE/TC change proposal would be a very significant buff to them and we don't want HAMs to get too out of control.

Not sure about the golem but cnr tank is crap compared to tengu, you are screwed if your drones are dead and your speed is so slow that you'll spend more time moving from gate to gate than shooting stuff.

I have spent alot of time training for a max skilled Nighthawk, perhaps not the best ship in the game but my favorite nonetheless. I have both an active and passive tanked one for various things. The dps on them have always been low compared to the other ships I fly (Amarr-Minmatar-Caldari cross trained). I think its a slap in the face to Caldari pilots to nerf the weapons system without balancing the ship at the same time. So now I am stuck with a ship that is skill point intensive that won't be able to fight its way out of a paper bag. This ship has always needed more dps, not less, why is it so hard to balance all the ships effected by the missile change at the same time?

Drake and tengu needed a nerf.

I'm confident CCP will adress these issues in the future. For now it means that you will have to live with it.

Its a provable fact that HMLs are significantly more powerful than their long range turret counterparts.

Its a proveable fact that the relationship between HMLs and HAMs stats is out of kilter with the relationship between short and long range turrets, to HAM's detriment.

Given the above the HML changes are clearly necessary, regardless of your view of drakes, tengus etc. One thing at a time.

About 25 km, more with fancy flying that forces an opponent to chase you, increasing the relative velocity of the missiles. Now you tell me the turret DPS of a dual-TE Hurricane at 25 km, using RF EMP. You may being to see a problem at this point. Of course, you could use Barrage... but you may want to inspect its damage type.

Of course, you know all this, being an experienced Drake pilot.

IMHO they should switch the fittings on the HML and HAM

Its universal that shorter ranged weapons are easier to fit; this is to make up for the disadvantage of actually having to get in range . . . why are missiles different?

Also they should make HAMs and HMLs the same as far as explosion radius and velocity are concerned. There is no reason for the short ranged ones to be nerfed like they are.

And when you trained for it, you didn't do it because it was OP, you just happened to be Caldari. You actually considered to train for the Legion, because all T3 are just as good for everything, but ended up with the Tengu by accident. Correct?

so youre idea is to . . . leave the Tengu totally overpowered?

You realize that after the change, youll be able to put one (1) range rig in and achieve > 100 km range plus your missiles will now be moving faster meaning less wasted ammo volleys; look what you have to do to the loki, proteus or legion to get them to go 100 km . . . and they do less damage there too . . .

yes, the tengu is getting a nerf because thats exactly what they needed.

Marvel as Fozzie wades through a sea of nerds, grunting mightily as his gigantic Nerdslayer battleaxe demolishes argument after argument, his muscles rippling with effort, and covered in a sheen of sweat.

again, you miss the point; its not that the drake can do any one of the things the other battlecruisers you listed can do; its that the drake can do them all at once.

the DPS of heavy missiles is WAY out of line with every other weapon system.

It's the same thing as a blaster mega, I've spent PLENTY of time in one. I don't remember ever getting it to hit for much over 40km, much less 70km.

Looking at it, with two scripted TCs you are sitting almost dead on optimal x2 fall with null at 70km. So your chance to hit an unmoving drake is sub 10% and your DPS is sub frigate levels.

Oh and Hey Issy.

yes :)
But you need to realize why the are doing instead of crying like a baby about it
Then you will realize how lucky you have been to fly it

Bringing isk into it makes you look even worse - Yes, the isk SHOULD represent the theoretical power of a ship but just because you spent a fortune for a ship it doesn't mean you should be much better than cheaper ships... CCP even admitted (though it wasn't easy for them) that somehow these ships might need a small adjustment.

Pinky

I've read through every single page on this post, albeit I have skipped some of the arguments between players; however I don't think I've read an answer that explains this:

"All Missiles
Increase missile acceleration so that real range is much closer to the client assumed range of flighttime*speed against a stationary target. This means a slight range buff for all missiles, and missiles will act in a way that is more intuitive to newer players."



What does the bold part mean? (if I missed the explanation, I am sorry.)

Big nerfs like this are very bad for the game. They give the impression of a poorly managed game and undermine the notion that Eve is real, and yes they will result in some lost subscriptions (this will be the last straw for some) and for what gain? IF there is imbalance, and I say "if" because the stats I've seen in this forum are not at all conclusive when taking account of real world circumstances, then the way to deal with is a way that does not break the continuity of the game. If the problem is one of Drake blobs then a far better solution would be for the other races to have better missile defences to nullify this.

An inherent feature of missiles is that they should pack the most punch, should have the longest range, but are vulnerable to interception. Defender missiles are one problem that could be fixed at the same time. (And yes I have read Fozzie's comment about them using too much CPU - I say think again and more creatively). Blasters, Rail Guns and Lasers are also weapon systems with potential anti-missile ability, especially against missiles that have been in flight for a while and their trajectory has been assessed. There must be ways these could be used/adapted such as probability based interception that would not introduce significant load while having the desired and real world effect.

As proposed this nerf is just fertile ground for the laws of unintended consequences. Please Please build the game forwards rather then trying to re-invent it. This not only makes the game more fun for all players it will bring in more revenue for CCP.

[quote=Noemi Nagano]If you have any credibility for judging missile performance first hand? Yours and your alts KB show you fly mostly Winmatar ...

when u see everyone destroying ur ship it MUST be beause the race u've chosen is poor, it couldnt at all be the fact that u just have no idea what ur doing...

Small gang pvp sees a fair few drakes. both kill boards that have been posted for my toons involve several drakes.

Yeah, other races like Amarr has solid T1 cruiser line up.
FYI, Amarr had most broken T1 ship line up in frigates and cruisers before they started rebalancing.

OMG @ these "Nighthawk will be broken" posts... Let me tell you the one very important fact: Cerb and Nighthawk are already broken "because Tengu can do it better".

In a properly balanced game all weapon systems should be viable and worth using, ignoring bad weapon systems and leaving them be is bad balancing.

Ok so a heavy beam harbi, how do you tactic that against a drake blob, with its 20k ehp and range disadvantage, or rail mrym (lol) ....well other than fitting pulses and blasters and getting in someone's grill.

We had a baby one today.

Drake gangs of 50-70 we still see.

Missile users get the HAM buff to go alongside the HM nerf.

Is switching fits really such a tragedy?

You've never actually done this have you?

:Edit: I've updated this post with the 2.0 versions of this proposal. Changes are underlined and can be found described in this post. Some big sets of responses to questions about the original proposal can be found here and here.:

Google doc with numbers for the affected missiles.

Hello everyone! we've got another F&I balance thread for you all, covering tentative plans for missiles in the Winter expansion plus a hurricane fittings nerf that doesn't really need it's own thread.

Difference, of course, is that the raven can hit effectively at the entire scope of its range.

How do tachs fare at 5km ranges?