Kale Eledar
Militaris Industries
Northern Coalition.
65
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Posted - 2013.02.08 23:36:00 -
[1] - Quote
Holy thread necro, people! Ima offer my two cents and dev comments re: drake balancing and maybe that'll clear up some questions in case people forgot.
To quote Fozzie:
The damage per second of heavy missile ships like the Drake seems low, why are you making it even lower?
- I believe the main source of disagreement here comes from comparisons between Heavy Missiles (a long range weapon platform) and short range weapons like autocannons or blasters. Once upon a time Heavy Missiles were the only medium missile system, and therefore shared features from both close range and long range weapons. Later Heavy Assault Missiles were introduced and were quite good, but Heavy Missiles still overshadowed them since they did similar damage at close range and HMs had the advantage of stellar long range performance. There are legitimate problems with many long range weapon systems at the medium size, but the fact that people have gotten used to comparing Heavy Missiles with short range guns should be taken as one of the signs that Heavies are far too good.
Why are you nerfing the weapon system when the real problem is two ships?
- It is true that the use of heavy missiles is very strongly concentrated on the Drake and Tengu at this time. There are some problems with those ships that will need to be solved in time, and we also need to make ships like the Caracal, Cerb and Nighthawk more viable with Heavy Missiles. But doing that rebalance requires a stable foundation to build upon, and the truth is that Heavy Missiles were skewing the balance of everything they touched. The fact that the Drake is so dominant at long range damage when it has no range bonus, and the weakest damage bonus we give ships (5% per level to just one damage type) makes balancing through the ships themselves unfeasible. Once we get Heavy Missiles to some semblance of balance we can begin the work of making sure each individual ship is viable without having to go back and redo our work right away to compensate for a midstream weapon change.
Not to mention they were the most frequent ship flown and weapons system used. Once upon a time Gallente ships didn't really make the top 20.
Just my humble thoughts :-)
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