Well, I would love to know how it was taken in account, then. See, every other's race weapon systems receive a boost (or better say a change) according to this race's philosophy while going to t2. DPS of t2 blasters going even more insanely high, while they are still bound to therm/kin damage types, t2 drones become even better while preserving their damage type variety, missiles aquire some specialization traits AND still retain access to all 4 damage type options. And for projectiles - yes, they receive some boost to amount of damage dealed/fall off in other case, but still not even close to blasters (you'll never find an incursion fleet which will accept autocannon boat in DD role), and bound to one of the least convinient damage type for PVE (except, probably, for angels, NPC usually have sufficient amount of exp resist). So, one can't say that such restriction is accompanied by sufficient raw damage boost, for example, which would help to overcome inconviniet NPC's resists. Its higher then with t1 counterparts, but not so much. And this particular case does not fit into the biger picture of t2 boost principles (which, as was showed above, stick with the general racial warfare philosophy) - in almost any guide projectile weapons are described as having good adaptability to different circumstances through great damage type variety.

Phased Plasma and EMP deal a great amount of therm and em damage respectively, and they are ones of most popular ammo choices for matar boats. Losing them while going to t2 is really painfull.

Projectiles are far and away the best and most used weapon system in the game. It's T2 ammo doesn't need a buff.

And I've heard quite the opposite more than once. I can't claim that I was able to compare all weapon systems in the game, though. Well, for sniping purposes where alfa is only thing significant its doing well, as for others fields of applications, I wouldn't be so optimistic.
But, regardless of said before, I don't asking for somehow boost projectile ammo. I'm just asking for preserving its initial flavor - variety of damage types. Which for some reason unknown to me were preserved for drones and missiles, but not for projs.

As for missions, no one is forcing you to use T2 ammo, most people don't use T2 for missions in general regardless of race.

For PvE or PvP the damage bonus vs the trade-offs is all part of the game, if you think your enemy has more of a thermal or EM hole then you're better off hitting there. For shield ships though Explosive and Kinetic tends to be a good bet because then tend to plug the EM/Thermal hole pretty solidly and I know from experience on my T2 Caldari shield fits that Explosive generally ends up short.

CCP will have this data in a database. I am pretty sure that it if there was an imbalance, with the current prevailing pro-active mood, they'd fix it.

It's not 2011 anymore.

Than how about that sentry drone thing, with ability to transfer sentrys from all over the gang to one particular fast locking boat which will allow for almost instant kill with enormous alfa of even highly tanked BSs? How soon it will be fixed, if at all?

Than how about that sentry drone thing, with ability to transfer sentrys from all over the gang to one particular fast locking boat which will allow for almost instant kill with enormous alfa of even highly tanked BSs? How soon it will be fixed, if at all?

This has never been mentioned as a problem before. The phenomenon has arisen only because suddenly domis can use gardes at 70km and curators at 100+km. If they'd left the domi as the brawler ship we all loved we wouldn't be having this conversation


Seriously, drone assist has been around for years. It's just that no-one ever thought to use it until now.

I'm pretty sure it'll get fixed. Domis are just too op for words at the moment. I am a gallente fan, so I'm not used to having an OP ship to use. Let me enjoy it for a few months....

Actually the real problem right now is more Sentry Carriers in null. From what I can tell the Domi doctrine actually grew out of that.

Well then that's grist to my mill isn't it? Sentry drones are not new, carriers are not new. Drone assist is not new.

Suddenly people are whinging because they's watched a few tournaments.

It's just the flavour of the month right now, that's all.

Don't like sentries? Stealth bomb the f*ckers. It's all over in 15 seconds.

Everything has a counter.

Doesn't work in low-sec unfortunately.

You're certainly right that this is a FOTM fit, it's just one that likely won't go away until CCP change the mechanics on drone assist. Spider tanking Sentry carriers/Dominixes is pretty damn scary as things go and while changing drone assist won't change that it will at least mean someone besides the FC needs to be at the computer for the fight >.>

who ever do that rebalance is a little stupid, arty was worst with dps, worst with tracking and awfull with fire rate, worst reload time (u cant all time talk on every balance has most alpha, because with miss u have 0) now u op everything else then fix arty, gj

Good point about lowsec, however, I can't think of any famous fights in lowsec that were characterised by domi porcupine fleets.

This idea that no-one needs to be at their keyboards because of drone assist makes good press, because it sounds sensational.

The truth is of course that actually allowing your fleet members to go AFK would be suicidal. If the FC (the assistee) gets blapped, then drones stop functioning and your fleet stops shooting. (didn't this happen in the Fountain war? The goons deliberately targeted known FCs)

I can understand that it's unpleasant to be on the receiving end of sentry drone assists when they scale up to fleet levels. But frankly, all weapons systems scale in an unpleasant way. That's just the nature of fleet warfare.

I don't think there's ever going to be a pleasing answer to fleet battles. They happen for political and economic reasons. The place to focus on in my view is skirmish warfare. Eliminate the threat of instant cyno-death. Start there. The game will be better for it.

Good morning space adventurers!

IF YOU WANT TO CRITICIZE THIS PROPOSAL PLEASE READ THE EXPLANATION BELOW FIRST <3

Okay so I'm going to give you the numbers first, then do some text walling below to try and explain why we arrived where we did.

Medium Rails (all sizes and metas):
+15% Rate of Fire
+15% Damage Multiplier
-15% Tracking Speed

Medium Beams:
+25% Damage Multiplier
-10% Tracking Speed

Medium Artillery:
+10% Rate of Fire
-5% Tracking

So the basic idea is that we're increasing damage by quite a lot for all medium long range turrets, while also lowering their tracking a little bit.

From a high level, the goal here is to make long range weapons valuable enough that people are able to use them for both PVP and PVE without being laughed at. This is hard to accomplish without stepping heavily on the toes of either large weapons or short-range medium weapons. We felt that a large damage increase was absolutely necessary for there to be any chance of seeing increased use, but the higher damage goes the more pressure gets put on other weapon systems. By making tracking speed a bit worse we preserve a lot of the advantage that medium short-range guns bring, while also making medium long-range guns a great choice verse large guns in many situations.

To understand why that last part is true, its VERY important that you understand how tracking works in EVE. I want to use an example here to help illustrate:

The tracking speed on a standard Neutron Blaster Talos with Null loaded is .0794
The tracking speed on a new 250mm Railgun Deimos with Antimatter loaded will be .0304

It looks like the Talos tracks 3x as well as the Deimos. In reality, because of the role Signature Resolution plays, the Deimos will actually track moving targets about 19% better than the Null Talos.

A real tracking number that combines tracking speed and resolution would look like this:

Real tracking on standard Neutron Blaster Talos with Null loaded is .0001985
Real tracking on a new 250mm Railgun Deimos with Antimatter loaded is .0002432

If you want to make this kind of comparison for other ships and situations, divide tracking speed by the signature resolution of the gun and compare the resulting numbers. If you want to see an awesome in-depth explanation for tracking, I recommend reading THIS BLOG by Azual Skoll.

One of the discussions we had with the CSM on this topic (there were a lot) revolved around a situation where you get to choose which ship to bring to a fight where you will be shooting at Talwars. Do you want a new medium long-range gun ship, or an Attack BC with large short-range guns. So I made a DPS graph here showing three fits: a 200mm Rail Thorax, a 250mm Rail Deimos, and a Neutron Talos, all of which have 2 tracking enhancers fit. The situation shown would be if the Talwar has MWD on and is moving at full speed at an angle of 60 degrees (hopefully fairly average, though it will vary a lot). You can see what that looks like here: DAMAGE GRAPH

There are of course a lot of other reasons to bring medium long-range ships over large like price, speed, resilience, and the option to shoot to much longer ranges. Overall we are still a tad worried about power creep here, but hopefully this will put medium guns in a healthy place in relation to their competition.

Be sure to check out the HEAVY ASSAULT CRUISER REBALANCE as well as many of those ships are affected by this change and vice versa

As always, looking forward to feedback.
CCP Rise

umad bro?

News Flash: Medium Rails continue to be horrible unless hitting far, far above your weight or have something mass tackled.

-15% tracking on medium hybrids. Poor rail Eagle, poor rail Moa, poor rail Ferox.

I will continue dualboxing Proteus/Loki and Deimos/Rapier and mock everyone who thinks rails are bad.

Use Eagles if they are so win...

I will continue dualboxing Proteus/Loki and Deimos/Rapier and mock everyone who thinks rails are bad.

In reality the issue with drone assist is that you can watch-list 15 people out of the fleet and switch targets without having to actually lock someone just by changing who your drones are set to assist on. This can be used to completely bypass lock times which is especially relevant for a carrier fielding 10-15 damage bonused Sentries. This makes the fleet doctrine extremely resilient in the face of everything from electronic warfare to simply damage because no one needs to fit Sensor Boosters.

Also while I agree that hot-drops are an issue I think the drones thing is likely going to be easier to fix

If it's such a big deal it's fairly straightforward to remove drone assist completely. It's unreliable anyway.

Just because a thing is difficult does not mean it should not be done. Neither does it mean that it should not be done without delay.

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.

Hot drops need to be fixed if we want fun fights. Its pretty easy really. Make every ship that cynos or bridges to a beacon land in a random position in the solar system, rather than on the beacon.

Q. how does this help?
A. the small gang people being hotdropped have an extra 40 seconds to evade the drop if they know they are outnumbered.

Q. how does this help?
A. people won't hot-drop unless they have to for political reasons. If they want a fight they'll have to escalate it carefully.

Q. how does this help?
A. It means more fights will actually happen. People will be more inclined to risk fleets on roams. They types of roam fleets will be broader (you are no longer limited to nano-only).

easy.

Next problem?

The problem with this is that it penalizes attackers overly much by scattering them around the system, could put capital ships in a position where they can't even warp to a celestial due to low cap, and generally amounts to a massive defender's advantage in any fight. It also hurts Jump Freighter logistics massively.

It certainly fixes your complaint with small-gang hot-drops but breaks large fights.

It actually does not penalise attackers. It helps them.

I assume you mean in a fleet context?

it would actually allow attackers to stage themselves with somewhat more precision than everyone simply arriving in a humungous blob on top of the cyno beacon.

A few well-placed cloaked scouts could serve as warp-in spots in order to assemble the fleet at the combat site at correct ranges.

Thinking forward to on-grid boosting, initial ship placement will be an important consideration.

Except that generally "in a huge blob and all in one place" is exactly where you want people. Dropping everyone all over the system gives an even remotely prepared enemy time to scan down half your capital ships, tackle them, and pop them.