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

Its very intentional that it gets ROF and not damage. Alpha on Arty is already plenty high, making arty Hurricanes and Muninns both viable before the changes. We wanted to make sure the dps kept up with rails and beams somewhat without overbuffing alpha which is working fine currently.

Its very intentional that it gets ROF and not damage. Alpha on Arty is already plenty high, making arty Hurricanes and Muninns both viable before the changes. We wanted to make sure the dps kept up with rails and beams somewhat without overbuffing alpha which is working fine currently.

at first I was super excited about this and was gonna buy some eagles. but then i saw the tracking nerf to rails and now...

I know you think that it tracking better then a talos with null is cool, but in reality its kinda ****** vs frigs unless they're ******** and coming at you in a staight line. m. rails already track the 2nd worst of medium guns, and only just slightly better then arties, so why even bother when you can just use the other, better tracking guns. Please, just remove the tracking nerf on medium rals, and give them the buff that they so desperately need. Literally nobody uses medium rails right now and if it turns out that its over-powered then you can always nerf it, but I really do not think that this tracking nerf is going to help.

Wahh, why can't I brawl down this frigate with my long range medium guns abloobloo

Ok.. this may seem like a strange question but still...

You have compared the tracking and dps on a Talos, against that of a Thorax and Deimos(t)....

The Talos being designed for large hybrids means, at least as far as I can tell, that it should have higher DPS numbers but lower tracking, whether it fits blasters or rails.

looking at your DPS graph showing what things will be like after this change, i can't help but notice that the Talos does not reach anywhere near the dps potential of either the t1 or t2 cruiser.

So, post change, a railfit cruiser will track better and do more dps than a large blaster fit battlecruiser?
Seems a little odd.

Capacitor usage of beams is still ****, even a 25% damage bonus is not going to make people use them instead of scorch heavy pulse or tachyon oracles.

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

Garviel Tarrant]TL:DR The fittings on these weapons (And cap use) is too high to use with armor tanks.. I want to armor tank my ******* amarr ships >_<

Welcome to my world - these are further changes that are going to be rushed out the door, leading to issues further down the line.

It's a general consensus that Medium Rails need a buff, but giving them a 15% bonus to both RoF and damage seems a bit drastic to me - they don't suck that bad (and Rail Proteus or Astarte still works very well in killing rats that are weak to Kin/Thermal).

2. This entire thing is an excersize in powercreep. You should nerf the talos and t2 ammo properly rather than majorly buffing everything else IMO.

Medium beams and rails were essentially unused even before tier3 BCs were introduced. They haven't been buffed because of powercreep, but because they're just terrible.

Capacitor usage of beams is still ****, even a 25% damage bonus is not going to make people use them instead of scorch heavy pulse or tachyon oracles.

CCP Rise or Malcanis,

What's the reasoning in not changing Heavy Missiles along with everything else? Weren't they originally nerfed because they didn't line up with the other long range weapon types and now they're being left behind in changes?