This is trivial, and we all know it. Supercarriers and armor titans together will ensure that there's no shortage of target painting. It's simply nonsense to claim otherwise, and that's why the balancing must be based on the assumption that a targeted battleship has 3-4 faction target painters on it.

No, I haven't. They can hit sometimes, but do way less damage. If they do 3% damage VS a battleship, imagine what it'd be like against a BC, or a cruiser if he's stupid enough to let you land the shot on him.
I'm a titan pilot myself atm, so I know perfectly well what they're capable of, and cruisers and below ARE able to avoid getting hit by not being ********. With the tracking nerf, BCs should be right around that limit as well.

Fortunately, Greyscale knows target painters are a problem. I have faith he will save the subcaps!!

Yeah, coordination of that kind of stuff is super easy. That's why EW is used so much in large fleet battles, everyone knows exactly who everyone else is using their EW on and is thus able to apply their own to the best possible target.

Everything you're saying has been systematically disproven over and over again. We've all seen the proof titans routinely blap dictors, hictors, and even rifters just for the hell of it. I would appreciate it if you'd refrain from making us reprove the sky is blue since it's been done in this thread and other threads to death.

Fortunately, Greyscale knows target painters are a problem. I have faith he will save the subcaps!!

Yeah, coordination of that kind of stuff is super easy. That's why EW is used so much in large fleet battles, everyone knows exactly who everyone else is using their EW on and is thus able to apply their own to the best possible target.

Yeah, coordination of that kind of stuff is super easy. That's why EW is used so much in large fleet battles, everyone knows exactly who everyone else is using their EW on and is thus able to apply their own to the best possible target.

I see what you did there


We're probably going with the square-over-square scaling, so you're hitting the 50% damage point around 1400 sig rather than around 1000, which *somewhat* mitigates this. The real solution here though is improvements to the tracking formula, and we're reluctant right now to go overboard with this stuff in the meantime, plus it's getting late in the day and we need to lock down something workable ASAP so we can ship it next week.

Battleships and sig radius: our current thinking is that all those sig radius penalties are there for sound balance reasons, and the only thing they really open up a vulnerability to right now is cap ships. Ignoring them for the purposes of cap ship guns just makes passive shield tanking even more desirable than it is right now. If you're finding that your 2000m drake or 4000m maelstrom are still taking huge amounts of damage from capitals, and that this is causing you problems, that's an issue with your choice of fitting rather than with overall game balance

Dreadnaughts: this has no effect on their main role as anti-capital/anti-structure (all of which are around or above 2000m), so we've honestly not worried about them too much. We'll have a quick discussion about their use in PvE today or tomorrow, but that may not result in any further changes.

I see what you did there


We're probably going with the square-over-square scaling, so you're hitting the 50% damage point around 1400 sig rather than around 1000, which *somewhat* mitigates this. The real solution here though is improvements to the tracking formula, and we're reluctant right now to go overboard with this stuff in the meantime, plus it's getting late in the day and we need to lock down something workable ASAP so we can ship it next week.

We're probably going with the square-over-square scaling, so you're hitting the 50% damage point around 1400 sig rather than around 1000, which *somewhat* mitigates this. The real solution here though is improvements to the tracking formula, and we're reluctant right now to go overboard with this stuff in the meantime, plus it's getting late in the day and we need to lock down something workable ASAP so we can ship it next week.

Could you just double-check that with your proposed formula, a titan hitting a hictor or a dictor (and here the dictor DOES need to be balanced around having an mwd) does very little? That's really important to ensure titans can't clear their tackles without support.

Working on some numbers to see what that would do in effect to battleships - thanks for the info.

With a linear scaling it would get hit for 25% damage, or 4% if the values are squared..and the MWD is only used for a short period while approaching anyway, once you get there you turn it off since it does absolutely nothing with the bubble up anyway. With it off, it would be about 1% or 10% depending on method chosen.

That works for a BS, but it gets too severe when it gets further down in sizes. Even a fully painted BC flying straight at a titan would be taking only ~6% damage, and a cruiser doing the same would take 1%. Without the squaring, it would be roughly 50% against a BS, 25% against a BC and 10% against a cruiser when you actually manage to hit and assuming you have perfect support. That may sound high, but restricting the titans target choices to only max painted ships with low transversal rather then any ship with low transversal on top of those raw damage reductions adds up to enough.

I hate to be pushy, but I don't really feel you're addressing my concerns here. I'm honestly not that concerned about the PvE issue, although i'm glad you're taking a look at it as other w-space folks are - i'm concerned about the PvP side of things.

Moreover, there are a multitude of sigradius reducing effects and bonuses that exist in the game, and properly stacked it would absolutely have an effect on the main role of dreadnaughts. A c6 wolf-rayet with loki skirmish links would see triage archons with 30k tank and 950m sigrad; that's not even including boosters or implant sets, which would push it down even further. 50% dmg reduction vs your intended targets is absolutely an effect, and that's assuming you guys stick with linear scaling.

e: with second-degree scaling, ie (target sigrad/gun radius)^2, you're talking about 22% dps. That means you go from needing two or three dreads to break it now to needing 10 to 15.

Could you just double-check that with your proposed formula, a titan hitting a hictor or a dictor (and here the dictor DOES need to be balanced around having an mwd) does very little? That's really important to ensure titans can't clear their tackles without support.

Working on some numbers to see what that would do in effect to battleships - thanks for the info.

MWDing Broadsword takes about 10% damage, MWD Sabre 3.5%, normal Broadsword around 0.45% and normal Sabre around 0.1%.

W-space stuff specifically is an interesting case, but it's something I think I'd prefer to see develop before taking any specific action against it.

Wspace will see a huge problem with such a nerf as right now Dreads are used in PVE and sub cap PVP as well. They make great targets for organized gangs. After this nerf noone will use them except for POS bashing.

/me angry

MWDing Broadsword takes about 10% damage, MWD Sabre 3.5%, normal Broadsword around 0.45% and normal Sabre around 0.1%.

Dreads were never supposed to be used for such things, that you been able to PVE with dreads for so long has just been an advantage for you... be happy about it, and deal with the future changes, if it's such a big problem, bring more target painters from golems or rapiers :)