Derek Sigres
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Posted - 2008.12.27 19:34:00 -
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I find this nerf plea to be especially hilarious - suddenly, lasers have become unstoppably powerful and it's a plague that is wreaking havoc on Eve as we know it.
When I started playing, there were exactly TWO flavors of combat - point blank active tanking nonsense where gallente blasterboats ruled the day, and sniper combat in fleets where once again gallente ships ruled the field (there was no Rokh, and the Amrmageddon/apoc had immense trouble reaching fleet ranges). For nearly two years I listened to amarr players ****, whine and moan about how much of a shaft they had - dealing damage that was well tanked by most ships, having a preference for medium range and so forth. Then, there were but a handful of minor buffs to lasers (em armor resist was reduced, pulse tracking was increased, the armageddon was made useful and so forth) and suddenly lasers have become ungodly powerful.
But, if you really want to know the truth, lasers really aren't substantially more powerful than they ever have been - the only significant thing that has changed is our understanding of the game and the overall preference for type of combat. Now that solo PVP isn't terribly common, the weakness of cap usage is more or less a thing of the past. Now that gang sizes are larger, point blank 1v1 combat seems almost stupid. Really, all that happened is how we play the game has shifted to favor middle ranged combat - something amarr have always been brutally powerful at and yet it is a technique that was once considered to be the poorest of compromises. There was a time when people would simply shout down such assertions of amarr laser ownage by pointing out that blaster boats deal substantially more damage up close and therefore THEY are superior, and rail platforms have far more range and therfore would pick amarr ships apart.
It's amazing how shifts in the logic of the community result in massive shift's in the status quo. Lasers didn't get better - players just got smarter; clearly we can't have that though, and lasers must be nerfed.
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