Originally by: Malcanis

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I'm serious: ECM sucks. I've used it a lot, in lots of different situations, and contrary to what some might think, I have been thinking a lot about what people have said in the various threads. I have come to the conclusion that ECM is horrible.

The effect, as many have noted, is too powerful compared to other EW. The balancing characteristic, that it is chance-based, makes it too unreliable to use as any kind of serious protection unless the chance of failure is so small that the ship is overpowered, or unless the range is so high that the ECM ship isn't in danger anyway. ECM ships have to be useless for everything but ECM, but or ECM ships to be worth flying at all that means they have to be too good at ECM. In the various ECM/Falcon whinethreads, a large number of people who know a lot about the game have comprehensively and consistently failed to come up with a way of making ECM ships useful for anything except ECM. Long range, unanswerable, fun destroying.
In short ECM is either overpowered, or it is overpowered and useless (ie: it cripples the enemy in a situation where they would lose anyway), or it is useless. What it isn't, ever, is fun. For anyone.
I have in the past argued that eg: Falcons are balanced because they have so many weaknesses and such specific utility. Whilst I still believe that this is true, I have come to the conclusion that the problem with them is not so much that they're imbalanced, but that their balance balance comes from being so rigidly specialised that they are either ridiculously good or ridiculously bad in a given situation. On average, they're not "overpowered". But what they never are is fun, either to fly or to fight.

So let's junk ECM and the current concept of hyper-specialised ECM ships and start from scratch. We need a completely different EW concept for Caldari ships. My thought is that it should have the following characteristics:

(1) Get rid of chance based effects, at least within optimal range. If it's reliable, it can be less powerful. If it's less powerful, then we can reasonably give Caldari EW ships stuff like drone bays or secondary E-War

(2) Caldari EW should still be the "best" EW, but by a much smaller margin than is currently the case. If Caldari recons are to get a secondary E-War, it should be the least powerful, and maybe a buff effect rather than an offensive one (eg: a range/effect bonus to remote sensor boosters or trackng links?) or something Caldari-flavoured like the equivalent of a tracking disruptor for missiles.

(3) Either drop the scorpion's EW role altogether, and buff it's drone bay and give it some weapon bonuses so that Caldari have 1 decent solo ship (and a tier 1 BS that can deploy a set of heavy drones like every other race has) or, if the new Caldari EW is worthwhile on a BS, give all the other races a tier 1 EW BS, and create a decent soloable (or at least multirole) t1 BS for Caldari to use. Currently the Scorpion Fails It™ and I say this as someone who dearly wants it to be a good ship.

tl;dr: drop ECM, rework Caldari ECM ships, let's hear your thoughts.

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