Ships & Modules

Some of the mid range ammo is popular for long range pvp. The max range ammo sacrifices too much damage, and gives more range then anyone really wants.

examples where i would use different ammo now

before for mega/hyperion/talos i would use navy am or null

now i would use if using blasters would be:

mega: Uranium to go with the rate of fire bonus

hyperion: antimater to go with the damage bonus

talos: Plutonium to go with the tracking bonus.

Keep your filthy paws off my DG iron charges...

i can understand having some kind of different damage patterns but hybrids really dont need a dps or tracking boost to their ammo, they melt faces already well enough

for antimatter and tech II ammo i have to agree... problem is there are lots of other ammo types and they should also melt face...

^

Both the mid and long range ammo types get used extensively in railgun ships

I have flown a couple of those so i know.

Not if you are cleaver about the bonuses...

I just checked ammo on SiSi since it's up right now.

It seems that all hybrid ammo is skewed slightly in favor of kin.

Perhaps what would be good is to equalize all the hybrid ammo to do a perfect 50/50 split of kin/therm like someone above me suggested, and then put something on the turrets themselves to skew the damage towards therm for blasters and towards kin for rails. For example, something where a blaster would reduce kin damage by 25% and then increase therm by 25%. It wouldn't be a weapon bonus, just a weapon property and it would be static.

Alternately, if people are worried about bonuses and such, just have the ammo do too much combined kin/therm damage and let the turret reduce the off-racial damage to a point where the overall yield is where it should be. Such that if you want a round of Antimatter to have 75 points of damage spread between kin/therm, you give it 100 points (50 in each) and then have the turret penalize the off-racial damage by 50%, reducing one to 25 points and the total becoming the desired 75.

Maybe it's a terrible idea. It's just a thought I had for how to racially-flavor hybrids and introduce a little variation in available damage type output. OP does indeed seem to be pulling a "let's make hybrids like projectiles" without realizing that it only works with projectiles because of all the different damage profiles available.

That being said, there's still no mid-range projectile ammo that deals EM and that does bug me a little..

I would go a step further in hybrid weapons. Rather than just rebalancing the ammo to follow projectile ammo, split the ammo into two classes:

Iron, Lead, Thorium, and Tungsten Slugs and Antimatter, Iridium, Plutonium, and Uranium Charges.

The slugs are paired with rail guns and a new short range kinetic weapon (possibly modelled after a shotgun, where target sig matters in damage dealt as well as range and tracking with extreme damage but super low RoF.) On top, 4 new slugs are introduced that have varied damage profiles: mainly kinetic but paired with thermal, EM, and explosive like projectiles.

The charges are paired with blasters and a new long range thermal weapon (possibly entirely falloff range much more than ACs, high RoF, good damage, significant cap use). With this 4 new charges are also introduced with varied ranges and damage: mainly thermal paired with either EM or explosive.

As a side effect, Caldari and Gallente each get a dedicated class of turret weapons. Follow what happened with Destroyer/Battlecruiser for skills. The S/M/L turret skills are split into two and the specializations are renamed. New specs for the new weapons can be back filled. This might go well with a weapon skill simplification so you can train large T2 guns without doing small and medium T2 first.

The history of hybrids, gallente and caldari is a history full of misunderstandings.

The problem with hybrids is scaling and proper use of ship bonuses to modify weapon behaviour for different propose on different hulls(gallente/caldari). The current state of hybrids is a endless sting of bad design decisions since 2008, where blasters are bad instead of awesome at point blank, players think blasters are like acs(while they actually did mimic lasers, utilizing ammo and web/sig dynamics to massively outdo them at limited range windows or optimal bonuses to mimic them at less range with better tracking), caldari receive damage bonuses instead making the optimal bonuses more useful and gallente hulls get buffed in fitting to a point where everything can be fitted without any effort. This is the result of years of bad design and band aids, because nobody addresses the core flaws of the weapon system and the idea behind the hulls.

- a blaster fitted gallente hull is terrible at point blank(full stop) it can not dictate range and utilize peak dps(because of the weaker web and scrams). A effective blaster ship, bigger than a frig needs a stronger web or being scram immune(mwd off effect, still pointed), making it able to dictate range at point blank even in X vs 1 engagements(since this is what you get in a blaster ship that comes with the "do or die" penalty if you engage at close range)
- a blaster fitted caldari hull is terrible, because the bonus doesn't scale well enough with the weapon to provide a more effective and different combat window than gallente and there is no real fitting concept, caldari hulls should be able to use the big blasters + tank with her lower effective turret count while forcing gallente to glass cannon + gank or smaller blasters + tank, by this you migrate the dps/optimal situation, however that only works with higher optimal bonuses on caldari hulls and the ability to do full dps with gallente hulls at point blank
- while the new mega is designed around a heavy tank and high rail dps, gallente hulls in general lack tracking with rails(rails got not enough tracking to be a good nano kite weapon, this is why medium rails suck, full stop)
- caldari hulls got not enough damage with rails outside of large rails(because they have 8 effective turrets here and can use high damage ammos at nearly every useful combat range). The problem of the ferox/moa is that they lack effective turrets to archive reasonable dps with rails. Eagle is just bad.

Hybrids are bad, because hybrid design is bad and it will only get better the day when people stop throwing bad ideas on it. Think about why gallente where useful at point blank, not because of a few more EHP and dps that they should not need to begin with, but because sig/web mechanics made them hit like a truck at this range, why a optimal bonus could be just as good but different compared to a damage bonus and why ccp put a falloff bonus on some gallente hulls(the reason for this was to not outdo caldari hulls for sniping, it is not good, it is terrible and doesn't suit a weapon that is used at point blank or long range, in both cases at optimal, not in falloff).