I made a Hawk, took it into a lvl 2 mission - to test it out - I could not complete the msision. The self locking missiles would not launch on the Damsels hideaway. I had it locked and they still would not fire. The game said there was no target for them to fire on. Is this a normal thing? That self locking T2 missiles will not fire?
Auto-targeting missiles only target things that are shooting at you, you have no control over them. The structure Damsel is in doesn’t shoot at you, so they won’t ever target it.
There’s nothing you can do about this except put rockets on the Hawk, that’s what you want on there. Rockets are amazing. I suppose you could use light missiles, but they make things harder to fit.
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Change your ammo.
Are there even T2 auto targeting missiles or just regular and faction?
if you’d look in game you’d know this.
but its only standard and faction.
I kind of think auto-targeting should allow you to manually shoot if it isn’t already auto targeting. They have less base damage than faction ammo (even guristas, the lower end faction ammo). I don’t think giving up the ability to shoot on demand is worth being able to spit out automatic damage without locks.
I read many guides that heavy autotargeting missiles were your counter to ECM. If you get jammed and you think the jams won’t break, reload to friend or foe missiles and let them pour damage. But ummm… you keep locks on your jammer so just shoot the bastard if he’s in range. I guess if ECm caused all breaks in locks, then auto-targeting missiles would have a great niche here.
I don’t think they should do as much damage as Guristas ammo. But I think they ought to have something to compensate the lesser damage. So if things are shooting at you, they randomly cycle between all things shooting at you in range. If you attempt to manually fire, I think it should still shoot things shooting at you, but if nothing is shooting at you there is a delay that is 7 times as long as the time it takes to shoot 1 missile and then if nothing is still shooting at you then if fires at your manual target. But you are right as they work in the game auto-targeting missiles just can’t complete the mission.
Memory might be failing, but I think they used to.
ECM, aka jamming, reduces the maximum number of locked targets your ship may have to zero. If I can maintain the jamming, most of your weapons simply don’t matter.
Sensor Dampeners, the Gallente ewar, reduces your ship’s maximum locking range. A pair of damps can cut your lock range down so far I can safely snipe you at short range.
Both of these ewar have the effect of possibly making you completely unable to lock onto the people shooting at you. Without a target lock, there are only two weapons that will still engage the people shooting at you, drones and auto-targeting missiles.
They’re kind of a relic of a bygone era now, and they were pretty much useless then, too. It used to be really easy to perma-jam someone and completely lock them out of being able to effectively defend themselves. If you were flying solo, and a Falcon decloaked on grid, you were fu¢ked and there was almost nothing you could do about it. Auto-targeting missiles had a narrow usage here, if you happened to be flying a missle boat, and happened to be carrying some of these, and that Falcon happened to also be flying solo, then maybe you could chase them off and survive. I seem to remember auto-targeting missiles having absolutely terrible damage output.
If you were in a fleet and got jammed, then it would have a niche here. I don’t know why but occasionally I see recon ships jamming DPS ships in fleet battles (they usually jam logi, but sometimes for some reason they jam a DPS ship that would shoot back).
If Logi can almost keep up with the incoming damage, cutting a ship or two out of the DPS being focused on a single ship is all it takes to keep it alive. Depending on the fleet, 2 jammed DPS ships could be a few thousand DPS.
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Well there you go, if ECMs worked the way they used to and prevented all locks and a recon ship jammed a DPS ship, here is where auto targeting missiles would be used since targeting attacks wouldn’t work. That is where the niche of the missile was. Except that’s not how ECM works anymore and a jammed DPS ship would just try to shoot the jammer, leaving auto targetting missiles with not much to do, but hey at least it used to make sense.
Defender missiles were/are also a thing, and they had an even narrower niche of usage. They required your opponent to be in a PvP missile ship that wasn’t using rockets, because rockets were fast enough to avoid defenders, and those launchers had to be all grouped together into a single launch.
Changes to missiles have since made them obsolete, and I’m not even sure they’re still in the game. I don’t feel like looking right now.