I was persuaded to skill up to the Widow to join a small gang of blops pilots to drop on ratting carriers. The idea was to jam the ship and the fighters to give the gang a chance to kill the carrier without getting deleted. If we try to do this after the changes then the Widow is always primaried and dies every time.
I’m seriously thinking about just extracting the ECM skills altogether as well as Long Distance Jamming, Freq. Modulation and Sig. Dispersion and inject the SP to shorten the time to train for another racial BS 5
Yeah a falcon did that way better than the widow. 4 ppl can easily drop on carriers in dps ships and use ec to jam out the fighters after the change. The widow is not the ship to use for that kind of ecm. It’s built to make use of the burst and it can do some nasty things with the right fleet
Once again, you ignored the small iteration change of having the cycle time on the ECM modules cut to reduce the oppressiveness of being jammed if you get unlucky. I am starting to think this behaviour on your part is deliberate.
How would this small change (even smaller than the one being pushed with this patch) be less effective?
You know, now I wonder if we have a cart/horse situation here. Or maybe chicken/egg?
You point out that ECM has much longer range. I wonder if at the time it was previously balanced, that it was their exact intention. Due to the fact that you generally need a rainbow mix and therefore four midslots to use this particular EWAR, that doesn’t leave room for tank. That is one of the major sticking points being hotly discussed here.
So ECM has the racial split, which prevents fitting tank, which necessitates it having really long range to use that as tank, which is then seen as too much, which then has CCP wanting to enact this nerf.
It really does feel like getting rid of the racial split would eliminate half the problems here.
No the problem is people getting upset that they have to spend 20+ seconds twiddling thumbs. Fozzi admits he fell the modal is balanced the problem is ccp does not feel it is fun
Either shuffle the locks around you currently have or randomly cause your locks to swap to something else on grid.
Should a lock with targeted modules be effected they switch to the new target.
If you go with option one out could cause damage to spread of you lock up secondary + targets.
My favorite is the second one where you ate now at risk of shooting friendlies/ healing allies of you are not watching. And would make it more effective against larger fleets do to a higher chance of locks swapping to a friendly
Because it doesn’t change the fact that if you win the roll, the opposing player is locked out of having a meaningful impact on the fight for a certain period of time. Even if it’s 15 seconds instead of 30 (not exact numbers, don’t rage), it’s still frustrating. The entire point of the change is to give the opposition at least some kind of a response. Maybe he can’t target the other three guys attacking him, but he can hit one of them. Maybe the logi can’t rep anybody, but he can send his whore drone to fight the guy who jammed him, etc.
There’s no point in going down the “well why didn’t they just…” route here. They didn’t. This is what they chose. If it doesn’t work, then perhaps lessening the duration would be an alternate.
That’s a point i have been making for years. It’s similar to being damped. The difference is in those two situations players feel like they could do something
Years ago we had a discussion about changing ECM from a binary mechanic to a progressive one. I don’t remember the name of the dev involved, it was like 10 years ago. Basically all the other ewar works that way (I don’t consider Neuts/NOSes EWAR as they work on a regenerating resource which is just another health bar on the ship, so please keep that in mind). There is always a 2nd element involved, mostly range, in the case of TDs also speed/size. Warp jamming is another problematic area and as ECM it is a binary mechanic that has seen various changes over the years and never worked to overall satisfaction.
Anyway no matter what band aids CCP implements, until they change ECM from binary to progressive, it will never work. The ECM ships are balanced around this all or nothing mechanic. Making a loophole in it basically makes it pointless since you cannot achieve the “ALL” state anymore and you die as an ECM user.
There are multiple options to achieve this, however with the approach CCP has taken over the years, none of them are viable. So far it is heading into the direction of ECM becoming useless after a few “balance” patches that touch it, then swing the opposite way again after some time.
Just few days ago i lost Vexor kill because he launched pack of EC-300 and warped away while i was helplessly waiting for jam cycle to over.
Being in retribution i could do nothing to prevent him from warping out or to kill such drones.
In this case it was “I LEAVE” button. Not much difference tho…
Sadly, it has become clear that you are not engaging in good faith here.
Cycle time is, as has been noted repeatedly in this thread, presently 20 seconds. Do not think that no one noticed you referenced exaggerated numbers to bolster your own position.
Reducing it to 5 or 10 seconds (I honestly prefer 5 personally) means that they are locked out, but not for long. Also, it means that if they have a sensor booster fit, they can load an ECCM script and start it cycling and have a much better chance to withstand the subsequent ECM cycles.
Your present position is literally that being jammed and unable to shoot back because you didn’t fit a counter to ECM feels bad, therefore it should be eliminated. Even though losing your cap and not being able to shoot at people because you got neuted out is exactly the same. Sure, they could have fit projectiles or missiles, but people being jammed could have fit FoF missiles too, or had their drones out and set to aggressive.
When I jam a person, and they can still shoot me, how do you think I feel? I no longer have any response because of this, because my jam accomplishes nothing. It also means the tank I sacrificed to get a good reliable jam going is not there to save me, and ewar ships just don’t have good DPS, certainly not enough to win a damage race against pretty much anything their size they encounter without their ewar. Why should I be forced to abandon my solo style just because someone gets upset because they don’t fit anything to counter me? After all, I fit explicitly to counter them.
It doesn’t feel good to be utterly helpless trying to kill a Titan in my Ibis. Does that mean Titans should get cripplingly nerfed? Or does it mean I should do something sensible like run away and fit properly so I can do something? Why should I have to fit properly, or bring a better ship? Why do I have to run away? I apologise, but this is the same line of reasoning behind this change taken to it’s ludicrous conclusion.
In general, what I saw about the changes in HIC, on the test server today, I liked it! And what if the CCP goes further, and implement these modules not as separate equipment, but as SCRIPT, for existing HIC modules!? This will create less trouble for the players!
1v1 a Lachesis with faction scram can damp so you can’t target, scramble so you can’t warp away, turn off your MWD so you can’t get closer/further away and has enough drones/guns to neutralize your drones
You are stuck in limbo - without the hope of a fail every 20 seconds - RNG based looks pretty good in this case
I think this low jam timer might be broken for ships with long locking time. For example battleship with locking time of 11 seconds will have 2-3 jam cycles every time it tried to lock anything. This will make jammer a lot more powerfull for such situations.