I am very disappointed in the ECM changes. Not only has ECM become completely useless for 1v1 combat, but several ships like the Griffon Navy are now utterly worthless.
The fact is that it has always been possible to essentially become immune to ECM, or at least, make it vanishingly unlikely to land a jam against you, with the right modules. Even then, the random nature meant people had a chance. Furthermore, there was always the opportunity to run away, and if the jammer manages to both jam you down and tackle you while managing to break your tank, then frankly I feel they deserve the kill.
This seems very much like a capitulation to people who complain about ECM being strong while doing nothing to defend themselves against it. Yes, they will obviously claim that they don’t have room in their fittings to designate a single mid or low slot to a sensor boosting module, but that is the tradeoff they chose to make when fitting the ship, and I don’t see why CCP should be rewarding this intransigence.
On a similar line, why don’t we give all mining barges and exhumers 100,000 hull and 90% resists across the board because the people who fly them in highsec don’t want to pay attention to the game when mining or fit tank and whinge about being shot at?
Basically, this has made solo ECM utterly useless, since its use for solo combat is either to jam the other ship to prevent incoming fire and ewar, or jam the drones to accomplish the same, neither of which will work anymore. In small gangs, you have guaranteed that such ECM ships will die vastly faster than before due to a complete inability to negate incoming DPS, or be forced to quit the field repeatedly during the course of the engagement and be limited to breaking locks and running, which just makes the whole thing annoying for everyone involved.
Also: drones were never able to permajam someone anyway. Their jam strength is so low you’d need a half dozen ships worth of them to accomplish it on a single person, and the same number of combat drones would just destroy them in half the time.
I find it kind of amusing that you haven’t taken a bat to sensor damping, since you can use that to shrink a targets lock range to the point where they can’t shoot anyone, especially when you web them down, and even if they can get a lock on you (which takes forever), you can cycle a prop mod and get out of range to break the lock before slowing back down and resuming your work.
