ECM Balance Pass - November

  1. Add percentage signature reduction bonus to ECM modules, as well as
  2. specific resistance bonus related to ECM equipped,
  3. and bonuses to support drone effectiveness.

The signature reduction bonus provide more initial mitigation, but does not allow complete damage avoidance. You’ll live through the start of the fight.

The resistance bonus per ECM module would allow you to survive a bit once you get hit.

Support drone effectiveness would make ECM drones, web drones, etc.,. be more synergistic to the ECM ships.

Its a 15 years old habit of CCP to nerf everything that made this game fun and rewarding. Everything in this game has been nerfed to oblivion, the ships themselves ( the little pixels you pay 15 bucks a month to train for ) and all that made PVE worth doing.

Serious question - after 15 years of such utter disappoinment why do you keep playing ?

I did not play the whole 15 years all the time, spent a lot of time upto 2010-11 then sporadically from 2012 upto now. I’m not saying the game is an utter disappoinment, I’m saying that when you charge someone 15 dollars or euros per month for a game where skills are raised in RL time, you should not nerf to s**t the ships people trained for and therefore paid for. Most the ships created in Eve Online have been there for a very long time, why the need to “balance” - understand nerf - them all the time ?. How long does it takes to fly a Rook or any T2 or T3 cruisers correctly ? several months. So why spending months and so RL money to be able to pilot a ship correctly if the devs nerf everything to the ground. What is the point of using a specialized ECM ship if any target you jam can always lock you ? .In the same vein, if you create a ship like the Marauder as an high damage/good defense ship with salvaging abilities. why would you completely nerf the drop from npcs/salvaging over the years , making the ship useless in terms of ISK you can get from ? Does not make too much sense to me in terms of gaming.

3 Likes

is this still true to life that if you are jammed the ship jamming you can still be locked? i havent pvped in a long time andi used to fly jam kite missle boats but will need to rethink this if this is true that my target thats jammed can still target me

Yes…

I wouldn’t like to see ECM buffed as its still prefered EWAR for midcore fleets. If you want to buff EWAR give all races EWAR boats way to fit all EWAR (ECM, tracking distruption…) with bonuses. This would also ‘buff’ ECM since it would give more ships options to use it on. Also giving other EWAR methods more hulls to use.

Any ideas on how a solo player can use ECM yet?

Unless you’re using ECM drones, ECM is not supposed to work solo.

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But by that logic no e-war should be used for solo, isn’t this a sandbox game? e-war had a hard counter, Just like all e-war does. now it is next to useless in all but one specific narrowly defined role, just seems very un-eve like.

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The problem is, there is a viability in every other form of ewar. Literally every other ewar ship that isnt caldari has significantly higher EHP. As for solo, Only the Rook as far as I know is the only broken combat recon at the moment.

It’s been 2 years now.

I like a few of the ideas being tossed around here specifically:

  • make ECM a high-slot module so you can choose Jams or DPS given that all ECM boats are shield tank anyhow this makes sense. Though ships may need to lose mid-slots for balance.
  • Scripted ECM modules is also a very good idea in my opinion and fits well with the recent addition of ECCM scripts, Flex Hardeners etc

Now my idea:
Should ECM bonused hulls also recurve a bonus to ECM drone Efficency ? This would help in solo PVP situations but also allow a clear counter play

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Or, you fit a sebo and can’t be jammed.

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I have been using ECM extensively during my time in this game. The way i see it, there is only one way to use ECM effectively: rainbow jammers + range tank. It was always a group multiplier and you were never really able to tank anything against an actual gang. In this scenario, the target change some time ago was annoying, but ultimately inconsequential, since you were range tanking anyways.

This change improves the only valid scenario (range and potency) without changing the scenario itself.

You can have:

  • a near 100k optimal griffin
  • a 200k optimal blackbird
  • a 200k optimal kitsune

From my point of view these are the only valid setups. The Scorpion is too slow, fat and expensive and doesn’t offer much over a blackbird, besides the ecm burst niche. The Griffin, Kitsune and Blackbird are fine, but limited in their use cases.

The other ECM ships are garbage because they can’t do range tank properly. If you want to change the underlying issue - which is the ecm use case scenario - you need to change how ECM works. Incremental changes won’t do anything here.

Looking into 2021, I just hope that we at least get some feedback concerning the status of the ECM and whether CCP has considered any changes to ECM/Caldari EWAR ships.

However, I doubt that this will happen given CCP’s current track record on the issue.

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There is a skill as well that increases sensor strength (4 flavors), forget what it is called.

@Salt_Foambreaker

Is it the sensor compensation skills you are thinking of?

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Very disappointing, extremely dissapointing. It makes solo ewar useless. Totally useless. so you only have the option of the proverbial hack and slash… toe the line… brute force. very dissapointing.

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Yup. New mechanism required.

Jam modules rather than hulls.
Either freeze them or overheat them (piggy back on the current heat mechanism)

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