The GNI will be fine. It’s not gonna be a good solo boat anymore, which is probably the only place that anyone really used it… but if you think about it now, more powerful jams (GNI has some pretty decent jams already) and more tank will make it an excellent logi killer in a gang.
Fit blasters, lock down a logi and hit it while the rest of your gang hits something else. Any other logi they have will need to split reps.
Bring two, and now remaining logi need to split reps even further.
Another option is as a tackle ship against bigger boats you can sig tank. Scram a battleship, orbit at 1k, and while the jams are up, the rest of your gang can hammer on it with impunity. ■■■■, they could stop their ships if they wanted to. All it gets to do is waste volleys on you. There are of course counters such as neuts/SB/drones… that’s Eve.
After some thinkin, I think that the ECM boats should get more speed and capacitor and agility instead of tank. Make enemies bring interceptors that will be not nullified LOL.
I have never looked at the GNI, I saw it’s bonus was jam related and it had to get close and the DPS was woeful, but could work 1v1 against certain targets. So yes that ship does seem to be used solo by some people, thanks for detailing that.
Tackle cepters are still nullified. Combat cepters are goign to lose it, and with it, any reason to ever undock one. But nobody brought combat cepters to a real fight anyways.
The ECM is a COUNTER MEASURE in place of a tank. This is an ECM ship’s defense. You can fit an ECCM if you want. It’s all about choices and this is taking the core, unique line of ships for an ENTIRE FACTION out of viability for solo play.
So Caldari is now the support faction. Fk u solo players.
Overall this is a bad change. People talking about being jammed for 20 seconds or whatever is not a good argument. It is no different then being in a blaster fit against a long range kite fit. Are they going to make all weapons have the same range and all ships the same speed? I don’t even use ecm but this change makes zero sense.
the drone change is good.
The ECM change would be fine the issue is the lack of ship balancing with it.
the ECM change should only be implemented with a re-balance to ALL ecm bonused ships… ecm ships should be reworked to be super tanky alongside enough ecm to jam one ship (via a bonus change to fitting a single super power multi-spectral) and a base speed buff and that should apply to The rook/widow/blackbird/scorpion/chameleon).
and the falcon/kitsune/griffin/N-griffin should get mwd sig bonuses, agility speed and ecm range and a little more tank. Those changes and this ECM Nerf would be acceptable.
This would mean that the combat ecm ships are good brawlers capable of excellent 2-3man pvp. while slightly outnumbered. The fleet ECM ships would be capable of coming in at range and proving jams for a larger fleet fight as long as they can stay away from light tackle and keep traversal up.
The big positive is that supers when outnumbered will go down fighting. making one of the worst deaths in the game feel a little less insulting. If it goes down this way Would be ok with it. other wise it stinks
As a rule, all EWAR ships have always been support ships. Always. They were never good for solo PVP or even solo PVE. You might have noticed, though, that the only ones people were solo’ing in were the ECM ships. This is indicative of imbalance. Personally, I never use them for anything but fleet support, but to each their own.
I think this change is a good one and brings these ships back into line with their intended use - fleet support. That being said, a Blackbird without any ECM modules on it can still sport an incredible shield tank almost unparalleled by any other T1 cruiser.
That being said, and despite the fact that I like this change, I’m not sure it was necessary. There are a lot of things in the game that make one feel helpless. There are a lot of situations that you can get yourself in with no way out, and you are going to lose a ship as a result. This is all part of EVE. This change looks like a direct response to, once again, nulsec whining more than anything, thanks to recent ECM shenanigans.
CCP, I, for one, would really appreciate if you could, just once, tell nulsec, and their reps on the CSM, to HTFU.
From my experience, ECCM works quite well. I flew kitsunes for a while, switched out for a Keres when jams proved to be too unreliable. That was because people were routinely fitting those sensor boost modules with ECCM script. I had max ship and support skills and the jams just weren’t landing. It was noteworthy when jams landed, and yes I was trying to use them on logi. And they didn’t even have the benefit of command boosts to increase their sensor strength even further.
I’ve been very vocal against these changes in the primary thread since my experience with ECM has been that it’s too unreliable as-is and doesn’t need more nerfs. It’s why I switched over to damps. Damps always work. You can have fun with damps when you work them right.
Whole this balance pass on ECM is inconsiderate IMO. If current countermeasure mechanism is that jammed target still hold lock on jammer what will happen with ECCM? If ECM strenght will be increased, to provide more consistent gameplay, shouldn’t ECCM be too? ECCM works only on ECM and not other ewar?
With so many goons in CSM expect more absurd, illogical and plain dumb changes to pop up in the future. Sadly, a toxic minority can decide to change the game mechanics for all of us…
