Debate why this mechanic is still in the game, why it isn’t a highslot module and why it has been allowed to shut off the victims ship despite nerfs spanning back over a decade in order to make it more reasonable.
As an ecm pilot myself I hate this mechanic, 100% or 0%, no middle ground, no counterplay. Fit an ECCM or have drones on auto aggress, don’t have those? Get cheesed.
Looks like you listed the counterplay. Whats the counter module to a warp scrambler or web? The main issue I see is the people feel helpless when ecmed. When your webbed and scramed by superior numbers you often accept death as the enemy claws through your shields, armor and hull. When ecmed though, you may get the false hope that “If i wasn’t jammed I could have won…”.
Let me tell you why the scram/web argument doesn’t work: AB and MWD do something meaningful outside of being scrammed/webbed/pointed.
What does a sebo or scan amp do outside of being ECM’d? Let you lock faster? Is that really a valuable proposition when talking about most combat scenarios where getting a fast lock doesn’t materially change whether you are IN a fight or not?
I don’t want this to be vacuous ranting. I want a meaningful change to ECM to reduce it from UTTER ■■■■■■■■ to something that requires a more material investment from a group than undock griffin and jam fighters ftw lol 1mil ship > 2bil carrier.
This is my proposal
ECM now reduces max target locks on target. This is a sample of how it would look like
Blue jams: 2,1,1,1 = 2 lost max targets for caldari sensors, 1 for others. Ship bonuses improve this
Green: 1,2,1,1
Red: 1,1,2,1
Yellow: 1,1,1,2
Omni: 1.5,1.5,1.5,1.5 = no improvement for unbonused ships, bonused ships will have higher effective jams
How do ships calculate bonuses for jams applied? Say bonuses = 20% per level. Therefore a griffin at all 5 gets
*Blue jams: 4,2,2,2
etc
*Omni: 3,3,3,3
Per jammer.
How do ships calculated jams received? The humble catalyst can lock for eg 6 targets. A griffin enters the field and applies 3 green jams. The catalyst is now completely jammed out, he cannot lock ANY target because he has no more targets available. The griffin must dedicate at minimum 2 of his 3 jams to maintain the jam-out.
This system is fundamentally superior because it removes the dice roll randomness from jams, it means that ships even with bonuses cannot permajam a target with a single jam, it means that you must either maintain jams on a target permanently to reduce their effectiveness or suffer the risk of them locking you. It means that jams can be spread over logis to force them to pick between capchain members and friendlies, it means that fleets which include ECM become more viable as well because the jams might force a target with 6 available locks to choose the 2 closest to him, or the jammer and another target, because he legitimately might be able to break out of the jam death spiral if he has the range to hit the jammer.
its hands down a superior system to the current F*** You mechanics we have now.
Auto Targeting Missiles can counter ECM too, right?
Yes and most ships can’t fit those. Not really a good example
You included drones as an excample how to fight ECM ships and I would like to add Auto-Targeting-Missiles. Around twenty ships are bonused for drone damage and around thirty ships are bonused for missile damage, therefore I see both as counters.
The small unbonused drone bay most ships have won’t win the day when jammed anyway. But perhaps you could add smartbombs and bombs in general. I don’t say that ECM couldn’t use an overhaul, but ist is not “bring A or B or you are screwed”. That may only be part of the meta gaming right now.
Drones don’t agro unless they are deployed before getting jammed. Like before, most ships can’t fit or would be stupid to fit autotargeting missiles unless they knew 100% beforehand they would be fighting ECM ships, which is not how EVE works. You don’t get to choose who undocks and in what. The idea that you would stock an infinite amount of all modules and all ships so you can rockpaperscissors any encounter is banal and also not rooted in the reality of the game. There might be people who do it and more power to them, 99.9% of the game’s population don’t carry depots and refits for every conceivable scenario.
Drone’s being issued attack orders outside of locks would make your argument stronger but as it stands if the jammer gets the jump on you (due to a myriad of reasons including having better scan res) the same situation emerges, you may or may not deploy drones in time to get a chance at attacking the jammer but if you’re jammed he can just moonwalk out of the battle because you cannot apply scram, web or longpoint to something you cannot lock.
So I don’t consider an entirely situational decision with a relatively small chance of working to be good enough as a counter measure for ECM. We haven’t even mentioned how a single griffin can permajam multiple destroyers at the same time either due to how the system works, how they have a fairly strong chance to jam out frigates entirely as well if they pick the right jams and hit the right targets. Perhaps having a single midslot on a throw-away vessel remove you from a fight completely UNLESS you had drones or the Nostradamus grade foresight to fit auto targeting missiles isn’t balanced. Perhaps you could argue for using smartbombs? They have very very short range, a jammer need only sit at 6.1km to ignore those as well.
Nope, that is not how Auto-Targeting-Missiles work. You just a load a stack into your cargo bay and use them in your regular launchers. No special launchers needed.
And don’t make things over-complicated. There are some counters for ECM, when you list them please list them all. That does not invalid your idea for a ECM change, it just draws the picture right.
Drone’s cannot be a counter as not all ships have good drone’s. There should be auto targeting gun ammo as well, since gun ships get 100% screwed over, eg Zealot, also how can the zealot fit eccm? It doesnt have enough mid’s you would have to sacrifice 4 low slots for eccm modules to even have a small chance of countering it 4 lows its not reasonable.
Drone’s should stop shooting at it’s target once the owner of the ship has lost lock in order to balance gallente vs other race’s.
Yes, for those ships which fit lights, heavy or cruise missiles. 3 weapons systems out of dozens. You cannot be seriously suggesting this. ECM works against ALL VESSELS, it’s even possible to jam capitals. Light missiles might fit on a lot of ships but not all ships have a full rack of missiles and even if you did you still aren’t addressing the basic problem of not having the ability to control the fight at all.
Agreed, there needs to be a mechanical way for people to counter ecm with good piloting skill’s this is not possible since ecm has too much optimal range maybe if ecm was pure fall off it would make sense.
Then if people wanted a much more stable jam chance they need to take the risk of flying into scram range with their paper tank ship, if they want to remain safe they need to loose a lot of efficiency.
I didn’t I say ECM is fine because there are Auto-Targeting-Missiles. I just wanted to add that if you list the possible counters please list them all. How good, viable, common and whatever those counters are is another question. But when you write you can bring EECM or Drones and that’s it you are arguing a bit one-sided.
If ECM worked on falloff more it wouldn’t have much difference than damps, outside of a certain range a damp means you have zero locks. You need to get closer to gain locks. If ECM worked entirely on falloff you would burn outside a certain range and then possibly get to lock depending on RNG from ECM, which lasts 20s (far too long). This is not to mention that once you get inside the damps range and get a lock, you can web and scram to control the fight. If you have to move further away from something you will eventually lose the ability to respond via range control, not to mention at very short ranges where the ECM is at peak performance he might have you web/scrammed and you’re not able to burn away.
This is something that needs to be thought about when concerning ECM, at the ranges where it functions best you may not have the ability at all to respond via prop mod. ECM to be balanced with falloff would basically need to have negative falloff where the closer you are the weaker it is otherwise whats the point?
Total opposite a falcon should not sit at 60km’s have good ECM strength and be safe it either needs to be safer with range with weaker strength and influence a fight less or it need’s to play more risky and go right into scram range and be much more effective.
An ecm ship should not perma jam anything, it should only weaken that ship so that the ships flying with the ecm ship has an advantage. Otherwise you get what happens now 4v1 where 1 goes and makes coffee aka boring broken bad game mechanic’s.
Somewhat. Damps are a kiters best friend, ECM is a brawlers best friend. A falcon needing to be at 1km wouldn’t mean much since you are jammed. Unless I misunderstood what you are saying, simply put, its not the ships that are the problem whether they have bonuses and 200km range or not its the module and the mechanic and the way that correctly using ECM either solo like navy griffin or kitsune or rook or tengu or in fleet with a dedicated jammer and some tackle/etc the same problem is present. Once you are jammed and scrammed you are dead. 100%. It’s not going to make an ass of a difference what you do at the point you cannot move away and break jams. Some of the very worst situations possible emerge when you get things like raptors with double damps targeting you and you’re in a t1 cruiser. You have all the power in the world to blow this thing away but due to the power of ewar natively you’re in for a rough time, not even considering whether the raptor has friends coming or not.
The falcon was dumb and sat at 80-90km’s and becuase it was weaker at that range it missed 2 jams which was enough time to kill the cynable who had me scramed. If ecm was pure fall off then the same scenario could happen at 30-50km’s and so on and small chance for 1 jam missed at 10km’s would allow the pilot crucial time to remove the ecm ship from the field although ecm ships actually have a decent tank sometimes.
All that has to happen is 1 jam misses and then it get’s real if that ecm ship is close then it’s going to need to start praying its tank hold’s long enough to get the next cycle off.
I use ecm ships sometimes too (keres) and would prefer if all e-war was pure falloff it would make combat a lot more interesting, nothing more boring than beating a dead horse.
That sounds like some particularly bad piloting on the falcons part.
Wouldn’t this generate just as much salt as the current system does? While it may eliminate the RNG part the “get jammed and die helpless” part would get even worse. You can’t even hope for a bad roll on the ECM side, when your foe uses enough modules and stays in reach of the ECM module you are nothing more than a spectator. Your proposal is far from “superiour” to me. Why use DEV time to change whacky mechanic into something just as screwed up as what we have now?
The way the RNG works with jams is that if the jam strength is higher than your sensor strength (basically a griffin with a racial jam vs t1 destroyer) then they have 100% chance to jam you. As your sensor strength climbs higher the jam chance is reduced by %. A moa has a 50% chance of being jammed by a griffin. Said griffin might only cost 2mil, top to bottom. Its jamming a cruiser whose base hull is 5x more expensive than the griffin.
If you land a jam with 1 module you don’t activate the others, its waste of resource, like using 8x 1400 arty to kill a single shuttle, you can split 1 gun and shoot the pod that comes out. It’s an open ended scenario, people who dump all their jams on the same target are either bad or in a 1v1.
So you take my proposed rework to ecm; said griffin no longer has the option to use a single jammer to ruin your life, he MUST apply more jams to a single target to knock it out. That’s immediately a net gain to the defender. There could be 4 ways of gaining additional locks under the new system. A corax has base 7 locks with all 5 skills. If you fit the much maligned faction sensorstrength implants you would have even more locks yet again (to reiterate, of little value to a combat ship and primarily to the benefit of logi when no ECM is present on field) meaning there is even further pressure from ECM to dump as many jams as possible on to a target to take it out. If that pilot doesn’t have enough jams on board or bad skills he will never, ever reduce the locks of the target to zero. He might reduce it to 1 which could be the jamming ship, or it could be his friend hard-tackling the target but without enough jam points it will never reach zero.
Right now ecm300s with 1pt of jamming each can have a chance of jamming any ship, removing their ability to target anything for 20s each. Do you not agree that even under intense ECM pressure having at least 1 lock is a superior option for the game in terms of balance? Do you really expect me to agree with you that getting jammed out is fun and engaging, when the only sensible option for fighting a jamming ship I see coming in on d-scan is to leave the field? That automatic I-win ships are good for the game? They have a tendency to be nerfed. I’m seeing more and more navy griffins as I fly around lowsec, if the meta catches on fully why fly anything else? It can enter novice sites right, a place where AFs cant go and only AF have a high enough sensor strength to not be a guaranteed knock out .