Holy crap I can’t believe I still see people talk about DR on logistics themselves. Have you guys never played another game in your lives that had a dps-healer dichotomy and still were able to reach a balance. If you have you’ll know that EVE is severely lacking in this area which leads to the problems we have seen for years, not just now.
Lets think wow, I’m sure most people have played that in the past or at least understand it enough to follow along. In arena matches a single healer is typically able to keep their team alive despite being damaged by multiple dps yet people still die. Why? Healers in wow can push out enormous hps compared to their dps counterparts. Well, simply put, there are tools available to both sides that we simply do not have in EVE.
Between the dps’s defensive cooldowns and the healers own cooldowns they can mitigate these times of incoming burst damage. This is similar to our own ability to overheat modules, adc/edc, prop mod, etc. So far so good.
One way for people to die is for their healer to run out of mana. This would fall under the same situation as our fax/logi running out of capacitor. Again, everything seems good. However, we have a problem now.
In other games, restoring this resource requires you to be out of combat to get anything over the base regen. In wow, you must get out of combat so you can drink, but in eve you just start cycling your cap injector(s). So balance step #1, do not allow the use of cap injectors while triage/weapons timer is active.
Okay, that helps, but now you do have to recognize how cap inefficient the reps really are and tone it down a bit since now the primary way of restoring their capacitor has been removed making them far more vulnerable to their own reps capping them out, not just neut pressure. Healer and fax have very large cap pools, you just need to look at passive regen or actual rep cap usage to bring balance to this situation.
On to the next missing piece of the puzzle. Crowd control effects in other games like stuns and silences exist to halt healers by stopping their ability to act outright or by hampering their ability to heal effectively through healing debuffs to either reduce the amount of healing done, increase mana usage, or increase cast times. However, you will never know what abilities the enemy team may bring to bear (you don’t know who you’re facing ahead of time) so can only prepare for the worst. In eve we are left with only damps and ECM as a comparable equivalent. This is my second and third suggestion to fix a piece of the balance puzzle. While ECM would be the equivalent to stunning a healer, as it stands ECM is entirely random and suffers no DR for each consecutive successful jam. CCP’s solution was to make triage immune to ECM. ECM should be reworked such that once jammed, a target cannot be jammed again for a period of time as well as any ECM immunity removed from any existing modules. This also means that people have a decision to make when using ECM versus burst jammers. Do they want to knock out a group’s lock or keep a single target jammed for a duration. A decision must be made because each would trigger this cooldown on any effected ships.
The third suggestion following suite would be an anti-logistics weapon which would fall under the E-war line as it would reduce incoming reps on the target. Like other e-war modules, would suffer a DR such that only a certain % (around 30%) of logistics could be reliably countered. When combined allows for situations to appear which currently do not where normal dps can be applied to kill a target but not such that it will always line up properly. The ideal module for this would take charges similar to a bomb with a longer travel time and load time but only strike the single target. This means multiple would be need to be brought to a fleet and allow prepared defenders to counter this mechanic wither their own wave of defender missiles. At the same time an unprepared fleet would be open to this mechanic, but only so many times as the attacking force came prepared to lob their way when not on cooldown. Meaning timing your vollies to align with jam cycles and anti-logistics applications becomes an actual important tactic in warfare.
—TLDR—
-DR solves nothing and has no place in eve. It just creates a larger problem of just forcing brawl fests with no logistics at all in large engagements. Also punishes people entering into more common small to medium engagements by reducing the role of logi pilots.
-Balance step 1: Do not allow for cap injection with active triage (or weapon timer). This will require a host of other balance passes on logistics cap regen/pools as well as logistics modules cap usage.
-Balance step 2: Rework ECM such that there is a period of invulnerability after being successfully jammed. Remove Ewar immunity/resistances from hulls and modules that currently have them. This opens up stun like mechanics to an area desperately needing them while removing their entirely oppressive nature by no longer allowing chained jams.
-Balance step 3: Targeted anti-logistics module which take a while to travel to a single target with noticeable reload cycle. Ammo is large so amount carried into battle per ship is limited requiring logistical planning to bring more in. Can be counted by already existing defender missiles. Suffers from a DR as any other e-war module meaning there is a cap to this reduction that can ideally be overcome but creates an opening which does not currently exist to be exploited.