I am kind of dumb and forget to focus killing destroyers instead of frigates in high sec combat anomalies, leading to me having to warp out, since the destroyers deal way more damage than frigates to me.
And the symbol for frigate and destroyer is kind of hard to see, its small and similar on my screen.
Can we replace the ship size symbols with something easier and faster to read, like letters?
This would only effect the triangle like symbol that appears.
For example,
Corvette → CRV / COR / idk
Frigate → F
Destroyer → D
Cruiser → C
Battlecruiser → BC
Battleship → BS
Dreadnought → DRN / DRD / idk
Turn on the size column in your overview and sort by that. It’ll put frigates on the bottom, destroyers above them, cruisers above them, and so on. Then you can just target in order of size.
They’re very distinct on my screen and easy to read too. Easier than replacing these clear symbols with letters.
For example can you imagine the awful readability and look when you see clumps like this full of letters instead of clear icons? Especially when nameplates with letters are also in the mix?
One has a line below the symbol, to show it’s a larger version of that hull size.
After all, both frigates and destroyers are small ships.
The same line is used to turn cruiser (medium) icons into battlecruiser (medium) icons.
Or mining barges and their support ships.
In other words, the icons are distinct enough to tell the difference, but also similar enough that you can intuitively tell they’re the same ship size in a battlefield with ships potentially ranging from Frigate to Titan.
The current NPC icon format works ok, it definitely denotes the different hull classes…
However, I think they should also include something with the NPC icons that differentiates the Elite hulls from the regular hulls, maybe something like a + sign in the top right corner of the NPC icon…
The reason being is that the regular hulls are much easier to destroy compared to the Elite hulls… For example, if there was an extra symbol denoting the Elite hulls, you could then quickly reduce the amount of incoming DPs by first targeting and quickly destroying all of the regular hulls…
Course I haven’t really been bothered by not having that aspect due to being max skilled and fitting my ships to have a good mix of defensive and offensive stats…
But there have been times in the past that I’ve wondered why certain hulls were taking longer to destroy… I then started researching the sites beforehand and made note of the names for those hulls so I could target them last… Doing that allowed me to very quickly clear the field and reduce incoming DPs…
And yes, EWAR threats are top priority and should be dealt with first..
So now I basically just look at the NPC icons to first target Frigate and Destroyer hulls, then while targeting them I’ll look at their names for the Elite nametag… If an Elite hull is locked, I’ll either unlock it or move it to the end of active targets… Course if the Elite hull becomes too much of a threat, then I’ll put all weapons on it..
That ‘extra symbol’ denoting elite hulls is their name.
In PvP there also is no way to tell the elite dangerous ships of enemy players, all you have to go by is the name of the pilot and the way their ship behaves. If that T3C suddenly webs you from 80km away you can tell it’s probably pretty blingy or ‘elite’, but it still has a cruiser icon.
In PvE you at least can tell by the name of the ship that it’s stronger than others it size, even if it’s still the same size ship. Or watch the name on dscan, where diamonds show how elite they are.
I’ve even heard of tools that give a warning when such an ‘elite’ ship show up on your combat logs to more easily spot them in between other ships the same size without looking at names.
As ship icons are only meant to show the size of the ship and not their ‘eliteness’ I don’t think icons should change for that. Just pay attention to their name!
Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of time to check all their names, especially when you jump right into the middle of a large Rat Pack and need to thin the herd asap…
That extra symbol could also be applied to player ships as well to denote Tech 2 from Tech 1…
Anyway, if any changes were to be made to hull class icons, I would rather have an extra symbol added to denote Elite hulls from regular hulls than do a complete rework on all of the hull class icons…
