Make OH arty worth it

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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currently its not worth heating arty as a lot of the time the reduction in cycle time barley raises the paper DPS and is often so little that with server ticks the actual dps increase is even less.

now this could be done by simply adding heat to the damage multiplier rather than the cycle time but this would take some good 'ol balancing work as too much could cause major problems with alpha increase (I believe this is one of the reasons it is not done this way)

or my personnel favorite is to have it added to tracking speed this would be less problematic than the damage multiplier but more useful than the cycle time. It would also be an interesting dynamic where you heat a weapon not simply for raw dps increase but to try to apply just a little more dps to that ship sig tanking you

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AFAIK weapon cycle times and rep mods are detached from tick rate and calculated within ticks. Having a cycle time of 0.9 does raise your dps over 1.0 or at least it should. The tick rate handles more banal things like align time and regen rate etc

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either way that wasn’t really a main point for however it does effect turning the mod on and off. something that is very common in alpha builds

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Arty is never fit for its DPS though… it’s fit for alpha. That said, TLDR I do agree the OH bonus is a bit underwhelming on boats with a solid ROF bonus already.

I believe that the sub-tick time has to do with where the calculation resides within that server’s tick… first in first out basically. So if you volley at 0.1 seconds after the tick and they rep at 0.2 seconds after the tick, you hit before the reps land.

Can be the difference between your fleet’s alpha strike splitting before and after a rep (and your target living), and your fleet’s alpha strike landing before their reps.

Consider common arty boats… Mach and a Tempest, both with a pair of gyros and 1400s:
Mach, NH, cycle time of 19.4 seconds
Mach, OH, cycle time of 15 seconds
Tempest, NH, cycle time of 14.7 seconds
Tempest, OH, cycle time of 12.5 seconds

In the case of the mach, overheating for 4 cycles gives you ~5 kills per minute instead of 4. A 25% improvement. Assuming you do it in bursts of 2 to avoid melting your rack, that can work out to a substantial improvement in sustained kill rate.

For the tempest, you save ~2 seconds. Which is definitely functionally worthless.

It would be actually kind of nice to rework heat entirely, such that the hull and not the gun provides the overheat bonus. That way a mach can keep its ROF improvement, which is substantial, and something like the tempest could gain a tracking bonus as the OP suggests.

I’m not saying the mach wouldn’t benefit from better tracking, but variety is the spice of life, right?

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yeah that just overcomplicates heating and could lead to balancing issues in the future lol

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It also gives CCP the granularity to tweak the OH bonus on a hull, rather than tweak the OH bonus on an entire group of ships (arty ships in this case).

Perfect example, you complain about OH bonuses. You want tracking instead. The mach clearly benefits a great deal from OH already… by switching the OH bonus on arty to tracking, you nerf the mach in alpha volley fleets which already have huginns giving them perfect application.

Would it be complicated? Kind of… because you can technically fit any turret in a turret slot (arty abaddons being a prime example). It’d certainly make the attributes tab bigger on a hull.

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the mach doesn’t actually benefit that much from over heating arty except in solo or very small gangs and in those cases the durations of the fight aren’t really enough to take notice. once you get larger and start one shooting it starts to lose its OH bonus to Ticks. while some situations the mach may suffer overall arty would be in a better place. your idea adds needless complication to a system that for the most part is fine.

giving CCP more granularity is worthless when they don’t even have the manpower to support a dedicated balance team as is

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If we round up to the next tick, the mach in that case is shooting once every 15 ticks with heat and once every 20 ticks without. That’s 4 kills with heat, to 3 kills without (a 33% improvement). Going to ticks just increases the advantage that OH provides to a mach fleet.

If an arty fleet is facing off against another arty fleet, the defining charactaristic of winning that fight is reducing their critical mass to the point where they can’t volley you anymore. By killing them 33% faster at the start of the engagement, you accelerate your ability to win the fight.

The mach benefits immensely from OH bonuses in any kind of arty fleet. Which is probably their most common usage for pvp, by virtue of the fact that it’s a popular platform for powerblocs.

Two separate issues. Giving them the ability, and them using that ability, are different sides of the coin. It’s not worthless, just potentially underutilized. Doesn’t take away from the flexibility it offers.

Besides… who knows what will happen with our new PA overlords. Perhaps new money is on the table for that. No idea. Either way, options are better than no options.

I do agree that the system is fine for the most part. I’m saying that if you want tracking as an OH bonus for arty, you’re going to be inherently nerfing platforms that don’t have significant ROF bonuses, and offering an OH bonus that that is useless to a properly supported doctrine.

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worthless wouldn’t be the issue the risk of causing problems and helping nothing is

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Plenty of opportunity for that already exists. Giving them more tools might increase complexity slightly, but it limits the problem to the hull they ■■■■■■ up on. Pre-nerf Svipuls are a prime example that come to mind. They did ■■■■ up, and they did fix it.

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