That’s one tactic.
I am curious how an AOE weapon is going to function with safety settings, corp friendly-fire, Concord etc…
I can see some potential uses for these weapons already.
If my hunch is correct, Aaaarrgg is going to love it 
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Safety settings prevent illegal damage. That was the purpose of the mass test this week.
If you’re set to green you can’t accidentally get concordokkened, but you can nuke your own drones.
Don’t waste spend your SP until you’ve tested them on sisi
/simples
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Or give it two weeks and pull the good builds off zkillboard.
I wouldn’t suggest that until ‘good builds’ are shown to be good builds - lots of dead ships on zkill is not going to demonstrate worth 
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Agreed just disappointing that they are so weak, if they doubled the base dps, improved the tracking, reduced number of arches to 3 (to limit maximum dps) and maybe added a diminished return for each arch after the first they could be very good just seems very lacklustre compared to the trig / pirate / empire ships
The ability to set the target number, 1 thru 5? A timer to switch the number?
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There are 12.5 million skillpoints in the new ship and weapon trees. I’m pretty sure that is the main purpose of the new tech. CCP might need to goose the numbers up temporarily so that everybody buys the skillbooks and trains them. They can nerf the ships and guns later, after people have spent a few months contentedly training.
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@Wanda_Fayne
It’s supposed to obey safety settings. So it won’t get you concorded. But, it will apparently hit suspects, so you can use that as a way to get limited engagements with Edencom pilots 
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@life_of_deads
Anyway, the weapon may very well need further balancing, but there are a lot of different activities in the game, and this seems like a weapon system that is particularly difficult to make predictions for. Given this stage of development, I just assume release it into the wild. CCP will be able to make changes based upon actual metrics and player feedback from various segments of the player base that have had plenty of time to play with it (and I SUSPECT that I’ll get some fun out of its current implementation).
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I’ve tested that in pyfa and it looks really awkward. The test zappi does up to 2k a volley every eigth seconds out to 140km. I applied that on some skirmish linked targets (an AB eagle and AB machariel) and some random targets (ferox and caracal with BC skirm links). The shuttle takes around 65 damage, so a hornet I with similar properties should be able to tank multiple hits.
So a defensive cloud of tanky drones like Navy Hornets might invalidate the arc damage beyond the annoying part. Might be smarter to only bring stormbringers, one of the cruiser sized ships, to anger enemy logistics and for that reason alone.
I|m curious to see how they’re supposed to work. Causing random broadcasts to disrupt an enemy fleet certainly sounds interesting.
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Me too, I still have no idea beyond the obvious (annoy enemy logistic, falling for suspect baits) how these ships may be useful. From the story point they make no sense either as they are useless against Trigs.
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Just saw their names.
Never ever flying these stupid crappy ships.
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Simple fix idea, why no have the arcs bounce between locked targets only?
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They need to change the cicle time from 6 sec to 3 sec to bring them in line to the same rate of fire as the other cruiser guns and I’m guessing the same to the frig and the battleship rate of fire needs to change then and only then the dps will be ok. Hell on the test server with full skill points to the cruiser weapons and you only get 194 dps with 1200 volley, I COULD NOT BREAK A 1,1 mill bounty RATS REPS . OMG THE DPS NEEDS WORKING OUT. WOW.
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I don’t think they are intended for PvE, they seem to be anti N+1 PvP boats.
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Even a Enforcer with its WEAK dps can break that rat easy. You need like 20 Edencom cruiser to break a Trig Hac or more and thats weak to be fair.
this is the intention 
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Why are you trying to use an AoE weapon 1v1?
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Because he’s dumb and can’t think outside his own perspective.
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All the people talking about using drones as a counter seem to be hilariously over-estimating how much HP drones have.
Soaking a couple bounces from a fleet of 50 of these weapons isn’t really going to help you much.