Launcher count is part of its ability to do damage… its not a hard concept.
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No it’s not oh great one! - I humbly ask your pardon and bow at your superior intellect! Please forgive masta please!
Which is another reason they won’t do it, because the larger missile platforms have more EHP and range than the things they are shooting. A 5% damage buff to HML won’t break the meta when it comes to shooting battleships, a 5% increase to application as you say won’t have any effect at all. A 5% damage buff won’t have any effect against frigates, a 5% application buff is compounding on other application improvers and suddenly 5% scales much more.
My point is that it would be a fantastic improvement.
Smaller ships have literally every useful advantage. They’re mobile, they apply dps to larger targets, they travel faster, and they’re generally a LOT cheaper. The only thing they can’t do is hit other big(ger) targets as hard.
Bigger ships, on the other hand, are not mobile, generally cannot apply dps worth ■■■■, and travel about as fast as my hair grows, while costing 10x as much (T1 frigate vs T1 battleship).
As we are all fond of saying, bigger is not better. But, smaller shouldn’t be better either. And unless you’re doing a structure bash, there really isn’t ever a good reason to bring battleships anywhere. Smaller ships are decisively better in virtually every way.
I’m not saying it’s “the” solution, and I’ve certainly not though it out well enough to say it’s a “good” solution, but if missiles started applying better to smaller ships, that would DEFINITELY shift the meta away from ‘Smaller is better’.
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It would be nice for the dual/quad sub-cap gun turret options to actually have better tracking and application versus smaller targets so that things like the dual rails actually have a purpose beyond just being much lighter on the fitting. You’d still have the missile classes having their trade-offs… but the ships stuck with turrets would have access to similar trades of efficiency. Which would help fix things a bit more than just shifting the goalposts by having bigger missiles apply more.
Also make using split highs a bit more palatable because in that case you’d just be fitting the undersized stuff for hitting below your class as your utility highs if you don’t need them for nos/neut and so forth.
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I may be wrong but isnt that what the smaller caliber dual guns in the large bracket are for? Still BS hit power but lower while being able to hit smaller targets easier?
Currently you have to actually use the smaller size class of guns and lose hull bonuses to have a good way of applying damage to certain targets. A lot of the turrets have a “lighter” dual/quad mount of a smaller gun that has the decreased range of a size down but massively loses out on tracking but gets to keep the hull’s bonuses for that turret size.
As an example… A Large sized Dual 250mm Railgun has a base tracking of 1.84 before bonuses. An actual 250mm Railgun for a medium sized ship has a base tracking rate of 6.56 in comparison. They have the exact same range when fired, roughly equivalent fire rate, the large gun has a less damage bonus but it gets to keep hull bonuses for the ship size class.
That increase damage and hull bonuses still being in effect doesn’t really make up for the fact that on average the large dual versions are over three times worse at tracking targets than the actual downsized medium gun would be. Its even more ludicrous at the break between medium and small rail turrets. There the tracking difference is over five times as much with again range and fire rate being functionally the same.
I’d be fine with tracking on dual rails being 66-75% of the actual downsized gun because you get to keep hull bonuses. I’m not so fine with it being actually ~15-30% instead. Which is part of the reason why smaller is better so often. Meanwhile over in missile territory RLML and RHML have a much easier time hitting “down”.
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To get back to missiles and the original argument, and if we’re talking PVE, drop a mobile tractor unit, mwd out to 112km, and clear a room without seeing more than 1mm of red on your shields. Clear the room and hoover up all loot.
“If you buffed the damage of HML by 20% it would not equal 20% more dps per se, since so much of it is mitigated. If you buffed the application, you get a straight 20% dps increase.”
Isn’t this totally wrong? The mitigation factor is multiplicative, if you boost warhead damage 20% that would be a 20% dps boost regardless of 100% or 10% application.
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You are correct… where he’s going with that is that 20% more ■■■■ dps is still ■■■■ dps. Even if the words themselves didn’t mean that.
Obviously, it’s a very narrow line to walk; too much application and now anything smaller than a battlecruiser becomes worthless. Too little and you don’t bother bringing battleships to 99% of engagements.
This would definitely fix them. Honestly though, just improving HML application is more interesting. Consider how many fleets use missiles in pvp… not many. They’ve got some pretty significant disadvantages, especially at longer ranges, over turrets.
It would buff missile boats in a huge way, and based on my experience, they’re the least common out there for pvp.
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That’s some fine fact-based reasoning right there. 10x as expensive, yes indeed. A merlin costs 600k, a rokh clearly costs a princely 6 mil. Or 60mil. Or 200mil, I forget.
The reason you bring a battleship is to have a platform that can deliver big dps numbers and utility while not necessarily fearing dying the second it gets tackled.
For reference the devs have said that cruiser level combat is the aim, that most gangs should be cruiser size due to their strengths outweighing the weaknesses. If you want to make a salient complaint anywhere, complain that battleships don’t do enough raw DPS considering their bloated cost and EHP numbers. Should a vindicator be doing 4000dps? Maybe, at least that would be a linear scaling against cost when compared to a 600dps thorax.
paper vs real outcomes. Stacking damage mods on an RLML caracal will still not do enough damage to get rid of a single interceptor. Years ago a gentleman pointed out that your avg missile ship typically has 50% more ehp than your avg gun boat, so why do they lose so often? The answer it turned out as zero range control and no attention paid to application.
Fly a HAM caracal with a crash booster, laugh as you obliterate gun ships at 8km.
Split any hairs recently? Fine, based on your numbers (which I don’t dispute) 333x more expensive. The argument, however, remains just as true. Incidentally, given enough time, I’d expect that if you ran out the various possible scenarios, the merlin would come out ahead if you aggregated said scenario results.
I’ve not seen the dev comment you refer to - I’ll take your word for it.
Regarding your criteria for a ‘salient complaint’, I frankly disagree. Their damage applies just fine to (most) other battleships, and to capitals, and to structures. Increasing their damage output would utterly destroy their balance against those targets, where balance quite frankly does exist.
I have often believed that a battleship’s current EHP should be at least double what it is now. Given that as you say, a thorax can put out roughly half the damage of a battleship, with WAY better tracking, way lower cost, and way better mobility. Feel free to split some more hairs here, but you can bring 10 thoraxes out for the price of one battleship. Obligatory “cost isn’t a balancing factor” statement.
Increasing their EHP would give them more time to do damage with shitty application against smaller targets, and realistically, not change anything for capital fights (they’re either getting alpha’d or logistics is repping them). In the case of small gang, they’d be a lot harder to kill, but really not “more dangerous”, save for their ability to stay on grid longer.
No that is the balancing factor, that for the mineral (read: time) investment for a single battleship you could produce 10 throw away cruisers that do 50% of the BS damage per each. Anyone with a brain flies what they can afford to replace, this necessitates making the decision at the dock on what to take.
Battleships have a time and a place and generally ships are best at killing 1 size down, 1 size up. Cruisers and BC are natural counters to one another, a battleship is a good counter for a BC, a capital with HAW is good against BS balls.
But you’re arguing that frigates and other smaller vessels are too strong for their size. Let’s say we are talking about some algos with 300dps and 14k ehp, nearly cruiser ehp and low cruiser DPS right, on a smaller frame that is very cheap. CCP struggle to balance the smaller classes because I’d wager that’s where 50% of the playerbase sits, in the low SP pit with their one or two cruisers and their destroyers being the best that they can field.
Players like myself with over 100mil SP aren’t that common, years of experience tell me how to leverage ships for advantage against others. This skillset doesn’t exist in a lot of players and ship costs are balanced accordingly. If frigates were 5mil a piece the avg punter would go broke overnight and quit the game because he starved to death.
Im learning more on this thread than I have in four years on Eve.
No, cost is not a balancing factor. Never has been. It certainly determines what you’re willing to risk, but not whether or not what you’re flying is effective enough. If cost was a balancing factor, Titans would be roflstomping everything, and dudes in LE tourney ships in HG implants would be rampant.
One thing we aren’t considering is insurance… you can damn near insurance fraud battleships. Can’t say for cruisers, never really thought about it, but I assume the same is true there. Which means your cost ends up being almost purely module based. Either way, really not expensive.
No, I’m not.
- I’m arguing that they’re too effective against battleships.
- I’m arguing that battleships have literally two advantages over them, namely projection and dps, with absolutely every other factor going against them.
- I’m arguing that a battleship must make significant sacrifices to engage smaller targets, even cruisers, whereas apart from maybe an ABC, any fitting sacrifices are minimal at best on smaller hulls.
My ultimate problem is that small ships hard-counter big ships. Every time. Big ships can make significant sacrifices to be hella-dangerous to small ships, but then they’re at risk to the big ships again. Little ships, on the other hand, need not make a single sacrifice to engage any target across the board (a statement which becomes less true the larger the hull gets).
What I want is for big ships to be as viable in random content as little ships are. Right now, they aren’t even close.
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You know WoWS supplies ample amounts of research material for you to work with.
Strange, I thought we were playing Eve.
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The underlying principles are identical. Battleships rely on range to compensate for their extremely poor tracking, in exchange they have the highest damage potential in the game and the fattest HP pools. This involves screening by destroyers and cruisers in order to push back smaller and more agile ships from surrounding and overwhelming the battleships.
It’s like every ship in eve with kiting sniper fits jostling for position over an objective. You know, the exact gameplay you see at the upper levels where battleships and 200km sniper fits start to emerge.
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On paper, you’re very much right. In reality, battleships lack the mobility to maintain that optimal position. To assume that support ships can keep an enemy gang/fleet from closing that range is ludicrous. Yes you can throw some smaller ships in to answer the gang that just closed on you, but the fact remains your battleships are useless once the gang closes. That’s poor gameplay.
I’ve ALWAYS wanted fleets to be more dependent on mixed comps, so believe me, what you’re saying and what I want are very much the same thing (it would definitely make battleships viable as they are). But the reality is that you can’t stop a gang from closing in most circumstances.
One of my personal favourite roaming doctrines is AC Svipuls. A couple cepters for fast tackle, and if we’ve got a good number of dudes, some Scalpels. You wanna guess how many times we weren’t able to close the gap on large doctrines?
About the only thing that we can’t close on is RLML kiting stuff (cerbs, orthrus, etc) because the damage is front-loaded and they’ve ample time to unload it.
Now that’s not to say that we can WIN all of the fights, just that we’re capable of closing the gap and applying damage.
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