I used to think this, but the more I’ve played, the less I’ve found it to be true. In the alliance tourney, ECM does pretty poorly. In fact, I don’t recall any time that an ECM team won the tourney or were even considered to be part of the top tier meta. The only strong disruption meta I remember is damps, which caused them to ban damp scripts the next year (if I remember right). I’ve seen similar lack of potential in non-tourney settings. Even the king of cancer, the Falcon, is pretty counterable, just have everyone send drones after him. He’ll shut down a ship for a jam cycle or two off and then be forced to warp off. The same easy counter doesn’t exist for dedicated nuet ships like the Curse, which can also shut down reps, along with everything else that uses cap.
I can see pros and cons to this idea. On one hand, it’s great risk vs. reward gameplay: Get closer and take a greater risk, get a higher jam chance as a greater reward. That being said, the jam strength may end up having to be very high to make it viable at long range, or the falloff may have to be very long, which would give it almost unlimited range where it can still do something because of how falloff works.
Personally, I think this is the key to making ECM good. I think causing a break-lock (where you can immediately relock) would be a good way to do it. While generally not as useful as reducing the range of a lock, breaking lock has a unique usefulness for things like entosis warfare or breaking small gangs that have logi that fly very close to the things they’re repping. I can think of two ways of doing it:
Dice rolls like we have now, but if it’s successful, but it breaks lock rather than breaks and denies lock.
Break locks that happen at predictable intervals based off of some jam strength vs. sensor strength calculation, with stacking penalties to multiple jammers and some threshold where you will never break lock (to prevent trolling with tons of weak jammers).
Thats a very interesting idea, so your suggesting the stronger the jam strength in relation to sensor strength the faster the intervals of lock breaking? That is actually pretty sweet, and forces the target to have to react quicker in order to achieve anything, also being forced to react quicker doesn’t give anyone the chance to be annoyed which is kind of cool psychologically XD.
Also to counter stacking penalities the difference between sensor strength and jam strength could be translated to a time before loosing lock as well (Maybe something like on average 8 seconds until lock loss after being ECM’ed), which means that only the strongest jam on someone at any given time will be in effect.
Also I guess that means jam ships need to use less mid’s for ecm as you would have no need to use more than 1 per target, leaving more space for tank.
Would be useful in team fights by forcing the logi to have to keep reactivating rep’s, and at the same time not completely overpower a single target in a smaller fight to the point where they leave there pc to go make coffee during the fight xD
I hope you make a separate post for your idea it actually solve’s ECM quite well makes it better in situation’s where its currently weaker but needed and less potent in situations where its op and not so needed :].
This isn’t quite what I was getting at. The way I envisioned it, there would be stacking penalties, so you could assign maybe 3 or 4 jammers to something before you have severely diminishing returns. At the risk of getting too mathy, the actual calculation would look something like this:
Target sensor strength / (Jammer 1 strength + jammer 2 strength * stacking penalty…) * some multiplier = Time to break lock in seconds.
Or, if we replace those with numbers…
20 / (10 + 10 * 0.869) * 8 = 8.56
Or, to say it in English: A ship with a sensor strength of 20 that is being jammed by 2 jammers with a jam strength of 10 will lose lock every 8.56 seconds
I would go and make a separate post on this, but there’s a very good chance it will be locked immediately, since there is already a recent post on ECM rebalancing. Also, there’s some really good discussion above, and I think it would be best if anyone who reads this, reads it in light of those perspectives.
ECM would be somewhere near “worthless” if it worked like this. First thing I’d do is spam-lock X-1 targets (if I can lock 10, I’m going to pre-lock 9 before the primary). Now your ECM doesn’t do ANYTHING to beat the primary. If it’s random, that helps even more because you maintain only a 10% chance of breaking the target I care about.
Ignoring that,
A frigate, even with worse sensor strength, would re-lock their targets more than fast enough to relegate ECM to “annoying”. T2 frigates this would be far less annoying and ultimately worthless against.
That applies to destroyers as well.
T1 Cruisers generally have 20 sensor strength, and even then they can still lock a frigate in less than 6 seconds (especailly if it has MWD on). They’d have more than enough time to get their volley off, after which ~5 seconds of the 6 seconds they were waiting are spent waiting for their module to cycle. So they’ve lost 1 second of actual DPS time.
As sensor strength goes up, chance/frequency goes down, which makes it all feel the same as cruisers were just described. Not to mention they probably have slower cycling weapons.
Sure but that’s more action’s they have to take care of in the same amount of time, which means less time for kiting for checking distance managing heat, 1 more distraction is a lot more than just 1 second of actual dps time nvm that moving the mouse to the overview holding cntl and clicking also takes a second so that’s 2 seconds :].
We have a test server and it’s not being used to the best of it’s ability, I don’t see why Idea’s like this are not put onto Sisi to be tested. It’s one thing talking about something its completely different trying it.
It’s not hard to ctrl+click the broadcast again. And again if need be. Certainly there are circumstances where it could make an impact, but they’re in a very small minority.
They barely have the devs to maintain the game as-is… they certainly don’t have devs to go about implementing completely new mechanics that players came up with “just to see”. I’m certain that anything they read (assuming they read anything of course) and like get debated significantly before POCs are developed. At that point I assume they spitball a bit more and experiment a bit in a development environment.
The multiplier would be the primary balancing attribute, 8 was just a semi-arbitrary number for an example. However, even with that number I think the impact would be significant. Here are a few examples where I think this would be exceptionally powerful (maybe even too powerful TBH).
Breaking cap chains. Jam every other ship in a cap chain. Half the logi wing will have an excess of cap, the other half will struggle to have enough. It gets worse if you can coordinate jams and cause half the logi to lose lock at the same time.
Reducing DPS/alpha. Obviously, ships that are relocking can’t shoot, which reduces DPS. This has a bigger impact on alpha fleets, which rely on volleys being fired at the same time. You can do something similar with damps and TDs/GDs, and have a constant impact, which in general is better, but that impact is marginal. It’s a reduction in something, not an elimination of something. At long range, that marginal impact will probably be enough. Once you get in closer, you have to start stacking modules in order to have the desired effect (at least when talking about range reduction scripts). With ECM, the impact will be much less sensitive to range, and you will never have to stack modules in order to be effective unless you want to prioritize particular elements of the enemy fleet.
While I do think that ECM needs a slight buff, I understand that it is frustrating to be jammed. However changing ECM is still half of the problem.
Caldari ewar ships still have poor tank and MUST depend on jams landing successfully, as where the other ships can have some buffer/active tank. (Pilgrim can have a absurd active tank)
As it stands now, changing ECM will further the cap/subcap divide. What needs to be done first is to revamp Caldari ewar ships so that they can compete on some level with their armor/hull tanked counterparts.
Griffon, base ecm frig that can jam at kiting range. Navy Griffon, faction ecm frig that has higher than cruiser jam strength but can only be used at short range. (Mine is…11ish km?)
ECM boats are the proverbial David in a world of Goliaths. Slow, low tank and hp, lowest chance of their ewar to do anything. Buffs across the board for Caldi ewar.