Remote shield/armor repair is simply too powerful, and more importantly too predictable right now. It creates a well-defined point in the engagement that the FC can anticipate long in advance where they will start losing ships because of no longer having critical mass of logistics ships. Get rid of that predictability, and make it possible to either grind someone down in spike of reps, or give them resource constraints that make it possible to push those reps past the point of sustainability even when there is a critical mass, and the meta will be much healthier and much less alpha dependent.
Thereâs at least a few possible approaches that would make remote shield and armor repair less powerful, and less predictable, some of which include:
Stacking Penalties on Remote Repair modules.
Increased capacitor cost based on how lower the targetâs HP is.
Increased capacitor cost for âoverhealâ
Increased capacitor cost based on âlow water markâ (lowest HP over 30 second period)
Decreased effectiveness based on âlow water markâ
Sure, as long as we get stacking penalties on DPS. Itâs no less predictable with stacking penalties, itâs just weaker, and makes fights more boring when all you bother bringing is buffer tanked DPS ships, and to kill more of them than they kill of you. It just makes for meatgrinder fights.
Utterly defeats the whole point of reps.
âOverhealâ already has an increased cost in that you just wasted your reps.
See 2.
See 2
That just nerfs remote reps, nothing to do with less predictable.
If you want remote reps nerfed, just call for an outright nerf, donât try and make it overly complex.
However reducing logi will not reduce the alpha fleet meta, because alpha fleet meta is based around DPS infinitely scaling, so all fleets reach a point where they alpha their target ships after a certain size.
And in short, I still hold that DPS caps & the natural lower logi cap that follows on an individual ship is the best way to reduce the effect of logi in mid sized battles, while making logi actually relevant again in huge fleets and not wrecking it in small gangs.
I feel like the alpha meta is both symptom and disease. It came about because of how effective remote repair is, and is made necessary by that, but I agree, it wouldnât necessarily go away if reps are nerfed.
The combination of an alpha-focused meta and effectiveness of massed logi though, is a problem, FCs know with near certainty when they will and will not take losses, and at what point those losses will become unsustainable. Thatâs what I want to see fixed, I want the breakdown of reps in a fleet engagement to happen in a way thatâs dynamic and sometimes unpredictable. There should be far more strategy involved than GTFO before the reps stop holding.
You mean exactly like individual ship DPS caps & logi caps would add?
Your strategy then revolves around how many individual pilots you risk, and if you concentrate on things like breaking tackle off targets in your fleet and evaccing them bit by bit, since you actually get a chance to respond to a new target in larger fights. and a smaller fight you canât instantly save them for good either.
So the bigger fleet will still take losses most of the time, and the bigger the fleet the harder it becomes and the more player skill is needed to avoid reps going to the wrong place and getting wasted.
Might be just because itâs been a long day, but I must admit Iâm kind of tired of the answer to everything being ânerfâ.
Nerf this, nerf that, nerf bat.
Nerfing doesnât in itself add any more to game play. It just levels the power of different ships/modules more without increasing engagement or options in the game.
I think in terms of logistics, which is still a very powerful force multiplier even after recent nerfs, a better approach would be to introduce new modules that the opponents can use to reduce the effectiveness of remote reps.
For missiles, the direct counter is guidance disruptors (plus all the traditional counters of speed, sig, etc. that existed before).
For turrets there are tracking disruptors.
For small sig size, there are target painters
For speed, there are scrams, webs, etc.
Having active counters increases game play because it increases choice; and those choices will give benefit in some situations and not in others, which is also part of the tradeoffs we make when fitting ships.
So why not, remote ârep disruptorsâ (as opposed to damps or ECM, which are effective but are not a direct remote rep counter, only a targetting/range counter).
Seems like, a good counter that an opponent can use would just as easily fit within the overall design of the game and it would increase the choice of players in the process, while not involving more nerfs.
Because remote rep disruptors already exist? They are called weapons? And reps are the counter to weapons?
You are over thinking this.
Also one of two things happens. Bringing your own DPS ship instead is more effective, players never use rep disruptors. Rep disruptors are better than DPS, well that just makes them theoretical DPS and since any fights over about 10 ships require logi, they become 100% needed and anyone without them loses.
Neither are good situations.
Because while weapons are the direct counter, people donât like the linear scaling nature of both DPS & Reps. Since the linear nature of the scaling introduces problems at sufficiently large sizes for both.
However what we donât need to be doing is introducing ANOTHER linearly scaling counter to reps, since there already is one. And we donât need to be making reps weaker in huge scale fights, since there already is a scale at which Reps become basically useless due to the alpha volley limit.
The problem is that in small/medium scale fights, either you have enough reps and reps hold no matter who they shoot at, or you donât have enough reps and you might as well evac as soon as reps start breaking because ships will die so fast. This is due to EHP vs DPS ratioâs which make time to kill very short in most fights.
So to break the entire problem up you have to go back to the EHP to DPS ratio issue, work out how to extend that time to kill on each individual ship without slowing down the entire fight (I.E. the overall fleet time to kill is fine, itâs the time to kill the individual components that is too fast), and then you can start to address logistics impact. Because thatâs where the whole issue comes from.
Hence my idea behind ships getting class based damage caps as a way to break that individual TTK without changing the overall equation much, which then also feeds very naturally into logi caps.
I donât feel very comfortable with ships having arbitrary dps and logi caps, but Iâm confident CCP and the community can find the way to integrate them more naturally into the game via modules or rigs.
Remote shield/armor repairers could always generate some heat (significantly more with overheat), and that overheat could be partially dependent on how much damage the target is taking
Resist and buffer modules could have a chance to take heat damage while soaking up damage, especially in the last 25% of damage
In either case, right now the âtipping pointâ is both sudden and predictable - up until you reach the tipping point in a small to medium sized fight, you take negligible losses, you can anticipate exactly how close you are to the tipping point by your remaining logistics numbers and reports from your logi pilots, and most FCs try to disengage just before that point.
Either the tipping point needs to be less predictable in these sort of engagements (by having too many factors to be able to predict), or we need to reach âlogi-proofâ alpha earlier, or we need the possibility to grind through a shipâs EHP slowly given enough time regardless of reps.
Just make reps more âspiky.â The spikier you make them the less rewarding they are as N scales up.
Imagine two types of reps:
A rep that heals 1,000 HP every second
A rep that heals 60,000 HP once per minute
These reps heal the same amount, but they play very differently. With the first rep, itâs hard to make mistakes. If you have 10 people repping, they will 10k HP/s. If youâre bleeding capacitor, you lay off. If the target gets close to 100% HP, you lay off.
With the second rep, itâs easy to make mistakes. You can accidentally overheal. You can wait too long to get âfullâ healing in, then watch your target get killed by the enemy. You can heal too early, and be left without reps during your long cooldown.
THIS is the easiest way to balance reps as N grows larger. The bigger the risk/reward is per individual rep, the higher the odds the suboptimal rep play will be made.
I agree, reps are too predictable. Theyâre basically damage turrets that are immune to tracking.
Remote reps received the optimal and falloff treatment but it could go further and have the rest of the turret formula applied like other guns. At the time of the falloff change to remote reps, I suspected it was a small step in this direction but I havenât heard anything since.
However, leaving remote reps as they are probably controls the ratio of logistics to DPS that you find in fleets. Any change in effectiveness would result in bloodier fights or more logistics in fleet compositions, and Iâm not convinced this is necessary.
I agree that repairs are too straightforward without tracking applied. It allows orbit F1 behavior of logi pilots and thereâs a lot of room for improvement there. If the predictability of repairs is an issue I would hope to see an increase in remote repair transfer amount along with the rest of the turret damage formula applied, but as a hit point bonus rather than damage.
When something like an interceptor has all the advantages of sig radius and speed, itâs a bit much to allow a flat bonus of hitpoints from logistics simply based on range.
Remote repairs are also a pool of omni points, while resists and weapons have damage types. Without a tracking requirement, remote reps feel way too simple.