I like the new weapons for the EDENCOM ships that can hit multiple ships.
However, I fear balancing them will be very tough.
Either they are absolutely breaking everything since they do tons of damage or the will be used only in a very small niche since their damage will suck unless used against the maximum number of targets.
So why not give them a script that trades the extra hits for a damage bonus, giving the ship some flexibility.
Something like +50% damage, no additional hits (assuming that this would bring the ship to still sub-par DPS, but enable it to perform somewhat better against a single target)
Right now, looking at the battleship with 4 damage modules, DPS against a single target is <500 using the best modules possible right now.
Couple this with a single utility high and no bonuses to anything but the currently fairly underwhelming weapon, it could be an ammo type which trades bounces for 300% damage and still be in line with other ships at launch. Might need toned down later if faction/officer damage modules are added and can be abyssal’d, but it’s nothing like a 4k DPS leshak.
Even the cruiser and frigate versions, which are in a better spot are still pretty mediocre, and will be over-shadowed in almost every role I can think of unless there are changes to the hulls incoming. The ships would be really cool with a few extra highs and trig style spider tanking buffs for shield.
They might be good in certain PvE situations where there are lots of targets and maybe they could be a counter to the standard Logi Chains in fleet battles.
I just think they might have a balance problem, but maybe I am wrong here.
Time will tell.
maybe +50% AOE distance, -2 arc targets - or -50% AOE distance,+2 targets ¿
I think a module(high slot ? Just kidding, mid of course) that would instead give +30% AOE distance, 1 target, and scriptable for +100% to AOE distance or +100% to targets and -100% to the other (exactly like tracking computers) may be more balanced ?
The issue here is price point. They look like being a rarer navy ship perhaps. At that price point you are better just fielding an alpha doctrine instead to cope with logi, because they will clear these ships from grid with speed.
Before the 6%/level shield resistances, you can get the cruiser to 81k ehp with a cheap buffer fit and 2 t2 invulns, plus a DC2 and t2 extenders. If you go to t2 CDFEs, the thing has an actually silly 26k raw shield HP
If you have a few of them to cause people to freak out, they’re a reasonable ablative ship and will make very good targets for the side fielding them, as they’ll make the most out of an HP too, with the 30% shield resist bonus at level 5 and a bottom native shield resist of 20%, you’re looking at a fairly nasty 48% resist before a single module goes on. Which means if you use basic faction hardeners, 70%+ resists with one module.
You could mitigate almost all of its dps by using logi drones, the arches will hit these doing almost no dps because of tracking and the only ship that takes any significant damage is the primary (arches hit by closest to primary?)
The low dps / poor tracking will not make them viable considering the most likely price of the hulls (I assume they will eventually be around the same as a Vedmak), ferox would do the tanky pvp job better for similar price, if you wanted random damage there are bombers, or just having multiple primaries / randomly aggress drones / ships warp in and smart bomb, the panic is nothing new
Due to the arches i assume the ship wouldn’t really be possible to use in HS due to concord?
I agree that making bounces go to drones reduces the damage a lot.
But at the same time, making a priority list would also be exploitable, eg to prevent smaller ships from being hit by small guns ; and making dynamic sig-based priority groups would also incur a lot of work on the server.
Also multiplying by min(5, #targets) and dividing by #target in order to split the damage among everybody may also incur a lot of CPU work on the server(hence the limit to 5 targets I think)
Yeah, while any kind of priority list would make things complete cancer in large fights, having the right one could make it harder to cheese by literally orbiting your drones around you
had similar idea too, make modes like on T3D, where you can choose either from bouncing damage or giving like 200% damage boost, but only hitting one target at the same time, and then it ramps up just like a disintegrator to another 150%.
Or just give it 400%, but that would make it a bit op as you have like 2500dps from the begin on on the bs