Breakers are broken. They only really work for something like a suicide pipebomb where you’re running your SBs, your burst jammer, and you get ready to flash your TSB if you get boxed.
The scan res and purple lock are too much of a penalty together. The evidence: who the ■■■■ ever uses TSBs?
You see a concept theorycrafted, you see it used once or twice, and then shrug, you find something more effective. Outside of pipebombing, it’s only a sliver above worthless.
Proposal:
Eliminate either the ability to break purple locks, or the scan res penalty.
Balance:
Increase cap usage dramatically, only permitted on battleships.
Reason:
It would break up blob tactics. Arty fleets would see half their fleet lose lock, and start failing volleys (which is critically expensive).
they regularly fall in and out of favor in large fleets (where they are designed to be used) as metas change. generally as FCs decide the lowered incoming dps potential outweighs the extra strain on logistics.
only change that could be argued is removing the 100% local break chance and apply the same chance as those targeting you have to lose their locks.
your idea explodes the N+1 problem as you now need far larger numbers to break a fleet. your cap increase isn’t much of a draw back on most sips sine using a TSB already requires your guns to be shut off and if your fleet has logi you probably have cap.
That’s the problem. You use it because you think “hey, this could really fix the ‘hey my ship just disappeared’ problem”. Then you realize that it just isn’t worth it so you stop. Making it actually useful fixes this.
Not true at all. The greater the number of target locks (/locking) the greater the chance that a lock will be cleared. Which means that by adding more ships to overcome, you increase the number of locks that get dropped.
By increasing the cap requirements dramatically (like, 4000GJ) it becomes something you really can’t spam. Add a cap booster and you’ll probably get two consecutive cycles out of it before it’s moot… but forcing a ship to be destroyed in 3 volleys rather than 1 is huge.
It would have to be used intelligently, otherwise an FC can just start broadcasting targets and cap out the enemy fleet with nothing but yellowboxes.
I thought about local break, and I do agree. It’s terrible. But this is a defensive module, so I’d be fine with keeping that if it was an effective defensive module (re-locking is a small cost for not dying). I argue that the scan res penalty is excessive because it penalizes you for merely having it fit.
Module would be in this case limited to Scorpions and Widows (battleship only). In this particular instance, the TSB has a chance-based drop based on the active target locks. I’d be more worried about a burst jammer (if in range).
i ask only because if your jamming tons of people so they can’t shoot you now by the logic of the new balance pass it only works if your trying to get them to stop shooting others, so if your trying to gtfo, you can’t now.
It’d be pretty hard to jam a tonne of people, even with a throwaway scorpion. ECM is, as you know, relegated to mid-slots which are of course finite.
If you’re jamming 7 people out of a gang of 10 successfully, all 10 can still lock you (the 7 can only lock you). If you strobe your TSB in that instance, I’d expect/want not more than 4-5 of those locks to break… including yours. 50% of their gang can still shoot you.
If you’re jamming 3 out of 5, I’d expect a TSB to break just one of those locks - probably also yours. Net result, 80% of their gang can still shoot you.
Now that I think about it, I’d say that it breaking your locks 100% of the time would still be a good and fair balance for a defensive module.
And of course, they can just re-lock you because it’s not a jam, just a break.