Agreeing with OP and adding one more “issue”: damage type of the ammo. Limiting it to an EM/Kin combo makes the ships even worse, esp considering the costs. Damage types for these new weapons should be opened up.
This also ignores the fact that Th/Explo is what you need against Trigs. That is, if these Edencom ships have anything to do at all with Trig invasions and the rest of the June sales pitch, which they do not seem to in their current state.
Like everyone else who loves to try out new ships I was looking forward to this new addition at the price of grinding for the materials etc. However, it seems very much like a conceptual design was released into the game, not a product that went through at least a few design cycles, and to my knowledge that’s a first for ccp. Together with the difficulty in acquiring the blueprints (can you even get them from anything but the DED LP store ?) it is no more no less a missed opportunity.
Talking to other solo emerging conduit runners and comparing numbers, the drop rate for the Trig Holographic Transcriber (needed for the faction vorton projector) is below 1% per conduit, let’s say below 1/2000 per trig ship. You already need 5 of them for the blueprint of the smallest version. The ones on the market (roughly a 200 of them) were probably scooped by groups like NED or EDI during invasions. And not even mentioning the whole skill book ordeal here…
Makes one wonder if anyone at ccp is monitoring the Edencom release closely, as three months into the “awesome new ships, and fearsome new weapons” should be more than long enough to hear the alarms go off and respond to a call for action. At least the trig ships last year worked from day one !
Apart from the fact that hardly anybody is flying them, CCP should also be able to see that not many people are even training the ship and weapon skills.
Or, perhaps the guys with 100M+ skill points are training these skills. If that is the case then everything is working as intended.
We will laugh about these threads someday. CCP will buff the Edecom ships so hard we won’t be able to believe these early days when they were an overpriced, unobtainable joke.
As of sept 22nd, CCP has reduced the DRF for Edencom ships. DRF is an exponent in the damage formula for missiles that affects how much the target’s velocity will reduce the damage, the lower it is the less velocity affects it. This will drastically improve their ability to shoot down. It does not affect their damage ceiling, but their explosion radius is actually pretty good as far as missile mechanic weapons go, so I do not think that will be an issue. This DRF change will likely correct most of their damage application issue.
Although the post doesn’t say it, CCP also mentioned that they were decreasing all the costs for Ecom stuff in the DED LP store in the news post talking about the 22nd update. I wish the actual changelog post would say by how much, but hopefully this will fix most of their production cost issues (This includes the Upwell Encryption Methods skillbook, I believe. Maybe not, but one can hope…)
No mention on the production cost issues for their T2 ammunition; as stated in the OP, even if there existed an unlimited supply of fully researched BPOs such that everyone could get them, the ammo would still remain the single most expensive ammunition in the entire game.
Of course, this does NOT solve the problems with their derpy targeting priorities. The Thunderchild will still shoot its own drones, the ships will still be forced to dock or die if a suspect player decides to go on grid with them, the ships will still be rendered useless in PvP by drone screens, and will end up shooting themselves and their allies in most fleet scenarios as well.
All of this applies to a smartbombing battleship as well to be honest, the Thunderchild isn’t much different. Just don’t use it in high sec unless you’re suicidal.
I can’t tell if CCP did a brilliant job recreating the RL occurance of a military contractor designing and building an overpriced weapon system so bad that it fails at its primary design purpose and is suicidal to run in its planned combat theater… or merely a half planned computer game feature.
The resources to manufacture EDENCOM ships are rather common. Simply come to any Invasion system and, salvage and loot for a few hours and you will have all of the resources that you need.
Incorrect, the Trig salvage necessary is a rare drop compared to the other salvage types. You have to fight fairly tough enemies for several hours in order to get any significant quantity of it, and that is a task that cannot be reasonably done solo except in lowsec with capitals. Therefore, grinding out the salvage takes a long time and alot of resources and fleet support. Just look at the market for those materials in Jita, there are only a few thousand in there are any given time that aren’t sold for ridiculous prices, and the “affordable” volumes still cost a pretty penny per unit.
You may be mistaking the blueprint materials for the materials needed to acquire the blueprint, which is where the bulk of the cost lies.
Except smartbombs have a use-case where they actually accomplish the task for which they were designed. The ECOM ships do not.
Also consider that smartbombs are a universally usable weapons systems, and the ECOM ships are an entire tech tree of hulls, albeit one that has yet to be filled out.
It is worse than just the ship tree - it is an entire weapon-system tree as well. Vortrons may be lumped in with gunnery, but it is effectively independent of the other gunnery skills. It is more like drones or missiles in that way. And what do you get for training millions and millions of skillpoints into Vortrons? A trash weapon system that doesn’t do anything particularly well.
Minor Update, I spoke with CCP Coyote on the EDENCOM Defense Initiative discord, and he says that CCP Pysch and the team working on the ships is focused on making small incremental changes, taking a wait and see approach. This, I believe, is a good thing, but it does mean changes and fixes will come very slowly. It does thankfully mean that CCP is aware of the issues and it trying to fix them, the only question that remains is what issues are they aware of, and what changes do the plan to make? I wish I could know these things XD
Is that the same team that made the precursor ships and went with a “let’s make them so very balanced that all other ships in EVE pale in comparison…” approach?
EDENCOM is the biggest waste of time CCP has ever added to this game. Their ships are garbage, the weapons make no sense, and the ammunition may as well be made of X-type deadspace modules. CCP’s biggest failure as of late has been EDENCOM.
The Captain’s Quarters was pretty bad, too. Resource wars weren’t great. Cosmos missions aren’t very good. My vote for biggest mistake of all time has got to be capital ships - it wrecked the entire game balance - and there is no sign CCP will ever be able to repair the problem.
The Trig line has frigates doing 600 DPS, subcaps pushing 4k DPS, all while having an abundance of utility high slots and PvP bonuses, and the attitude has been to release them in godly form and slowly dial them back, and EDENCOM is the polar opposite. It makes no sense at all.
I don’t think the weapon system works on a fundamental level outside of some very, very niche environments. In PvP if you brought them the other side knows they simply have to stay >10km away from each other to competely gimp you without even having to target you.
It feels like a system designed by someone who has never played Eve, frankly z
I think they just gimped their own fleet by doing just that. 10 ships at 10km apart is 100km, 100 ships… pain in the ass for FC to manage. If a goal of the EDENCOM ships is to break up enemy fleet structures, then objective complete.
The ships still suck though. The bonuses and lack of high slots/utility pale in comparison to Trig ships.
You wouldn’t be able to get a fleet to stay 10km away from eachother very easily, but he has a point in that the EDENCOM weapon system is flawed on a fundamental level. It just plain does not work with the mechanics of this game. A) Any weapon system that can hit your friends is 100% useless. Not only is that wasted DPS, but you’re helping the enemy. B) “Chain” weapons in a game where there is infinite room to move around in infinite directions with infinite space just means that you will NEVER reach your peak damage output. While you won’t find all enemies spaced 10km apart, you won’t find them packed into tight enough ball for you to farm either. Even rats aren’t that dumb. We already have smart bombs if you inside on having an AoE mechanic, and even those are restricted to a narrow niche. C) Vorton projectors require an entirely new set of sub-skills to maximize the effectiveness. Trig weapons can piggy back on your existing gunnery skills. Literally everything about Vorton projectors screws you over. Skills, effectiveness, DPS, hitting friendlies, ammunition cost. There isn’t a thing about them that is good.
