I could have gotten enthusiastic about these things if they were just focused smartbombing ships. There could have been a lot of smartbomb support skills - and having a dedicated ship class could be interesting. Might be tough finding a niche for the frigate and cruiser smartbomb ships, but how useful is a vortron frigate anyway?
If at least their ammunition and modules would be much cheaper, they would be at least good as a bait 
Precursor ships mesh well with the majority of scenarios we encounter in pvp, from a small skirmish close to home, to sitting on either end of a gatecamp (or similar), to a small gang fighting another gang, those are everyday scenarios for most.
Now how many drekavac fleets did you see fielded against eagles, muninns, ravens or feroxes.
Precursor ships work well in fleets to take down capitals or other unreasonably tanky ships in an environment that puts a limit on mass you can bring to a fight, they are great for skirmishes, but they have limitations.
Until now, only perception of the cruiser changed when advertised for T5 Abyss sites, but the BS have excellent application to battlecruiser and up, and acceptable still against cruisers. The cruiser applies nigh perfectly down to destroyers.
When it comes to stating a verdict, I’d rather like to see them once the drops are improved after the war and doctrines are more realistic.
There is no war doctrine scenario where EDENCOM becomes a thing. EDENCOM is nothing more than the laughing stock of the EVE universe. The SP investment is massive, far greater than that of Trig, and the payoff is in the negatives. You actually lose something by including EDENCOM in the fleet. The design is flawed at the most basic level. It needs a complete overhaul starting from scratch. Nothing else will do.
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I tried to use a stormbringer in crimson gauntlets with corpmates, I ran into one issue that held me from testing how it performs :
I shot everyone and everyone’s drones, not just the NPCs. So I turned around and brought back another ship.
We need to be able to control who will be shot, then we will see how it performs in real combat, not just on paper. Note that others in the fleet have been using auto targeting missiles, and they choose targets better than the vortons, why the target selection algorithm isn’t the same as the auto-targeting ?
That ship is now a running gag in our corp, called corner shooter and friendly fire beast…
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I’d rather keep EC as is as a default counter to anchored fleets. Can still nerf afterwards.
How exactly does it counter anchored fleets? EDENCOM is useless for literally everything. You can use your drones to spread the damage out because the vorton pilot has no control over where the arcs go. They just go wherever. There will never be a situation where EDENCOM won’t be vastly outperformed by a few bombers. Only with the bombers, your enemy won’t fall over laughing at you.
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I think what he means is that a fleet of edencom ships might overwhelm logi of a fleet that’s anchored tightly together since the damage is going to arc multiple ways and you can’t be sure where the damage will go.
While the theory is sound, I dont see it working in application. Even if the Edencom ships were a support fleet.
Then each logi just pops drones to act as chaff, or has drones sent to them, and the other sides DPS drops by up to 80%. Instead of chaining to 4 other logi it chains to up to 4 drones, with the probability going up the more that are in the cloud.
All academic of course, because no one sees EDENCOM ships used in any meaningful way anywhere anyway.
I 100% agree with you. Like I said: its a sound theory, but the application simply isn’t working. I’ve had a few ideas on what they could do to fix the issue, but I’m not going to claim any of them are good… and thus why I don’t bring them up here.
It looks like Edencom ships were designed to break big balls of anchored ships… the issue is that it really doesn’t work. And I’ll leave it to other people to figure out how to make it work.
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That’s all the more reason to just rework them from scratch. It sounds like a good idea right until you think it through. Then you realize it’s garbage. EDENCOM needs a complete redesign and it needs it now. “Incremental” changes is the same as no change. The entire concept is bogus. Garbage x 1.1 = Garbage. Even if vorton projectors had world ending DPS, that’s damage that can be pointed back at your own fleet, so you still haven’t improved anything. It’s not a matter of numbers. It’s a matter of design. It needs a new one.
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There is no rework of the concept that will fix them. They are like defender missiles. Just forget they exist and don’t train them.
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Sure there is. Abandon the concept completely and come up with a new concept. At least ignoring defender missiles doesn’t kill off an entire ship class. Ignoring vorton projectors does.
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You can still use them for roleplay. Maybe for parades. The ammo is too expensive to use anyway.
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Just checked on Sisi. Vorton Projectors don’t damage fleet members now.
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Great news, but that is only the first hurdle to overcome.
Now onto items like damage done, ammo cost, etc.
If you don’t make them at least in the same neighborhood power/ability wise as the Trig ship line, then you wasted dev resources creating something that will be underutalised or ignored…kind of like RW.
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Not to mention no one farms the skill books, so they’re north of 1bil a pop. It’s good if they don’t hit fleet members now, but that was the bare minimum needed to even consider the concept to have potential. It’s still far from viable.
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yeah
skill book for Trig weapon Large specialization like 2.5 million (guessing)
skill book EDENCOM weapon Large 1.5 Billion (guessing)
now that’s quality game design.
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Brought to you by the inventors of the Palatine Keepstar.
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Reminder that EDENCOM is still liquid dog crap.
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