I think auto cannon’s should have at least 1 area that they beat other weapons, some type of specialty but they have nothing special they are beaten in every field T_T.
King of damage selection: Missile/Drone
King’s of DPS: Blasters/Drones/HAM’s
King of mid range dps: Pulse Lasers/Drones
King of long range dps: Missiles/Rails/Beams
King of Alpha: Arty
King of Projection: Blasters/ Rapid Light / Rapid Heavies/Drone’s in brawling range.
Auto cannon’s seems good on paper because or fitting sheet but in reality its horribly low dps and tracking because of how they get calculated with fall off, look how tiny their area is on that sheet… it’s truly in a horrible spot atm.
P.S. the only good auto’s are large while medium is falling the furthest behind with small slightly better but no where near where it should be.
Suggestion would be to up tracking speed on small and medium auto’s.
Well they still have all the racial benefits: The various damage mix ammunitions, no capacitor use, option to apply like half dps in falloff for more range
I prefer Arty, but AC fills the niche of a short range capless multi-type damage gun (instant hits are great in big fights when things die fast)
They seem pretty hard to balance imo, any increase in base rof, for example, will make any rof bonused min ship overtake blasters entirely, add more falloff and any falloff bonused ship overtakes pulse… if you just say well change the ship bonus too then now who knows what happens to Arty setups, a separate ship bonus for AC might work I guess
I think one of the issue that muck the water is how huge the powergrid use difference is between AC,s and Arty. Maybe increases Ac pg and lowering arty pg would help in alot in balancing. There is not alot of variation in the t2 line for minni hacs either. Amars have missiles/laser. And both pulse and beam benefit from optimal zealot works good fit for either. Gallente you got the blaster boat or drone boat. Caldari get a missile or rail platform. Minnie get short range guns in falloff or long range guns in falloff. Perhaps a look should be made on the ship bonuses.
That sounds really interesting. Just have to be careful with how powergrid affects tank fittings or utilities like neuts. If you increase AC pg in exchange for better performance then it also lowers the tank of ships using it, and if you decrease Arty pg then all of a sudden we could see Arty ships that can 1v3 with multi reps/booster and cap injections and probably escape with oversized afterburners. Oh also if the pg to dmg ratio becomes too good then we will always see projectiles on things like soe ships, myrms, dominix, prophs, arbs, vni, and maybe even on maller/abaddons to super tank or active tank. About the lack of options thing, Minmatar would make a good officially second missile race with a few more missile options so maybe that’s an easy fix.
Autocanons are simply not specialized weapons. The low fitting and apparently low performances allow for utility and tank. They are also very flexible weapons, and excellent to kill lower sized ennemies.
They are versatiles, which means that in order to not be absurdly OP they can only be the second best at everything. If they were the best at anything they would be the best at everything.
Missiles have the same problem, but the poor application hides it. Drones are more complicated.
PS : I’d like to know when you can consider blasters good at projecting damage though.
I think maybe that is why AC’s are so weak in the first place, maybe any race using another’s weapon system should get a nerf to that weapon type so that balance doesn’t get done because of ship’s that aren’t supposed to use it.
This used to be the case long ago when they where decent, but since then its just been nerf after nerf, mini ship’s have much less utility than any drone ship, most mini ships only have 1 high slot, the hurricane lost it’s double high slot (utility.) but the weapon system was not changed.
If I’m in a blaster frigate I can track drone’s np, but if I’m using small auto’s they keep missing, I think because blasters have just enough optimal to keep the tracking speed up, while auto’s start their fall off way earlier.
I disagree with you. IMHO Autocannons are best turrets in the game. There are 3 reasons for this.
They have best optimal. Either by available ship hull bonusses or ammo bonusses / penalties or just by themselves. Hence you can actually deliver that paper DPS while retaining full speed tank, which is not possible using other turrets. There is a huge difference between potential paper DPS and actually delivered DPS, double this if you need to do so while retaining tank or using other utilities.
They also have better falloff, which again means much more of your DPS actually delivered. Sure you can fit a blaster boat for range, but how many of your tank/utility slots do you end up sacrificing to do so which you do not need to do with ACs.
They don’t use cap. That means more webs, scrams, neuts, or whatever else in PvP, and more active and speed tank in PvE. You are also by default less affected by neuts and cap drains. This is important in both PvP as well as the PvE that is coming out lately.
They have best ammo types available to them with fast reload types so can easily switch mid combat. Open up with EM or thermal to take out a large shield then switch to kinetic / explosive for armor and hull is very easy to do. This is also very important for both PvP and PvE.
Overall I feel ACs are the best turrets in the game. And missles drones, while are good for PvE are not so good for PvP. Sure there are situations that they do well, but overall and on average AC boats do better.
I often end up using ACs as secondary weapons platform on any ship that has turret slots but no specific turret bonusses, and on Gallente drone boats often end up using them despite the hybrid turret bonusses because of the 3 things I mentioned above. Paper DPS is not everything, combat flexibility, no cap use have gigantic advantages.
Missles and drones have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. In PvP its difficult to hit fast moving targets, really difficult, unless you’re talking frigate combat. You need to fit missle velocity mods or rigs or implants in addition to rigor rigs or explosion radius bonus stuff. In PvE its easier because you can always string your targets, even if just a little bit, due to the predictability of their movement. You can of course web, scram, etc. but that is providing your target is in range for that in the 1st place.
While I do not PvP much these days, only occasionally here and there, I have literally gone up against ships / fits that would right down outrun both my drones and missles.
Um no they have the worst optimal… I think your getting confused with laser’s.
Your dps goes down when you start going into fall off best dps is within optimal…
Neither do drones or missiles
I’v already covered this missiles and drones again have 100% pure damage not 70% mixed vs your targets resi hole, unless its kin which is even lower %.
Here I’ll post it as a screeny so you can see actual dps and not on screen dps:
What you see as number’s is very different to reality.
True jack of all trades would be decent at most situations and have a lower dps and larger covered area, which auto’s is not its a tiny area, true jack off all trades is more like heavy missiles II.
Despite these charts and everything you said, take a Deimos or Vigilant, fit it up go do maybe 20-30 F4 abyssals in them to get a full spawn range. Then fit up a Munin, Vagabond, repeat, see the difference. It is huge. very plain and very noticable. All that chart and paper stuff just goes out the window.
For example falloff is huge, it means you start softening your targets on approach, quite significantly, and when your orbit goes beyond optimal you still deliver DPS, albeit, lower DPS, but still deliver it unlike with the other turrets. And I did specifically state they have better optimal / falloff due to the available ships and their bonusses vs other turret types. So again, the chart and paper goes out the window.
The F4 abyssals are actually pretty decent for benchmarking once you get into full variety of spawns including full battleship groups, mixed spawns, all cruiser groups, those super fast frigate groups etc. Sure the meta hasn’t changed unfortunately, but that is also due to other mechanics including the instances themselves. But as far as turret boats go, ACs are pretty nice.
And yet the best ship’s for these site’s are rail deimos, gila, sacrilege? I lost a muninn with 625dps in a t4 because Stuff wasn’t dying quick enough and I ran out of time a vaga does less dps than a muninn, a 625 dps gila would have been fine.
Individual pilot ability / preference. Plenty of vids available, jsut do a basic search. Rail Deimos was horrid for me, blaster Deimos better but takes too much extra damage while using too much cap. Gila is an exception, like I stated, it is unfortunate, I personally would love for the meta to go to turrets, but unless they buff turrets for PvE that will not happen and buffing them for PvE will not happen either as focus of the game is PvP and they would become OP.
Nerfing drones / missles is also not the answer, remember back in the day drones were already laughable and needed some gigantic buffs to make them viable, and missles … well missles have their own myriad of issues, starting with Tidi where it all really comes to light. Why do you think most doctrines are turret based instead of missle despite all that super pooper paper / chart stuff ? Do you think people and entire huge groups of people haven’t tried them ?
That’s because of (ammo) travel time which scales with player number’s, but then your talking beam/arty/pulse/sentry/rail/ rapid light not autos for fleet crap :]
Really dude? That’s just low.
For an answer I would just say give auto’s the best tracking, it would offset the damage loss at range and let you hit a tiny bit further, it won’t break them it will just give them something to be good at, and law wise it makes sense if your spewing 1000 bullet’s a second some are bound to hit.
Sorry if it came out that way, meant it more as a practice applied comment.
Going backto the discussion, I do think hybrids could and should be significantly side buffed by buffing the funky ammo types such as iridium, plutonium, etc. and maybe adding 1 more damage type, albeit at significantly reduced DPS ? And perhaps adding a precision ammo of some sort.
Pretty much same for lasers. Just give them one different damage type ammo, it would kinda make sense to go explosive as things can and do get heated up to point of exploding IRL. Throw some cap reduction ammo in there and they just may be OK.
Yes I would agree to giving hybrid’s/lasers at least a 3rd damage type through a different type of ammo, give auto’s more tracking, give heavy missiles and heavy assault’s a tiny bit more projection. Would help in balancing the weapon systems a bit.
Hybrid’s unique ammo type therm(35%)/kin(35%)Exp(30%), Laser’s (em40%)(therm20%)(kin40%), auto’s +15% more tracking in general, heavy + heavy assault -15% explosion radius.
Arty - 15% power grid cost, Rail is damn amazing atm, beam too, drones are in a good spot, rapid lights are op lol but that reload time sux and tthe mutaplasmids making everyone a little faster makes them less op.
I’m not an EvE weapons expert. But I thought one of the big sells of autocannons was that they had a huge falloff range.
Also, I’m surprised at claims of low DPS. When I ran incursions in a specialized fleet that used Vargurs and Machariels, the weapon of choice that everyone fit was autocannons.
The graph is not painting the truth. No cruiser in game will stand at 200 m/s in front of you unless you scram it. And if you scram it, you certainly web it too. At 12km it goes at ~1200 m/s and signature is ~600m.
At these realistic speed, signatures and ranges missiles fare a lot worse than on your graph. And no same pilot would stay in blaster range if he can avoid it. Blasters are not in competition with AC. Missiles, lasers and long range weapons are. And against all of them you have far better tracking/application.
