Hybrids – Blaster Rebalancing

Hi All,

Doing the same kind of comparison, this time with the close range guns. Again all ships have a 5% damage/level or ROF bonus, three standard weapon upgrades (magnetic stabilizers etc), and close range ammo Anti-matter, EMP, Multifrequency. Leaving out drones at present and all at L5 skills

Hyperion – 929 DPS, tracking 0.05412, optimal 4.5, falloff 13

Abaddon – 797 DPS, 0.04219, 15 and 10

Maelstrom – 763 DPS, 0.05913, 3.5 and 31

All the guides I’ve seen to date (without getting into the complexity of the maths – which frankly makes my head hurt) give a 100% base chance to hit at optimal, 50% at optimal plus falloff, dropping to nil at optimal plus 2x falloff. This is discounting all other factors  – which we’ll get to later.

So… our Hyperion has a 50% chance to hit at 17.5km dropping to nil at 30.5, the Abaddon at 25km and 35, and the Mael at 34.5 km and 65.5. I was surprised to see the Megapulse Lasers perform so badly to be honest until I realized there is another component to consider… more on that in a minute.

Lets talk the Maelstrom for a moment. The 800’s track the best out of all the weaponry for a start, and if we take the premise from the rails where tunable damage is easily worth another 15% (and likely considerably more), this puts in on par damage wise in real world terms with the neutron blasters provided the right ammo is used.

Add to that the no cap usage and by far the best effective ranges by a long shot (see what I did there..?) and there’s just no contest out past 25km for T1 ammo, and while all ships are going to have problems up close, the Mael again gets the best of it.

So… and I’m going to digress for a minute, do you remember ever swinging something heavy at the end of a chain? If you lengthened the chain the item at the end of it moved relatively slower, if you made it really short, you could whizz the string and item round and round really fast.

I’m being really simplistic here I know, but that chain or string is your gun barrel, and the item at the end of it, your target. The actual target can actually have the same straight line velocity, but the angular velocity ( the speed at which it is orbiting you) is much faster for the closer in.

If you don’t believe me, take two bicycles doing 10km an hour side by side. One is a full sized road bike and the other a child’s bike. Both are doing the same speed, but the smaller wheels are going round and round a darned sight faster. Your gun is actually like one of the spokes, the larger wheel goes round slower, so it tracks slower, the smaller wheel goes faster … so …

So, how does this apply to the guns? Well, the issues are the same for the very low optimal for both Gallente and Minnie guns, whatever they’re trying to shoot will be moving very fast from an angular perspective (small wheel). The Amarr ship, while have a lower overall tracking, applies that at 15km instead of 4 (a much larger wheel).

Very roughly speaking, to track in the same manner at their optimal, both the Gal and Min would need to have a tracking speed 4 to 5 times faster than it currently is.

The Amarr have another advantage in that they can very quickly change ammo (which also takes little or no cargo space), stepping up the optimal by 4km and then 6km by type giving an optimal range from 15 up to 48, though the DPS drops to 332 with radio. However their T2 scorch ammo is very very good, doing 730 DPS at 45 + 10.

Lets look at the Gallente – similar progression at 1.1 and 2 giving an optimal starting at 4.5 and finishing at 14. DPS tapers off quickly giving a measly 387 at 14+13. The T2 null ammo does do some nice 852 DPS at 11+16 but like the scorch, also has a 25% tracking penalty. Again, the closer optimal means that affect is magnified.

Minmatar only have three steps with their ammo, optimals at 3.5, 6.9 and 11 fitting in with their tunable damage types for the different shells. Their T2 barrage will do 700 DPS at 6.9 plus 47.

A quick and dirty comparison:

Hyperion will hit 50% of the time using AM at 17.5 doing 929 and at 26 doing 852 using null

Abaddon will hit 50% of the time using MF at 25 doing 797 and at 55 doing 730 with scorch

Maelstrom will hit 50% of the time using EMP at 44.5 doing 763 and at 54.9 doing 700 with barrage

The gallente pilots are effectively faced with a double whammy, the relative tracking issues with speed in close and the range with which they can effectively apply their DPS. So how on earth do we fix this?

I’m not entirely sure it can be done in isolation. Ship balancing for both base speed and racial EWAR almost certainly needs to come into this. In the short term a simple fix could be to just add one half to base fall off  bringing AM to 20km and half way between the two races. There is a strong argument too to change the stepping for the optimal as well as doubling the base.

This would give something of a temporary respite until the entire Gallente race can be looked at thoroughly. Hmmm. Afterburner and microwarp drive speed bonus to all ships? They’d get into range quicker but still suffer the usual inertia penalties. Would definitely help with applying all that damage… 🙂

FS

H

 

EDIT – I left a blasted tracking enhancer in the lows for the Maelstrom. Tis late. Will fix later! Grrrrrr!!!!