Alexander wrote:Oh stop getting your knickers in a twist.
It come down to three things..
Do you want:
a. High repair amounts for high AP cost with a low cycle time
b. Medium repair amounts for medium AP cost but with a medium cycle time
c. Smaller repair amounts for smaller amounts of AP but with a fast cycle time.
The old system (When using an ERP) would result in High repair amounts for medium AP costs with a low cycle time. It was fun but was it balanced?
For this game I believe that you should have the choice between any of the a, b or c and this is done through fittings. For a start lower base cycle time of armour and remote armor repairs. Decrease their base AP usage. Change tunings so that they give a cycle time reduction, a repair amount increase but use more AP. Change ERP plates to resitance to electronic warfare effectiveness (Demob and energy drain) but do not give an armour bonus.
The thought about this is that when a large group primaries you with the correct setup you'd be able to survive as long as you AP last so returning fire would be a wise idea unless it uses very little AP and running with an injector would make more sense (Also needs to be balanced to inject much faster! Reload time will be the death of most people).
Thoughts?
It's not a matter of knickers being twisted, its feedback of 1 corporation/ 1 person being presented as "community opinion" and browbeating the poor Developers that unless they do X the big bad evil wolf will scare everyone away from their game.
ERP pre-nerf was quite balanced, as it required high-level extensions (accum. expansion 8+, energy management 8+) to function independent from a medium injector. In order to even consider fitting it, big investments of EP had to be done in economical/optimized armor and weapon usage skills (8+ in econ armor, econ weapon, optimized armor, optimized weapon), coupled with data processing and reactor expansion 10.
And all it took was 1 troiar with 3 light neuts to completely wreck the ERP tank pre-nerf. Hell, 6 waspishes with a few light neuts were able to completely wreck it.
It created diversity in the game, as people could choose between:
a) being a viable TANK, moving at 45-46 KPH, still prone to Demob (no armor plates), but incredibly durable under fire.
b) being a viable DPS, moving at 70+ KPH, heavily prone to Demob (LWF), but capable of high-DPS output.
c) being a viable SUPPORT, either as ICTUS or ZENITH or VAGABOND, capable of completely shutting down TANK and DPS bots.
Whereas now, there's no point in sacrificing speed & range & DPS for tanking capacity since you can't tank anymore. It's a DPS & Support game, we've taken a big step back towards release when light bots & speed > everything.
But, enough of logical technicalities. I've seen enough how things are done around here over the last year (give or take a few months); and its high time I started playing the same game.