Thursday 31 July 2014

Ishtarisis Cure

Finally this anomaly is going to be addressed by some HAC tweaks. Whatever that means.

I stated my case as to why EVE is currently Ishtars Online;
The drone assist feature existed in EVE for years. The meta of the game did not favor it because, to whit,
1) DDA's did not exist for the vast majority of this time, restricting the Ishtar to around the 500-550 DPS range. Adding DDA's now sees a shield Ishtar reach 600-650 DPS, though 750DPS was achieved before Crius.
2) The Ishtar used to be too hard to fit, with too little CPU relegating it to special-purpose ratting fits, where it eked out an existence in nullsec tanking Sanctums. With the DDA introduction it got a tweak of CPU. This was further addressed by the addition of CPU rigs in the short term. Then the HAC rebalance of Rubicon gave it the CPU it needed to finally fit everything it wanted.
4) The Ishtar could never be cap stable with a MWD. It wasn't much of a threat when it would or grind to a stop after 45 seconds, which prevented it orbiting its sentries forever.
5) The Ishtar used to have the same MWD sig bloom handicap as every other ship. its sig was so bloated (especially shield fit) that it would just get alpha'd off the field
6) The Ishtar was also a mite slower than it is now.
7) Geckos also did not exist for brawler work.

The HAC de-re-balance which is proposed will help. Right now Bouncer optimal without Omnis of any kind is 78+45km; afterwards it will be less. This is good. Dropping the ishtar's base speed by a few m/s will reduce it to more manageable (i.e. catchable) levels for small gang PVP but won't really address its use in fleet fights.

The problem remains the ability to dish 650 DPS to 80km with impunity from EWAR. Yes, you may be damped or ECM'ed but your drones keep firing regardless. It's a feature of drones which is handy, that they auto-aggress and keep attacking even if you are jammed or surprised. However, in the case of drone assign, it gets broken. Your drones keep changing targets, as instructed, regardless of whether your ship is jammed. All it requires is that the target setter is not jammed. This prevents the use of ECM to wash drones off en masse.

The solution, arguably, is fairly simple. Make the Target Spectrum Breaker able to be fitted to any ship, not just a battleship. For a start, a TSB is useless against anything except alpha fleet; a drone assign meta only really needs a couple of ships to target you and yet you take DPS from a whole wing.

Secondly, make the TSB scripted, with a script that allows you to target it at an enemy drone boat and knock out its drone controls, using the same ECM mechanic as normal ECM. it wouldn't prevent you from shooting normally, using EWAR, or maintaining a lock.

What this will do is allow individual ships to wash drone DPS off themselves, and indeed others in their fleet. You can then effectively counter sentry doctrines,  and indeed the Gurista ships with their uber drones of doom, without firstly destroying the drones in one shot, or preventing the targeted ship from doing something.

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