There is a lot of talk these days about how hybrid weapons, especially blasters, need a fix to work properly in the current Eve combat environment. There have been tons of posts and discussion about how to address this issue but there are a lot of difficulties and making sure the balancing does not go too far the other direction and make the overpowered. So I'm going to propose something radical.
Get rid of hybrid weapons.
Yes, I'm serious. I believe it might be easier than balancing blasters and rails to fit alongside projectiles and lasers while still being desirable.
How to do it? Easy. All Gallente ships (and pirate ships based on Gallente hulls) with bonuses for hybrid weapons are now equivalent bonuses for laser weapons. All Caldari ships (and derivatives) with bonuses for hybrid weapons are now equivalent bonuses for projectiles. So the current weapon mastery table goes from:
Faction - primary / secondary
Amarr - Lasers / Missiles
Caldari - Missiles / Hybrids
Gallente - Hybrids / Drones
Minmatar - Projectiles / Missiles / Drones
To:
Faction - primary / secondary
Amarr - Lasers / Missiles
Caldari - Missiles / Projectiles
Gallente - Lasers / Drones
Minmatar - Projectiles / Missiles / Drones
Once this is done, all the affected ships would need a review to make sure they still make sense and some ships might overlap too much with a corresponding Amarr or Mimatar one, but overall it should not take too much effort. All hybrid blueprints, modules, rigs, and charges could be substituted for corresponding laser or projectile version.
The upshot of this change is that it would be easier to balance lasers versus projectiles instead of lasers versus projectiles versus hybrids. Plus, with blasters and rails out of the mix there is more leeway for the other weapons to have their attributes modified without trodding on the removed weapon systems.
* * * * *
So do I think this would actually happen? No, there is too much invested effort into the backstory and universe to simply dump hybrids. And my ten minute thought experiment makes it look easy when a thorough check would reveal lots of hiccups. But I thought I would throw it out there to make people think.
Posts
Actually we should get rid of lasers and change it to:
ReplyDeleteAmarr: Hybrids / Missiles
Caldari: Missiles / Hybrids
Gallente: Drones / Projectiles
Minmatar: Projectiles / Missiles
;-)
That's the spirit! More out of the box thinking!
ReplyDeleteHaving started as gallente, I kinda felt the same way about hybrids. However as I actually trained my gunnery skills up, they really shine as an average weapon system.
ReplyDeleteEven rails became useful [in pvp], but the key is knowing how to use them properly in the situation at hand.
But if they were to be buffed, i wouldn't complain about +30% more base falloff. This would put blasters around autocannon status imo, and possibly bring more gallente ships onto the field.
However at the same time, this may make them a bit overpowered in the sense that a lot of gallente ships have nice drone bays to augment the hybrids lack of range or tracking. But for caldari gunships, a hybrid buff would really help them out and maybe we would see more of them on the field.
Blaster Tengu Anyone?
Please show me the numbers with the drone + blasters + tank that would make them overpowered. The difference in drone bay on the unbonused drone ships doesn't even begin to make up for the lack of buffer or a +30% increase to falloff. The ships need to be fixed not the weapons.
ReplyDeleteKirith. Why not have Gal with Projectiles and Caldari with Lazersss! Think about it. Nightmare is the Cal+Amarr ship - Use's Lazersss. Macherial is the Gal and Matari faction ship. Use's Projectiles. If Gal had autos I think it'd be alot better and caldari had Lazers! Im just going on 2 faction ships I know there are some which go against this kind of thought train im having but Vindicator with autos? How awesome would that be!
ReplyDeleteI have a slightly different take on the problem. Each weapon system has a gimmick except hybrids. Lasers are special because of their frequency crystals, missiles are special because of their explosion radius and fof/defender ammo and power requirements, projectiles are special because of their power requirements, hybrids are special because of ...
ReplyDeleteThe Jove Empire comes in and changes hybrids as they are deemed shit weapons in comparison to their non-racial counterparts!
ReplyDeleteHere's a couple of ideas:
ReplyDelete1/. Increase the alpha, decrease the cycle time. Rails have a nice combination of optimal and falloff BUT are very anemic by comparison to either projectiles or lasers.
or
2/. Make the damage/cycle time variable. Player can increase the amount of output by feeding in more power to the weapon systems over time at a cost of ROF.
@H
ReplyDeleteI was thinking more gimmicky, like hybrids also act as mini target painters or have increased bleed through to the armor/structure.
I disagree.
ReplyDeleteI think all three weapon types are necessary; the commonality of hybrid weapons and their kinetic/thermal damage, their tradeoffs and advantages, are all fairly essential to general game balance. Make all the ships that do massive kinetic/thermal damage and suddenly the best way to tank your ship for PVP could change dramatically; plus, hybrids are really great against a lot of the pirate factions right now.
Plus, the mastery table as it exists right now is more like:
Amarr - lasers, drones, (missiles)
Caldari - missiles, hybrids
Gallente - hybrids, drones
Minmatar - projectiles, missiles, (drones)
I think some basic boosts would help out more. Maybe boost their tracking, or give blasters a 15-20% optimal & falloff increase or something of that ilk. I'm all out against making EVE a simpler place; it's remarkably balanced as it is.
You think that the power usage on projectiles is special? Open up EFT and try swapping out the railguns on a Lachesis for artillery. I dare you :P
ReplyDelete@Jessie,
ReplyDeleteI tend to try and keep things within the current EvE framework (or at least with a minimum of additional overhead on the servers).
Guess thats a little away from Kirith's brief, but I am aware of CCPs willingness to implement small yet significant changes.
Nice ideas though :)
Plz don't kill hybrids; I love my Taranis too much :))
ReplyDelete@ Jason Parks
ReplyDeleteLack of buffer? U trollin.
@ anxiir: compare gallente to amarr...
ReplyDelete@ jesse: that's a tad TOO far out of the box mate.... a solution to this would have to be more similar to how they are now just making them not suck as much.
@Kirith: while i like the out of the box thinking and this is truthfully one of the best ideas I've seen to fix blasters, it would never work and would piss a hell of a lot of people off.
Personally I believe that hybrids should be a midpoint between lasers and projectiles, while projectiles have super short optimal but extremely high falloff; while lasers have high optimal and extremely short falloff. I think hybrids should be somewhere in between them getting similar COMBINED optimal plus falloff. that would fix blasters in my mind. Rails on the other hand I don't have any idea's about how to fix them at this point.
oh and one other thing that bugs me is that after amarr ship bonuses are applied hybrids use similar if not MORE capacitor to lasers. a Mega Pulse laser II on a armageddon with bs 5 uses 15 cap per activation w/ Multifrequency, where a Megathron w/ Heavy Neutrons uses 18 cap per activation w/ bs 5 and antimatter.