Do you have any Idea what dumb fire warms would be like. Imagine a carpet bombing that never ended. The matches would be decided on how many swarm launchers and nano hives were at the highest point in the map.

area denial ho

Do you have any Idea what dumb fire warms would be like. Imagine a carpet bombing that never ended. The matches would be decided on how many swarm launchers and nano hives were at the highest point in the map.

area denial ho

The Assault name on the Swarms is flexible. Main point is we're taking away the current assault swarms and replacing them with something else (Tactical I'm partial to, Breach I would prefer to leave for a single shot version).

Idea with the new swarms is to make them faster, but also less agile so that a dropship pilot that's on the ball can better maneuver to avoid them. The standard swarms will be shorter range but higher damage, more suited for taking out ground targets. I forgot to mention I'm also looking at lowering the lock on times

wow.. you people are hilarious.

you actually say that swarms are a "weapon to chase away dropships"

the term "weapon" should be the clue here people.
they fire missiles as in things designed to destroy vehicles.

in case ccp decide that they should be for chasing away vehicles, I will point out that invariably the pilot goes away repairs and returns.
if that is what it's supposed to to do then it needs to become equipment as it is designed to be unable to kill ANYTHING.

"the swarm launcher requires no skill"
ok it locks on and chases it's target....
the person using it has to rely on their secondary weapon in order to survive, if your not in a commando suit then that means a sidearm.
they also need to get into range against either a fast moving lav, a powerful and probably equipped with hardeners tank which is more than likely looking for infantry to kill, or finding a way, on foot to close in against something that flies...
after they actually achieve that they then need to lock on and fire more than once.
They have to do all of this without being noticed by scouts, heavies or snipers (in my main role av people are often a high priority target.)

You people seem to honestly believe that the reward for all of that work and investment of sp should be assist points at best, that their main goal is to just chase away the pilot.

how are they supposed to earn war points then?

"dropships are harassment vehicles"
Really? ok I must be imagining things when my corp mates can get over twenty kills per round or even go tank hunting.
I don't disagree with them having this ability, I just don't like to see people spout bs in order to deny other players a genuine way to play the game.


onto the actual subject.

I actually agree with other ideas that go along the idea of swarms for ground av/ air av, one having more power the other more range.

I Completely disagree with the idea of any weapon designed to not kill anything. people don't design weapons to be a deterrent.
not even things like emp, stun weapons, mace sprays etc are not designed to deter, they are designed to subdue.

I Agree that dropship pilots have a lot of skill involved in what they do, and should certainly not be in a situation where they can't play the game either... under no excuse should anybody ask for a weapon to obliterate a vehicle in one shot, it is a tricky thing to balance.

but if the answer is to stay that swarmers can't realistically destroy vehicles then there will need to be big changes to war points and the expectation that players need to put serious sp into a weapon that fills their main slot but can't kill.


sometime ago it was pointed out that swarms do not do the damage they are supposed to.

my suggestion would be to buff swarms a LITTLE AND fix the swarm damage issues then afterwards if there is an imbalance do more to fix it in another hotfix, I would personally like to see changes to missile speed, range and damage, I believe that extra range to lock on will be too much for the pilots. the idea here is that when a swarmer gets within range they are a genuine threat that can't simply outrun the missles,
an aware pilot can chose to leave earlier, get their squad to deal with the swarmer or run the very real risk of being killed.

sorry if this seems one sided, but at the moment ads, etc can kill easily swarmers can't.

I am going to tackle the question specifically in a new video,. But If you have not really fought swarms in a dropship watch this overview video of what it is like from and ADS view and why swarms often fail. It is 17 minutes long but shows some of the issues we face. I will, as I said, make a more detailed and specific responce for CCP and post it here too. That way we can talk about facts, not myth.

Comparison of what we look like to each other at 85 meters.

Example of rendering issue


Note the "damage mod active" message is a bug. It sometimes sticks to the swarm after you die fighting a tank with a damage mod on, which happend to me in that battle

I think they're fine as is. A skilled swarm user can easily kill assault dropships that overstay their welcome and even multiple sets of militia swarms are completely able to indirectly kill an ADS by knocking it around. As Judge put it before in a recent video, swarms aren't easy to dodge after they're locked. An ADS can't just fly straight and avoid swarms, one has to do a not very easy maneuver and avoid hitting things.

The only balance problems we have with dropships are due to stacked turret skills and vehicle damage mods.

Pythons are fine vs av. I have a pro fit, and 1 good swarmer can chase me off with a 1 round hitting me, and running from the other 1-2 rnds he got off, even if they only chase me off for a limited amount of time. They are where they need to be.

. . .

Now my incubus on the other hand, I can put 2 basic heavy reps on that sucker, and tank 1 normal swarm guy all day long. Forges, if they're more than 1 of them, or a swarm launcher with a fg helping, can turn me away quickly.

And while using my swarm launcher, i can launch a volley of 3 shots, and by the time i've reloaded, generally they're back to full health, glaring at me, I can almost hear them asking, why for you shoot me? (same with the repper maddies) I normally die after my first volley . :)

Maybe this leads back to the stacked armor repairs being op by being able to tank av, or people not willing to spec fully into an av weapon, and use teamwork to counter something.
I go for the latter.

This is all nice but there is still a huge issue with armor based dropships. They currently only take 55% damage from swarms. That means when i put only a single basic heavy rep on a armor dropship it becomes literally imune vs. swarm launchers. That needs to be brought in line with shield dropships which take proper damage.

With a Minmatar commando, proto swarms vs python is usually a pretty fair trade off. A single swarmer won't kill that python if he isn't dumb but you do enough damage that he needs to run away if he values his ship. If a python hangs out long enough for you to reload he will be dead.

Incubus however are a much bigger problem. They will just sit there, tank, and rep through your swarms laughing at you. It takes 2 swarmers just to suppress an incubus like you would a python. This is more of a problem of vehicle armor repair mods rather than swarms themselves though.

AV damage resistance:

It has been stated several times in this thread that certain (Gallente) dropships experience reduced damage from Swarm Launchers. This is a problem because on the one hand the damage reduction is to great, and on the other hand because it is not applied to all dropships.

However, if the damage reduction could be adjusted it could be a useful tool in AV balance. We could balance AV against HAVGÇÖs, and then use the AV damage resistance of dropships to balance them against the AV that has been balanced against HAVGÇÖs. It would have to be applied to all dropships though.


Swarm Launchers:

- I think that Swarm Damage should be adjusted to 250 per missile.

- I think that lock time on Swarm Launchers should be applied per missile, so that Lock time increases with each additional missile, just as Damage increases as you move from Militia/Standard, to Proto. The balance of Time to Damage should be such that the increase in DPS from Militia/Standard, to Proto should be comparable to the increase in DPS of Standard Forge Guns to Proto Forge Guns.

One of the challenges of balancing the Swarm Launcher has always been that making the Proto Swarm Launcher balanced meant that the Standard Swarm Launcher became completely ineffective, and balancing the Standard Swarm Launcher made the Proto version OP. This change would salve that problem, without getting ride of the unique damage per missile setup which makes Swarm Launchers unique.

Proto Swarms would still have much higher Alpha, but the difference in DPS would not be as extreme.


Missile Speed:

Judge Rhadamanthus has explained that the first indication a Dropship pilot often has that there is a Swarm Launcher targeting them is when the first Swarm hits, and by that time there is already more swarms in the air.

It occurs to me that if Swarm Missiles moved fast enough, the first Swarm would hit while the Swarm Launcher was still trying to acquire its second lock. So faster swarms would actually give Dropship pilots more time to react. On the other hand it would be harder to get away from the Swarms once they are in the air.

So when looking at it that way, would faster missiles be better or worse? From a Dropship pilot perspective? From an AV perspective?

Alright, so I'm going to put some of my early thoughts here. None of this is final and is highly dependent on your feedback

* Reduce ADS price to 250,000 ISK
* Swarms to 150m, Assault Swarms to 200m
* Buff base dropship health a little (not ADS)
* Increase swarm reserve ammo
* Reduce physical impulse on Assault Swarms
* Slight increase to physical impulse on Swarms
* Increase Assault Swarm speed, reduce tracking and flight time. Total range will still be slightly higher. Max Rotation rate is currently 90 degrees, will try 60 first.
* Increase Standard Dropship speed (140 -> 160)
* Increase missiles to 6/7/8, reduce damage to compensate (165) to close gap between standard, advanced and prototype.
* Reduce Assault Swarm damage (looking at 10% initially)

Vehicle Armour Repairers need a big hit with a nerf bat, so I'll also look at those. However they are a much wider issue, so that might take some more time.

The resistance profiles for swarms also seem a bit strange, so I'll dig into those as well.

I saw someone mention afterburners increasing damage taken as a thought, and from what I can see that might be possible, but that's going into mad science territory at this stage and I haven't given it much thought yet.

Lastly to fully cross into mad science territory, what would you think of a swarm variant that does half the damage but applies a very strong slowing effect to it's target?

Not going to lie the thought of an 8-missile swarm launcher makes me giddy....

19 hp splash damage says otherwise.

Seriously.

As an addon: could we have it able to 'lock' at any point on the ground, and spray missiles at that locket point?

Imagine waiting in ambush for a tank, and as he's about to turn, you lock the ground at the corner, hitting the tanker before he can see you: you have now made the strike before you've been seen, and it needs tactical foresight and skill.

As it turns out, I found a bug that means the Forge Gun and Swarm weren't getting their proficiency skill bonuses against vehicle armour on HAVs and Dropships. I think I'll look at fixing that.

While your at it, can you also fix the damage profiles of railgun turrets? They currently do +10% damage against shields and -10% damage against armor, when they should do the opposite.

Ah incoming overbuff with a rollback in a month or two, the AV-vehicle cycle goes on.

Lowering the damage of Swarm missiles, and adding more rockets seems like a nerf to me. Now more of my missiles have to hit to do the same damage as before. Swarms may be "smart" with the lock-on, but they are dumb as hell when it comes to tiny hills and buildings. Swarms are already terrible anywhere but out in the open, and this makes them even worse imho.

Still doesn't change the fact that the Swarm Launcher has no use against infantry, while other AV items such as the Forge Gun, Plasma Cannon, and Remote Explosive do.

Sidearms/Secondary Weapons are irrelevant when discussing AV weapons in the same sense that the Dropsuit being used inside a vehicle is irrelevant when referring to vehicles.

Most dropship's ability to tank damage isn't an issue for me personally since I've had proficiency 5 swarms since Uprising 1.0, but anyone with even slightly less damage output than I do must be going crazy over it. Except for the absolute best of ADS ships, I can keep DPS up on them enough to kill them if they are around long enough.

I'm actually thinking you should increase the DS's resistance to rails since rail sniping them out of the air is ridiculously easy (I've been testing out both ADS's this week).

As far as swarm balance goes:

Regular swarms need to have a beefier hit to them. If these are to be the CQC swarms, they need more damage and more in a clip, perhaps with a slight (SLIGHT!) lock-on and flight range drop to make room for:

The assault swarms need to have slightly less damage than current swarms, but with more lock-on and flight range and a much faster missile.

~Swarmer Since Replication

Along these same lines as Alena is saying.

Logibro, please strive to be more consistent with the current nomenclature in the game. All light weapon assault variants are shorter range and higher rate of fire.

Your proposed longer range and slower missile variant would better fall under either the breach or tactical variant name. As Rattati has been trying to fix with the AR. The idea of a slower and short range variant is fundamentally bad design and Rattati has already proposed reworking the Breach Plasma Rifle into a longer range weapon than the Assault Plasma rifle, which is good. This should be translating to sidearms and AV, try to make it so:

Assault Variant should be high damage and short range
Breach should be higher damage at slightly longer range at the expense of missile velocity
Tactical should be lower damage but very long range.

Very basic kind of spreadsheet here with 'proposed ideas'. Numbers are likely unbalanced but just for general idea.

Swarm Launcher variants 'proposal'