Amarr oomph and other similar words | EVE Online

Amarr oomph and other similar words

2008-01-30 - By CCP Zulu

A little backstory

There have been a lot of requests (to put it mildly) and petitions to do "something" about the so called Amarr problem. Most of those are about Amarr not being competitive when it comes to damage output and therefore not a viable race to fly in PVP.

The complaints

There have been plenty of ideas for a fix put out there and I'm going to count out a few of them:

Fix crystals

  • Adjust the ratio of EM/Thermal in crystals to be Thermal heavier or at least 50/50 split* Introduce Explosive damage crystals* Reduce the cap penalty on the high damage crystals

More damage

  • Remove the energy turret capacitor need bonus and replace it with more damage bonuses* Increase the base damage mod of energy weapons

    Amarr need more midslots* Need more midslots to fit Ewar/tackling gear

    The answer that pretty much covers the damage arguments is: By simply changing damage types or increasing raw DPS doesn't really fix the issue that EM damage is pretty much useless against armor tanking ships due to high natural resistances and the popularity of omni-tanking. We would still have EM drones and EM missiles being less useful than others if we just changed damage types on crystals or increased the damage on energy turrets.

    The more midslots argument doesn't have any one answer. The Amarr are the tanking and ganking floating rods of gold. While the Minmatar are versatile and the Caldari do electronic warfare the Amarr simply sit there and charge their lasers, secure in their knowledge that God is on their side.

    The issues

    These are the issues that we've identified with Amarr:

    • Some ships could need lovin'* Cap usage on Energy Weapons may be too high in some cases* Fitting requirements on some Energy Weapons need adjusting* Base EM resistances on armor are very high

    By far the largest problem is that armor tanking is quite a lot more popular than shield tanking and EM by far is the highest resistance on armor for all races. Then once you start looking at the Minmatar ships that get extra 10% resistances to EM on armor by default and their Tech 2 versions go up to 92.5% resistances, well the issue pretty much explains itself.

    The solution we've been looking at to fix this is quite simple and straight forward. Remove 10% off the EM resistance on all Tech 1 ships and re-calculate the racial bonuses for the Tech 2 ships from there. To maintain a correct ratio between shield tanking and armor tanking we'd also remove 10% from the explosive resistances on shields.

    That's not to say we won't do anything about the other issues. For example we'll be looking into some of the Amarr ships this patch. However we don't want to change too much in one go so we're trying to pace ourselves and spread the changes over more than one patch.

    A few examples

    Jaguar base resistances

    • Before changes

    Shields
    EM - 75%, Exp - 60%, Kin - 40%, Therm - 60%
    Armor
    EM - 92.5%, Exp - 10%, Kin - 25%, Therm - 67.5%

    • After changes

    Shields
    EM - 75%, Exp - 50%, Kin - 40%, Therm - 60%
    Armor
    EM - 90%, Exp - 10%, Kin - 25%, Therm - 67.5

    Zealot base resistances

    • Before changes

    Shields
    EM - 0%, Exp - 90%, Kin - 70%, Therm - 20%
    Armor
    EM - 60%, Exp - 80%, Kin - 62.5%, Therm - 35%

    • After changes

    Shields
    EM - 0%, Exp - 80%, Kin - 70%, Therm - 20%
    Armor
    EM - 50%, Exp - 80%, Kin - 62.5%, Therm - 35%

    Raven base resistances

    • Before changes

    Shields
    EM - 0%, Exp - 60%, Kin - 40%, Therm - 20%
    Armor
    EM - 60%, Exp - 10%, Kin - 25%, Therm - 45%

    • After changes

    Shields
    EM - 0%, Exp - 50%, Kin - 40%, Therm - 20%
    Armor
    EM - 50%, Exp - 10%, Kin - 25%, Therm - 45%

    Whoa, slow down there

    This may seem drastic, but we've given it a lot of thought. We've also spent quite some time on our internal test server shooting each other repeatedly with various ships and setups. We initially thought about moving 10% from EM to some other damage type (or split it between the other three) but felt that would homogenize the base resistances too much. So we applied a healthy dose of Occam to the fold and came out with the current proposal. While EM resistances on armor and Explosive on shield are still the highest resistances and can easily be pushed over 70% they're more in line with the other resistances.

    More examples

    A variation of an omni-tank for a Raven for example would consist of a Photon Scattering Field II and two Invulnerability Fields II. An example of an omni-tank setup for a Dominix would use two Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II's, an Explosive Hardener II and a Damage Control II. Let's look at what that translates to before and after changes.

    The Raven with shield hardeners running would be getting 79.3% Explosive resistances before the change and 74.1% after. That's effectively a 25% increase in Explosive damage taken. Other resistances on shield are not affected. The Dominix with armor hardeners running would get 80% EM resistances on armor before changes and 75% after them. That's a 25% increase in EM damage taken on armor.

    The Tech 2 Minmatar ships that have enjoyed a 92.5% EM resistance on armor will now have to make do with 90%.

    What now?

    I've just gone over how we intend to fix one of the problems we identified with Amarr and that's something we want to implement as soon as possible but not without heaps of testing. The changes are now active on the Singularity test server and I urge you all to go there and try them out. We don't want to do too much at the same time since that could cause unforeseeable issues, so we'll start here and then figure out if we need to do something else and then what that should be.

    In conclusion

    Get on Singularity and test like the wind. Let us know what you think once you've looked thoroughly at it and if you've found something that doesn't work. Enjoy shooting each other in the face!