missiles
Cons1) Damage over time is below average compared to certain other weapons. If you want to feel powerful and overwhelm opponents with force, or quickly blitz through missions, missiles aren't a great choice.
2) Firing rate is terribly slow. Default firing rate on heavy missiles, for example, s 1 shot every 15 seconds. Even with skills and upgrades it's difficult to get that much below 1 shot every ten seconds.
3) The missiles themselves are slow. When you fire, it's routinely 5-10 seconds before they reach their target.
4) Because of 2+3, there are often periods of additional downtime where you're not doing any damage at all. For example, let's say you have have 2 missiles locked on a target at 10 seconds range and because the battle has been going on for a while they're not synchronized in their firing. Instead of two missiles beign fired together on every tenth second, one missile is being fired every fifth second. When one missile destroys the target, the other missile hs invested 5 seconds into flight time. That missile is lost and does no damage, and you then have to wait for the launcher cooldown to expire, lock onto a new target, and then fire a new missile which then has a new flight time. Often this results in 15+ second windows where a launcher is doing no damage at all.
5) There are significant blast radius penalties when firing on smaller craft than the size class of the missile. For example, a medium ship sized missile firing on frigate will do very little damage. Doing L2 missions in my drake I've had to downgrade from heavy to light missiles, because even with over a million points in missile skills, I just wasn't doing enough damage against frigates.
Pros1) They can do any damage type and it's easy to carry all four types and reload whichever type of missile you need on the fly.
2) They have good range. Even my light missiles that I can put on a frigate are effective at 35km.
3) They don't miss, and are equally effective regardless of range. They completely ignore all tracking speed, angular velocity issues, accuracy falloff issues. However, this ties into #1 above and #5 under cons: if you, for example, are using heavy energy weapons against frigates, generally at close range you simply can't hit them, but at long range because angular velocity is minimal, you can hit them just fine and you're using a heavy class weapon against a light target and can easily one-shot it. Whereas with missiles you always hit it but the blast radius penalty applies regardless of range.
4) There do exist "friend or foe" missiles that can be fired even with no targets tracked, thus allowing you to continue to fight while jammed.
5) While their overall damage over time is low, they tend to have big alpha strikes. With 7 heavy missiles you might only be doing 100 dps overall, but if you want you can deliver that damage so that 1500 arrives all at the same exact instant. This can make it more difficult for a target to regen/repair. For example, compared to a faster weapon doing the same 100 dps, but actually doing 100 damage every second, a target will be able to start recharging/repair after the first second, meaning that by the time each weapon type has done it's 1500 damage, the target being fired on by missiles has no zero recharge/repair, whereas the target being fired on by the faster weapon has had 14 seconds of repair/recharge time.
Too long, didn't read:Missiles are convenient and easier to use than most other weapons, but they're slow.
Author
Topic: Eve Online (Read 275067 times)