Monday, February 10, 2014

Doh-ver Heating

In Rubicon 1.1, CCP allowed you to overheat a lot more modules than you used to be able to. Sensor boosters, target painters, tracking computers! All good stuff. I have Thermodynamics V trained as I love a bit of overheating.

Many times overheating is the difference between winning and losing, it really can make that much of a difference. Lets take a look at that staple of my hanger, the Cockbag Thrasher.


Normally I overheat my guns. This decreases the cycle time by 15% and thus increases the DPS from 295 to 345. For a Cockbag this is essential as it allows you to get that all important second volley off before when the target is still trying to decide "fight or flight?" or was trying to warp but you caught him and he needs to decide what the smeg to do now.


On some rare occasions I also overheat my warp disruptor. This usually happens when I am on a gate and a war target lands on me. I jump through and reapproach hoping he'll jump too. With no prop mod, it can take a while for the Thrasher to get back to gate. You really need to be on the gate as your guns optimal range is the same as the normal decloak distance. If that enemy that landed on you jumped quickly, he could easily decloak over 24km from you. Overheating the point gives you an extra 4km and a overall range of 28km.

But now following Rubicon 1.1 you can also overheat your SeBos. A standard Cockbag has a scan resolution of 1078mm with 2011mm with sebo's running. Overheating the SeBos gives you a yummy 2234mm.

To be honest you are not gaining a massive amount here as it takes you at least two seconds to point something and this you cannot get around as it is server mechanics. The server hamsters rotate their wheel once every second, this is also known as a 'server tick'. Every command takes a minimum of a server tick to register and you need to give two seperate commands that cannot be done at the same time.

1. Lock that asshat
2. Activate the warp disruptor on the locked target.

Even if you have a scan resolution of OVER 9000 you cannot lock a ship faster than one second simply because it takes one server tick. Then you need to activate the point which takes, you guessed it, one server tick. So when a target escapes and people blame 'module lag' what they actually mean is that the ship got into warp in less than two seconds. If a ship enters warp in 1.9 seconds you won't point it, even though it appears to be locked on your client.

"WTF my point didn't activate!!!!"

It would have if the target had stayed around for a complete server tick after it was locked. You cannot catch 'em all!


Now I'm finding a slight issue with the new overheating mechanics. I keep forgetting that I've overheated the sensor booster modules! Worst still is that the SeBos are fairly tough little buggers. They will burn out your warp disruptor before they burn themselves out. I need to get into practice of turning off the overheat on these new modules. I've not missed a target yet because my overheated SeBo's burnt out my point, but its going to happen.


2 comments:

  1. You know you can click the point then click on the target in the overview for "one click" locking?

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    Replies
    1. Even with "Mods hot" the server still needs those two ticks. Thats why even with insta - lock tackle on a gate some ships still escspe.

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