We're jammin, I hope you like jammin, too.

ECM changes

Before I tell you what changes we're going to make, let's go over what's wrong with ECM to begin with. In my opinion there is not much wrong with dedicated ECM ships. They are very powerful and can lockdown multiple opponents but they are very vulnerable. Anyone that has failed a jam in one of these ships knows how fast they go down. It seems fair to sacrifice hard defenses for electronic warfare, but this isn't really totally true. You're using a low slot when armor tanking, leaving a med slot free for electronic warfare.

So what is the problem? Being able to tank and jam at the same time is part of it, the other is how powerful a single jammer is. It's a bit unfair towards people that can afford to put a single jammer in their med slot. They're not sacrificing a whole lot of resources for a module that makes you unable to lock for 20 seconds and with about a 30% chance of success.

If we work with the system we have right now, what can we do about this? To us it's pretty simple, move part of your jamming power to the low slots, decrease strength of single jammers and make jammers reletively more powerful on ECM ships (that does not mean boost ecm ships).

Step 1: Lower the jam strength of all ECM modules,
Step 2: Increase the ship bonuses of all dedicated ECM ships,
Step 3a: Create a new low slot module that boosts the jam strength of all ECM modules,
Step 3b: Stacking nerf the jam strength attribute.

There are two ships that get kind of nerfed by this, the Griffin and Blackbird. Neither have bonuses to ECM strength, Griffin's current bonuses are ECM cap need and missile kinetic damage. The Griffin only has two launcher hardpoints so I don't think it's a huge nerf to it if the kinetic missile damage bonus is changed to ECM strength.

The Blackbird is a bigger problem. It's getting two ECM bonuses: ECM cap need and ECM range. The cap need bonus is necessary to be able to run the jammers, especially multispectrals, while the range is very useful as it is its sole defense. One of these bonuses needs to be changed to a ecm strength one. Personally I'm in favor of changing the cap need. That would really coerce a Blackbird pilot to use racial jammers instead of multispectrals.

Is this all? This is the general scheme yes, we've also tweaked the cpu need of ECCM and backup arrays a bit.

Best regards
Tuxford