Turret damage: Difference between revisions

This article describes how damage from turrets (guns) are generated in EVE. The information here is focused on concepts and game mechanics. The practical use of this lies mostly in the understanding of how falloff and tracking works, and how far you can push them without loosing any noticeable performance.

All the data is based on facts, drawn from the mathematical equations working behind the scene every time someone pulls a trigger. Since not everyone is fond of math, the article will be divided into two sections. The first part is more like a summary that describes all the concepts and how they work. The second part is the same thing all over again, but more theoretical and with math.

To understand how turret damage is generated you will need to understand a number of concepts and how they interconnect. Some of them are visible under the attributes tab when you click for info on your guns, but not all. Especially the concepts falloff and tracking are easy to misunderstand, so be extra careful when reading those.

A turret always have a 0-100 percent chance to hit a target. The hit chance start at 100% but factors that reduce the hit chance can lower this. Those factors are basically the range to the target and the targets movement, with a few modifications. When the hit chance has been calculated, the EVE server will "roll a dice" for each turret to see if it hits or misses the target. One thing that needs to be emphasized is that your own piloting can change your hit chance, by actively trying to control the range and the movements of your opponant.

DPS stands for Damage Per Second. This number is calculated from the average damage per hit that you do (if your hit chance is 100%) divided by the turrets rate of fire (ROF). The fitting window in the game will show you your DPS from turrets, drones and missiles respectively.

The damage from turrets always have a random factor in it, this is is built into the game and can't be avoided. Under ideal conditions, when your hit chance is 100%, the damage done by your turrets will be inside an interval of 50% to 150% of your average damage (your targets resistance will reduce the damage done too). However, things are different when your hit chance decreases. Not only will you have a chance to miss your target, which means no damage done. But also, the damage interval will change as well. That interval is actually from 50% but only up to (50% + hit chance). So if your hit chance is 70%, not only will you miss a few shots, the shots that do hit are now in the damage interval of 50% to 120%. There are thus two simultenous factors that reduce your damge when your chance to hit goes down. (This description has two tiny intentional errors in it that were used to help explain this concept more easily: the first error is that the damage interval is spread around what is known as base damage, the second error is that the percent interval only has 99 units, more details can be found in the second part below).

In the 0-100 percent hit chance interval, there is a 1% chance of doing a perfect hit. It is that first percent unit in the entire interval. Think of it as rolling a 1D100 (a dice with a onehundred sides), if it lands on a 1, you get a perfect hit regardless of the hit chance. This actually means that if your hit chance is a measly two percent, half of your hits will be perfect. If your hit chance is less than one percent, you must first get that hit, before it can become a perfect one. A perfect hit will always do exactly 300% of your ideal average damage (tiny intentional error, it is base damage).

The distance to the target you are shooting at. Range is used to determine penalties to hit chance based on the distance between the shooter and the target.

This can be a tricky concept. It describes how fast something passes by something else. It is measured in the unit rad/second, where one rad is equal to a 57 degree angle. Your in game overview can show this value if you open its settings and tick a box under the tab called columns. Angular velocity is used to determine the penalty to the hit chance based on the turrets tracking capabilities. Relying on high angular velocities to stay alive is called speed tanking (not to be mixed up with kiting). A cool headed player can use special manouvers (like keep at range) or modules (turning webs on and off can really mess with orbiting ranges) to drastically reduce the angular velocity of a foe to open up for some heavy handed blows against a target that is otherwise hard to track.

The angular velocity is calculated by dividing the Transversal speed with the Range to the target (don't mix meter and km if you calculate this, use just meter for both). Transversal speed is sideways speeds, not speeds towards or from the target (that is called radial speed). If you stand on a straight road and see a car coming, the car will have no sideways movement but a large radial movement towards you. If you stand next to the road and watch a car passing you by, the car will have a large sideways movement but almost no radial. High transversal speeds are important for speed tanking, never fly straight towards or away from a target, if you do the need for tracking drops to zero and you will be shot dead even by the biggest guns.

Inside this range the gun will suffer no reduction in hit chance due to distance. If the target is sitting still inside the optimal range, every single attack will hit it.

Falloff is an extra range that goes beyond your optimal range. This is however not a limit value, like the optimal range is. It is best described as a gradual loss of hit chance, where the given number (plus optimal) represents the distance at which you are down to a 50% hit chance. At two times your falloff value your hit chance is down to 6.25%, even though it is unlikely you can still hit your target at that range, and with luck even at three times your falloff range.

Tracking is a value that indicates how well you can hit targets that are passing you by, higher tracking is needed for faster moving targets. This is not a limit value either, in fact it works exactly as falloff does. When the targets angular velocity is equal to the turrets tracking value you will have a 50% hit chance (note: size of the target will also affect this, see below). Just as for falloff, when a targets angular velocity is two times your tracking, the hit chance is down to 6.25%.

This value kind of represents the accuracy of the turret. But only kind of, because it will only be important for tracking, it plays no part when it comes to the range. In EVE, every gun can hit the bullseye of any target in range regardless of its size as long as it is absolutely still. If the target beings to move on the other hand the size suddenly becomes important. All small guns have 40m as their value, all medium guns have 125m and all large guns have 400m. The smaller the better.

It doesn't matter what a ship looks like physically. They are all treated as if they were spheres when they are shot at. The target signature radius describes how big this sphere is, the bigger it is the easier it will be to track with guns. A big target also tend to take more damage from missiles, but that is outside the scope of this article.

The "Percent of Tracking or Falloff" values means how much of the listed falloff or tracking you are looking at. If your falloff is 12km then 33.3% means one third of that, so 4km. If your tracking is 0.4rad/sec then 50% would mean 0.2rad/sec.

|0%|| 100%|| 0.0%||

Few players would be able to spot a -10.6% loss in DPS. In fact, this is so small that the normal random distribution sort of drowns this out. Based on this. It is safe to say that you can use 1/3 of your falloff or tracking without any loss of noticeable performance. It is a sweet spot if you will, and a good value to remember for those who often engage targets out in falloff. You still have fairly good performance out to 1/2 (half) your falloff or tracking, but beyond that things quickly get worse.

As mentioned above, target size only influence tracking penalties, never range penalties. It may seem counter intuitive, but that is the way the game works. The problem with target sizes from a player perspective is that the game will not provide you with the information about the sizes. If you need to know, you must estimate and then calculate the effect yourself.

This is not as hard as it sounds, there is a rather neat way to quickly estimate what kind of tracking you really have against smaller or bigger targets. And you only have to be very rough. First you need to know the tracking value of your guns, the second thing is the Turret Signature Resolution of your guns, and the third is to guess (yes, guess, but qualified guesses can be made) the Signature Size of your target. Guns always come in the resolution of 40m (small), 125m (medium) and 400m (large). In a similar fashion, you can use 40m for frigates, 125m for cruisers, 200-300m for battlecruisers and 400m for battleships. Shield tanked ships will always be a bit bigger while armor tanked ships have a normal size. Now you estimate the ratio between the target size and your gun size (target size divided by gun size), multiply that ratio with your own tracking to get the value of your adjusted and true tracking against a target of that size.

Example 1: A battleship (400m resolution on guns) fires on a frigate (40m radius). Target size divided by gun size gives us 40m / 400m = 0.1, or 10%. So the guns can only use one tenth of their listed tracking against a target that small, and large guns have pretty bad tracking to start with.

Example 2: An Incursus (44m size) and a Rifter (35m size) both uses small guns (40m resolution) (also assumed that both are armor tanked, since shield tanks will increase size). That means that the incursus is (44m / 40m = 1.1 or 110%) 10% easier to track than the listed tracking value of on small guns. While the rifter is (35m / 40m = 0.875 or 87.5%) 12.5% harder to track than the listed tracking value of small guns. This is only a minor factor, the fittings and the pilots experience will be much more important than this differance.

 

Example 3: An Incursion Machariel with three T2 Tracking Enhancers and T2 large autocannons have a tracking value of 0.067rad/sec. While shooting at a Sansha frigate (49m size), its effective tracking value is only 49m / 400m = 0.1225 or 12% of the stated one, 0.067rad/sec x 0.1225 = 0.0082rad/sec. A typical Sansha frigate orbits at 14km at roughly 500m/s, that corresponds to an angular velocity of 500m/s / 14000m = 0.036rad/sec. Although this is half of the listed tracking value, it is actually over 4 times higher than the Machariels effective tracking value against such a small target, so it becomes nearly impossible to hit it. Liberal use of webs will make things much easier.

No. Even if the guns are grouped on your screen, they are still treated separately. This can be seen by collecting damage data and comparing that with the normal expected damage distribution, its very clear that its a combination of several seperate turret shots instead of a single one. It can also be deduced by looking at the turret group's damage output when shooting at hard to hit objects, like things deep into falloff, its quite easy to tell when one, two or more guns hit the target.

Since these modules increases the targets signature size, it means that turrets will have an easier way to track the victim. Improving tracking with +20% has the same effect as increasing a targets size with +20%. It is noteworthy that a T2 Target Painter with full skills give a +37.5% boost and help your friends tracking too, while a T2 Tracking Computer (with tracking script) gives +30% (but it can swap to increased range scripts, can't miss and need less cap).

Let's start by taking a look at the variables inside the equation. Most of these variables are actually determined before you even undock. From things like your choice of ship, your skill points and your fitting. There are only two that depend on you as a player (how you fly your ship), those are called 'Transversal Speed' and 'Range To Target'. This is the first important insight: How you fly will affect the damage you do.