Remove ramming speed and abandon ship. Those two abilities have been responsible for too much grief and too much dev attention to tweak them over and over. Just get rid of them and it all becomes a non-issue.

It should, as others have stated, be a last resort. You should use it knowing you are going to die. It should equal automatic death with a chance to take your enemy with you or do serious damage to them.

I don't think "auto-death" is necessary. It would be enough if there are only 2 outcomes - two equally damaged ships, or 2 equally dead ships. I cannot really see any of these crashes going another way.

Determine the fraction of hull remaining for the ship that would be damaged the least afterwards, and both ships are reduced to these fraction of their current hit points (so a heavily damaged ship would not be destroyed, but could still only go worse.

Also, add a knockdown/push effect to the skill (knockdown hits both, push only the target).

Ramming Speed does heavily damage the ship using it. It's that the ram *****s spam it with Aux to ID, which boosts their resists amazingly AND boosts their speed/damage.

I recall one time a BoP rammed me for 25k on me and 50k on him..haha. I had BFI and Aux to SFI running.

a kinetic resist armor will help as well

yep id say, ramming speed/abandon ship only becomes available when ur hull is less than
25% left. Then ur more than likely to die in the ram, and he might die too if his hull is down
enough too.

They could get rid of it for all I care. That isn't very likely though. But it shouldn't be rewarding to be at full or near full health to ram an opponent. I don't care if my hull is at 25%. You can do a lot at 25% health and you're a cooldown away from being 45 or 50%. If I'm tanking you and your buddies and taking you out one by one and my heals or team mates heals are keeping me in the fight, if you ram me, to as some call it "finish" me off, you should die and the opposing team should be awarded a point for your death. This will dissuade full health ship captains from ramming any ship because that automatic death would be a waste unless that captain was about to die anyway. This way it is only viable for someone to use when they are about to die and they can possibly earn a point for their team with their death by ramming the opponent. It would be counter productive to use it as an alpha strike to quickly take someone out in this case because the other team will automatically get a point when you die and the ram may not kill the target. I'm tired of the successful and unsuccessful attempts to kill someone via ramming by opponents with near full health because his buddies can't take you down right away and can't or won't invest the resources necessary to take them out. Just my take, though.

Just have it disable all forward energy weapon banks for the ship that does the ramming for say 60 seconds and I guarentee you it's use will drop dramatically.

~D

Tribble build has it usable only if your hull is below 50%.

Good, I'm tired of the neg'vhar decloak and ram strategy. I also agree that is should result in two equally damaged or dead vessels. For game balance it should not be based off of the mass of the vessel, then it favors one class of vessel over the other and is not a balanced ability (there is no reason a cruiser should be able to ram a 100% escort and live according to the rules of game balance).

Much better.