Ships & Modules

I think you can agree with me on the fact the game is not exclusively null sec doctrines, nor WH's with dedicated bonus to armor ships making at some point Proteus being excellent in that specific area of the game.

On paper Gallente can absolutely deal with every single race in the game with their specific racial traits, in game we all know this is not true.
I'm probably amongst the players for a couple years now, who jump on each Gallente dev thread trying to put on the table difficulties gallente pilots have and still have the feeling the very first Gallente issues are not taken in consideration but just somewhat "covered" with fake bonuses and tools that still make them not the first choice you will do if you can fly all races like me, and I'm at first a very specialised gallente pilot before I realised I could have more fun if I trained other races so I wouldn't be stuck in a single restrictive game play/area of the game.

Well over four years ago. The situation you describe lasted for maybe a year.

"Welcome to Eve. Please Choose Difficulty:

Easy
Medium
Hard
Minmatar"

Scrubs seem to forget so quickly.

You forget that the Rifter is a pile of garbage now, and I'm talking about it's performance.

Anyone who thinks otherwise, is a bad Minmatar nut-hugger.

Hmmmmm... ships that I really like (I make no claims for this list to represent everyone or be complete):

Amarr
- Executioner
- Punisher
- Tormentor
- Slicer
- Coercer
- Arbitrator
- Omen Navy
- Guardian
- Zealot
- Curse
- Harbinger
- Oracle
- Armageddon
- Abaddon
- Archon
- Revelation

Caldari:
- Condor
- Merlin
- Griffin
- Hookbill
- Kitsune
- Harpy
- Hawk
- Manticore
- Blackbird
- Moa
- Caracal
- Ferox
- Drake
- Scorpion
- Raven
- Tengu

Minmatar:
- Jaguar
- Stiletto
- Thrasher
- Sabre
- Rupture
- Stabber Fleet
- Vagabond
- Cyclone
- Hurricane
- Sleipnir
- Tornado

Gallente:
- Atron
- Incursus
- Comet
- Taranis
- Ishkur
- Ares
- Thorax
- Ishtar
- Arazu
- Myrmidon
- Talos

The ships I actually fly are almost always Caldari, Amarr, or Gallente. I can't even tell you how much Minmatar loot I've collected and have never bothered to put on a ship. And really, I think people dramatically underestimate how powerful lasers are with today's shield superiority.

-Liang

CCP claims that laser crystals are one of our "strengths" but in reality they're little more than a royal pain the arse. With other races switching ammunition not only changes range but also the type of damage done by the weapon. With laser crystals the ranges change but the damage type always stays the same. That's only half the problem, however.

The real problem is well known to every player who's tried to use lasers on one ship after playing with something like cannons on another: Optimal Range and Falloff. Well looky here, we've got eight - count 'em - eight different flavors of crystal to chose from so you can stay at optimum range with the flick of a few buttons, ain't that grand?

No, not it isn't, because you have to have all eight crystal types and you have to constantly be swapping them out every third shot in order to keep your shots at optimal range. Why? Because the falloff on lasers is a complete joke. Your typical Minmatar light cannon may only have 3km or so of optimal range but the falloff will reach out to 12km or more easily. That's a nice wide bracket that you can use that weapon in before having to worry about changing the ammunition. Now compare that to your typical Amarr light laser in the same area and you'll find that the average falloff bracket is less than 2km wide at best... and it hardly gets any better as the gun tier goes up, either.

An Amarr pilot most constantly be juggling between eight different crystals to get keep a their target from falling too far under or over because of these absurdly narrow falloff arcs. That's click time that you're not spending doing things like adjusting speed, heading, managing drones or tinkering with all your other modules. Basically, an Amarr player needs to train in Multitasking 5 first in order to keep their weapons even marginally effective.

The oddest thing is that, scientifically, it makes absolutely no sense. What is the range of coherence of a laser in a vacuum? In real life you'd have be pretty much underwater to have to fiddle with focusing crystals as much as we have to in EvE. It's absurd.

I can live with the monotone EM/Thermal damage type because striking down sinners and heretics with the powers of Lighting and Fire suits our culture just swimmingly. But I'd also like to see the falloff brackets for our lasers get a massive boost and the number of crystals needed reduced accordingly. What I'd really like to see is for the crystal list to be dropped down to just three types: short, medium, and long range. Then adjust our falloff brackets so that's all we would actually need.

That or just invent a special module that automatically switches them for us. That would be spiffy too.

Absolute truth.

I may have only been around since 2006, but the best ships are entirely up to a player's style. CCP has worked long and hard at ship balance, and while not perfect it is very good. People will whine about this ship or that ship, but most of their experience comes from being shot at rather than shooting. CCP has tried very hard to make sure that one ship does not dominate all others, all ships have positives and negatives. Once you match the positives to what you like to do (or want to do) you'll have found your match.

Looking purely at solo, the most justifiable generalisation is that amarr are awful. They have the best damage at mid-range, but they pay for it with a pathetically fragile capacitor which disrupts their ability to stay at that range or to tank or both. Their damage is locked into anti-shield mode. Many of their ships have terrible fitting problems, and it is theoretically almost impossible for an amarr ship to solo anything with a heavy neut. Then there is the "wasted bonus" of cap usage and the lack of midslots which force them into predictable strategies

Actually, you do in a way, since they're the race most likely ro be able to disengage at will. They're easiest to just poke some ship to see what happens and if things go wrong, you just 'do a barrel roll', so either you win or you disengage, but you don't lose.

CCP apparently never realized how much of a decisive factor that is.

The combination speed, agility, smallest sigs and very decent tanks that can be used for shield or armor make the ships the strongest sub-BS platform.

Having the only capless, all damage type guns with awesome tracking/alpha and tremendous falloff in combination with TEs made them most effective, rendering the most absurdly overpowered raceto have ever existed in the game. Pre-projectle-buff Minmatar were fine, since they had the tradeoff of dealing poor DPS as a combination for all the advantages. Now there's no drawbck and ASBs aggravated the problem.

Yes - their caps aren't great, but then again most people use alts to fly caps.

I don't doubt Liang kills mostly minmatar ships in his other races ships, but that's a statistically logical consequence of everyone flying Minmatar and Liang not doing so. A pilot with a clue (and an OGB) will always win against someone lacking both.


Anyway, considering the OPs question, the race with the biggest number of bad ships are either Gallente or Caldari, but especially the latter have a handfull of ships that make them shine(Drake/Tengu).

Except for the Avatar, Aeon, Archon, Abaddon and maybe the new punisher and exec (never tried the last two since the rebalance), Amarr are subpar accross the board.

And no - the Rifter doesn't suck, it's just a change from it being the only competitive T1 frig to one amongst many - people used to their I-win button for years may need time to adapt to that.

But it wasn't before?

The only ships they ever engaged is the other Frigate that just got buffed?

Tracking, Speed, Low Sig, Range, Neut / Nos slot, choice in tanking it, Scan Res. Seems like everything that was great about the Rifter is still there.