Ships & Modules

i'll see your wall of text and raise you two fluffy kittens.

Make Crystals affect Capital Shield Boosters. Armor gets their Slaves for their Capitals and Shield gets Crystals for theirs.


Now off to EFT to see how much a chimera can tank if Crystals were to work.

This is also one of the areas with the most potential for new ships down the road. There is quite the skill gap between BS and caps. Something to fill that gap would be interesting. a light carrier that can go through gates? A T2 BS with immense firepower and/or tank that can't? A cap ship dedicated to crowd control would be interesting.

As a side note, I'm not really using my 3 billion isk dread. Something that expensive getting one shotted...... Uhm. No.

Don't confront the OP with things like "facts"!

you misunderstood me. the reasoning is: if titans are supposed to counter dreads (which they do), then dreads are by definition not supposed to be useful against titans. on the other hand, they are just about as useless against subcaps unless you bring your own support with massive web and painting. this leaves me wondering if dreads' role needs to be defined better; pos bashing doesn't quite cut it as the only effective application of an entire ship class. then again, i never flew a dread so that's why i'm asking.

Well, except for carebearing in W-space...

• they have DPS comparable to supercarriers (so they're okay for structure grinding if they have balls and/or numbers);
• they can decently hit battleships/draeks without painterwebs (though this will require 2-3 trackmods, Drop, and keeping targets at 25+ km; also multiply this by the usual crappy lock time and locked target count);
• they have a chance for fair capfights in lowsec (no doomsday there, POCOs are conflict drivers aside from POSes);
• they could be used for blapping not-so-big groups of guys with triage carriers (though the supercarriers are always better, if you have them).

And of course hitting subcaps provided the proper support. Fleet coordination should be and is encouraged.

The dreadnoughts are capital ships. More power — more specialization. So they should be awesome in a small number of situations and helpless in every other one. I'd say it's a problem with supercariers that they can carry on effectively far more than a couple of things.

It's a... not bad idea, just make sure that there would be no 'X + Y counters X + Y + Z'. All three types of arms should be needed in a proper fleet.

like a capital sized interdictor maybe with bonuses to ecm? possibly deployed using a seige type module

IDK Why the leviathan isn't used more.
It's arguably the best Titan due to being able to DPS the hell out of stuff AND have an epic tank
Shield capitals FTW

A covops cloak and +4 warp strength would be pretty handy on those too.

To be honest Trinket anything you don't understand tend to be what you refer to as "philosophical mumbo jumbo". The very reason that you have to resort to throwing out random "EFT" chirps in a discussion about capital use say alot about how you approached this discussion.

The one time you came close to any content of my post (which is what you referenced) was in this segment:


Yet you have a very shallow perspective on what "tanking philosophy" actually imply. The fact of the matter is that selecting targets and fitting your ship is important regardless of what ship you use and in what setting you use it. It's not exclusive to "ganks" and what tank you can muster is not irrelevant for a smaller gang either. Likewise, escape is not irrelevant even for the largest of Supercapital fleets.

That reflect the current balance of the Hel, which can be tanked (it's just not as popular as other races' options when tanked in a large fleet) same as other SC can be nano-fit (they are just not as good as the Hel at it). If you want to play in a large fleet and amass a big tank you can do that, the ship is just not ideal for it. At the same time, if tanking as much as possible was the goal of your SC, why didn't you train the ship with the bonuses, modules and slot-allocation for that?

That leads to the question not being about wether you can just tank or gank with a ship, it becomes a question of the balance between those elements. How much should we value a straight tank to escape?

At the end of the day, this is yet another case of a player wanting his ship to do what another ship does in a specific situation he has put himself in. He does not value the features of his own ship, so he regard them as irrelevant [for him]. That last bit is the key to the discussion. Is it irrelevant? Should the rare out-of-box approach exist?

The reason those questions are interesting is that when CCP have homogenized things lately they have either completely removed the ability to do certain things with your ship(s) or upset the balance between popular use and inventive use. If we just feed the popular how does that affect the reinvention of the game?

The philosophy itself is quite simple: there is a limit between amount of resources when you can no longer trade blows. When you have reached that point the question of escape and commitment become important. This is the conclusion you jumped to when you said that it "won't need to tank". Obviously, tank is not irrelevant and the balance between "trading blows and just ganking" does not let itself be described in such extremes. You refer to something as "just a gank" that is "all about picking your target" but you don't seem to have any experience what so ever about how that is carried out or what risks are involved. There is no "just ganking" where tank is irrelevant, but escape becomes a much more important feature when you can't expect to tank your opponent over time. Escape is thus the niche of the Hel and the choice of ship for players who don't expect to hold the field.

It backdrops to the question of balance between larger and smaller entities and the resources available to them.

If you can't commit, should SC be available to you?

You do realize people using their ships to "just gank" provide targets and opportunities, right?

You also have the background of that discussion: The underlying question of how we get more ships to explode. This is interesting for the balance between escape-commitment and escape-tank. Look at the amount of Supers that die in smaller setting, in safer security (where Supers can utilize the mechanics even better) and how they are used there without commitment. The Titan that died this week is a glaring example. The problem with feeding the popular use of big tanks in large setting with a higher level of commitment is that people tend to stop attempting to use them outside of advantage. That's the primary reason why not enough Supers die, people have a tendency to "stand down" with them. For my own part, i'd rather see successful ECM-bursts and an interesting lynchpin-play around HIC as they exist today, than seeing more people "stand down" and not put their Supers to risk in the first place. Obviously, the lowsec Super that get away from an engagement have been put at much higher risk than the super that was never logged on (or used to PvE).

That's my issue with the current homogenisation: it doesn't get more people to use their Supers, because the homogenisation players like the OP is after - is finding a way for their Super to fit into a given doctrine decided upon by their coalition - which is only put to use under minimal risk.

That doesn't make the ship better, it doesn't make the ship more worth using and it certainly doesn't make sure we get more explosions.

It leads back to an interesting question: do we want the Hel (or any other capital with features that do not involve a better buffer tank) to tank better so we can use it and put it to risk? or do we want the Hel to tank better so it fit into a doctrine where we won't use it and won't put it to risk?