Ships & Modules

Huh. Away from the game for a couple of years, and I come back to find that my Drake's been nerfed. Down to 6 launchers now. When did that happen?

Ah, well that's not so bad then. What was the reason for the change?

Want the long story? CCP has decided to rationalize ship progression while also shunting ships out of tiers and into niches. The original idea is described in a dev blog from January 2012. After working through frigates, destroyers, and cruisers (and changing missile stats rather significantly; if you plan to fly your Drake you should give that a look), they announced that BCs were next.

The BC change thread pretty much lays out the sweeping concept behind the changes and then devolves into people yelling at other people about whether the Harbinger is **** or utter ****. It's a great read. Another dev blog explains the final changes.

And while we're on the topic of BCs, you really should know that the skill is being split into racial variants sometime around May. If you want to get all 4 to 5 when it happens, start training BC to 5 and all racial cruisers to 3.

tl;dr: they're doing a big ship rebalance. They just got done with BCs.

What makes you think that DPS is down?

I thought for a second that DPS had gone down because the ship had one fewer launcher. Then it was pointed out that the loss of a launcher came with an increase in per launcher damage, which results in a net gain of DPS.

Slightly annoyed that I'm going to need Information Warfare V and Skirmish Warfare V to fly a Command Ship after the Summer, but pretty happy that I probably won't need Caldari Battleship V anymore. Kind of wish I could get it to turn back to white from yellow, but oh well.

...
Hm, that's a bit of an unusual situation. Less upset now, but more amused.

For the Drake, I think the way the numbers worked out with kinetic missiles was that it was a nerf at BC level III and below, a push at BC level IV, and a buff at BC level V.

And yeah, at some point the models do need some work. They had to do funky things to the Naglfar because there was no place to put a third turret, the Myrmidon shares the Drake's issue of having more turret slots on its model than it has high slots, and the Moa (along with the Eagle, the Onyx, and the Gila) is still uglier than sin..

Oh, and if you can inject the Command Ships skillbook now, do it. Get that plus Battlecruisers V and you'll be a very happy camper when Odyssey drops.

One additional thing to note: (especially for you pilots who like flying with gang links): the tech 1 battlecruisers can more easily be fit with a single gang link than before, and even still be quite viable for use in combat. For now, that means you can have gang links in small roams. But eventually links will probably have to be on the field to function -- or at least outside of a POS shield. There was a devblog mentioning that too, but I can't remember where it is and don't want to go digging for it.

Here's something you might be interested in, though. It's a devblog which goes over all the changes to skill requirements for ships. If you can fly it now, you will be able to later. But if you're close to being able to fly it now and haven't injected the book, you might wanna browse and see what changes will be made, to decide if you wanna make a push and get it before Odyssey, or wait till afterwards. Either way, you can potentially save yourself a ton of trouble.
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/74234

Simple. They have no interest in coddling us and holding our hand while we play EVE. But coming back to EVE on an already-trained character and finding out you can't fly your stuff anymore unless you spend several weeks in re-training is absolutely crippling. A few hours is negligible.