Ships & Modules

Everything is still in constant flux, and new stuff emerges all the time. Many ships are actually balanced against each others, especially T1 small ships are very viable.

Attack BCs (formerly known as tier 3 BCs) are probably the strongest contenders for FOTM status, but the situation with them is not really OP- most of the cries can be tracked down to them used in blobs. Their stats will be tweaked slightly, as well as TE stats.

FW have their own FOTMs, Hookbill is in a pretty good place, but in reality you will see ships from every race flying in the plexes.

In w-space, tracking dreads and armor T3s still reign supreme, this probably won't change as long as the mechanics stay the same. Unless the oncoming T3 nerf is radical.

Next big things will be OGB nerf (their strength will be toned from 5% to 2%, off-grid boosting hinges only on lack of technical solution) and battleship tiericide.

Skill tree changes might have some surprising consequences.

All in all it's a great time to pew pew. You can fly what you want, and your success will mostly depend on your player skills.

Keep an eye on Features & Ideas forum, plenty of Dev stickies there.

I'm not really familiar with blob warfare, so others can comment on that.

Ancillary Shield Boosters made active shield tank viable in small gang/solo, active armor got some buffs but it's still niche (1vs1 or 1vs2 thing)

Yes, Moros currently overshadows the others in terms of brutal damage. Nag will be changed to projectiles only, which will probably make it really nice.

No word on specifics. Although majority of subs (rr, ewar, warp, etc) have always been sucking the ground so hard a nerf hardly seem possible at this point. My guess is CCP is going to nerf the subs that actually have uses (although not even close to their cost) into the ground too so no one uses them over cheap BC and the wh economy dies.

There have been changes, the biggest is ASB. It's a real game changer. The Cyclone with XL ASB can produce a lot of rage. Hit a camp of 5 or so solo, kill all of them effortlessly and watch the rage and tears in local. Too bad they defanged Cyclone by change it to missileboat from projectile. Was nice while it lasted.

BS can fit multiple XL ASBs, it's the cruisers and BCs that can only fit one or two. Look, ma, medium hulls and capless XL boosters. And Mael > Rokh for XL ASBs. Armor rep bonused Myrm now tanks better when shield tanked. Medium armor reps ('cause Larges don't fit) vs XtraLarge capless shield booster ('cause they fit).

Blasters still can't get in range, as Gallante is still slow and armor makes them slower. Rails are still lol. ACs still fit and pwn nicely, except for boat that got switched to missile. Cruises are still worthless, and now hmls are going the way of the Cruise. Oh, and Rage Torps exp radius increased from 650 to 775. It needs the nerf 'cause, you know, there are still ppl using these for some reason and CCP wants to make sure they don't. Awfully nice of them.

Welcome back to Eve.

I'm not in the best place to offer an assessment on ship/module balance. I will say that cruiser and battlecruiser tiericide, HACs have an even smaller niche than last year. Also combat ceptors. In terms of future developments, I think people are curious to see how tiericide will effect t1/t2 industrials. OGBs are definitely on the chopping block in one way or another. And while I have no illusion that CCP thinks this is an issue at all, I still think that deadspace shield boosters need a sanity check on their attributes.




I haven't seen a Merin or Liang post in quite a while.

Roime is the new Liang..

There is only one Liang.

I find it annoying that T2 projectile ammo is limited to explosive damage, unlike T1 ammo which can be chosen to optimize most damage types. This contrasts with T2 missile ammo, which comes in all damage types. There are 48 kinds of T2 missile ammo but only 12 kinds of T2 projectiles. Not necessarily a balance issue--certainly lots of people fly minmatar ships fitted with projectile turrets--but spending a couple of months training up T2 large projectiles and then finding the T2 ammo isn't worth the cargo space is a bit anticlimactic.

Barrage is still good.

Kin/Therm is a pretty good damage type shoot at anything, Kin sucks against Caldari/Gal T2/3, but it's often made up by having a significant raw dps advantage.