Player Features and Ideas Discussion

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It's not just the Kronos it's almost all the Gallente ships that have been gimped over the years. Vexor, Ishtar, Myrmidon, Eos, Dominix & the Kronos have been gimped to high heaven because victims poured rivers of tears longer then the Nile of how they got smashed by these monsters of pvp, sultans’ of solo, Eve Alliance Tournament Champion's (EOS helped win 2 for BOB), the House of Bees. It is the mix of blasters for close range and drones/Sentry’s to extend their range which made them beautiful and balanced. Return them to their once untouchable glory CCP and you will see carnage like no other.

While I'm sure other marauders have issues as well, I wouldn't say the golem is the best in class.

With t2 range rigs, 4 caldari ballistics, and all skills lvl 5 we get

838 dps at 65km, however factoring accel time, it's more like 57km.

1192 dps at 38.9km, accel time, about 35km

1070 dps at 43.7km, accel time, about 38km

However, even at max skills the golem has hell of problems with dps'ing small targets.

You need at least 2 target painters to be able to down cruisers in 3 shots.

Now, on the approach the golem can down frigs and cruisers in one shot, however, once the target is orbitting the golem it becomes much harder to hit effectively.

It can sometimes take up to 5 shots to down an orbitting frig or cruiser even with javs. and 2 target painters.

The issue then becomes that the golem is much more effective with that third target painter, however, you can lose a good amount of tank in fitting this 3rd target painter.

It also suffers from the issue that it can't have effective dps or tank without having target painters AND a ded space shield booster.
This means that you can't just buy a golem and t2 fit it and be happy. It won't work. You'll either have good effective dps with a weak tank, or you'll have a good tank with bad effective dps.
Without target painters you might as well be flying a raven, because your dps is going to be just as effective, if not worse.
And without a ded space shield booster your tank if going to be just as effective as a raven if not worse.

So basically, in order to fit a golem worthy of flying lvl 4 missions you must spend a MINIMUM of an additional 600 mil for a ded space booster and t2 rigs.

on top of that, the golem is extremely slow, even with a wmd, thus meaning if you don't have missile bombardment and missile projection to lvl 5 on top of the t2 rigs, then you will not be able to reach the max orbit range of npcs, which I've seen to be 51km.
This means if you don't fit the golem just right, with just the right skills, then you're either losing even more effective dps or even more effective tank in order to fit the wmd to catch the targets.

Now while you're chasing the targets with the wmd, you're also losing cap, which means you tank will die and the target will be getting extremely effective hits on you long before you make it within range if the ship isn't fitted just right.

Basically, what I'm saying is that in order to be able to fly the golem effectively in lvl 4 missions it not only needs t2 rigs, ded space booster, and a minimum of 2 target painters, but it also needs several skills to be lvl 5, and like I said, this isn't to make it a good mission ship, this is just to make it usable in lvl 4 missions.

On top of all that isk required to fly the golem in lvl 4 missions, you also have expensive t2 and faction ammo which is completely REQUIRED for level 4 missions in order to get range and good dps.

So not only does it cost you a bare minimum of 1.5 billion isk to buy and fit a golem, but it also costs you over 4k isk per volley.

That said, with the majority of the faction ships, they are less skill intensive, require less skills to lvl 5 in order to be effective in lvl 4 missions, but can also pull out the same effective dps if not better with a less intense fit than is required by the golem.

When you factor the implementation of the noctis and that the golem is limited to a 40km tractor range, has kinda crappy salvage ability, is slow, has a quite large sig radius, has a max missile range of about 58km or so with max range skills and t2 range rigs, has terrible sensor strength, terrible scan res, terrible effective dps without at least 2 target painters, and is skill and isk intensive in order to fit.

Then flying a faction bs and coming back and salvaging in a noctis is actually faster than using just the golem.
Not to mention the noctis can have a much larger cargohold, so you not only salvaging, but you're also able to loot.
In most lvl 4 missions the golem doesn't have enough cargohold for loot, salvage, and at least 2 different types of ammo.

So my suggestion for buffing the golem is.

Reduce sig radius so it's able to have an effective tank without expensive mods (however still requiring the trade of some dps in order to do so)

Give it a larger boost to the effectiveness of target painters, so that 2 is the equivilant of 3.

Increase the scan res so that it's able to target smaller ships faster, thus allowing it to knock out any jamming, dampening, and neuting a bit faster. When a golem is dampened or jammed it can't ever seem to get enough of a window to be able to lock and engage even one volley on a target.

I can deal with it being skill intensive in order to get a lvl 4 mission fit, and effective missile range, but it being a t2 ship it shouldn't REQUIRE an almost specific fit in order to be effective. It should be like every other bs in game, able to effectivily run lvl 4's with a t2 tank, but better off with a ded space booster, cause a t2 fitted golem doesn't really stand a chance.

Give it a slight speed buff.

Now, specific buffs that would apply to all marauders.

Give them the tractor range of the noctis.
Give them a salvager buff equal to the noctis.
Give them a buff towards salvaging difficulty, since they can't fit salvage tackles in the rigs.
Give them a bigger cargohold

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When marauders were originally brought into the game they were designed to be the best ship to use in missions.
They had high dps, and the best salvager.

Now that pirate bs's can out dps them and with greater range and less intense skills and fits, plus the addition of the noctis, It's actually easier and faster to use the pirate bs plus a noctis in order to clear the mission and salvage.
Thus taking away from the superiority of marauders in pve.

They need their superiority back

While I do agree that the Golem needs a really high skillset/good fit to perform really well is rather steep, but it's atleast doing a good job once those requirements are met.


With 7s RoF and only 4 launchers faction/t2 ammo really isn't that expensive at all... (I thougt it'd be really costly at the start but it was ALOT chepaer than expected) Esp not if you buy ammo from the LP store(I've got over 500k LP with some caldari corp to supply me torps)

As for anyone who are somewhat serious about running 4's for cash, they have implants.

(4 faction BCU's, anyone who runs 4's uses faction damage mods)

These numbers are not counting in drones

Golem with navy torps = 1182 dps to 40km(you only have to reload javs for a few bs's orbiting at 45/50)

926 with javelins out to 60-61km

1317 with rage out to 35 km

As for tp's and cruisers/frigs etc, your drones kills the frigs and you 1 volley EVERY cruiser apart from the mercenary guardians(Moa hull)
with 3 PWNAGE paineters(best named t1) npc HAC's take max 2 volleys, many of them only 1.5 so you often overkill with the 2nd volley.

I've been thinking about Marauders getting a tractor/salvage bonus aswell, and the bare minimum should be a tractor beam range bonus so you'd easily be able to haul in the bs wrecks at 50km

And when it comes to scan resolution of Golem after you've been jammed. Just DONT fly Marauders vs Gurista.. I quit running vs Gurista as soon as the failfest of Guristas changes got live, CCP decided Marauders should be made fun of by npc's aswell, screwing over Marauders yet again.

As for Vargur someone complained abit about, it's amazing vs angels and works really well aganist anything but Guristas, it can change it's damage type fairly easily. If anything should be boosted on the Vargur, it should be a little speed buff

Paladin works well vs it's "native enemies" (Blood/Guristas). really well vs Drones. Eom die pretty fast to EM damage. Serpentis are v.easy to take down with Lasers aswell. only real pains are Gurista(sucks in any marauder) and Angels(you should only get AE if you run blood/sansha) so overall the Paladin doesn't really suffer that much when it needs to fight non-blood/sansha(non-blood/sansha random missions)

And the Paladin out dps's the Kronos by almost 100 dps even after the railgun change, and it's got better tracking, and if there's lots of cruisers/close range ships you need to pop in certain missions you can always fit Mega pulses(as I've said before), Kronos will just be bad there.

125/150 m3 bandwidth/dronebay now please.

And as some people have said a few times, they don't need to be superior in every way, they just need to... NOT SUCK like the Kronos is exceptionally good at.

Bump.

Either boost rails so they're worth fitting on any ship(They're still sorta weak with no unique benefits) Medium rails are even worse though

Or gimme my Dronebay!

Bump Now with another 5% tracking boost to rails, 25% tracking boost on Javelin and only 5s reload time the Kronos is actually pretty decent

125m3 bandwith would actually more it potentially OP'd compared to other Marauders atleast

But still, 100m3 bandwidth is fair and it'd be a great ship(IT LOOKS FANTASTIC!) make it perform well on top!

CCP hear my call!

Bump, gieb 100m3 drone bandwidth!

Yeah, they need a buff in general but Kronos is still dead last. atleast give it 100m3 drone bandwidth until CCP decides to boost Marauders in general atleast.

I still vote that they at least get the tractor and salvage bonuses that the noctis gets, so there's a good reason to use marauders as compared to a pirate boat and a noctis