Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Ship class: Stealth Bomber
Ship role: Blobbreaker

Effectiveness: Super effective

Depends on the FC, of course ;)

First off, AOE weapons are the easiest weapons to accidentally make overpowered. An example, the old titan DD used to allow a titan to basically emit a large smart bomb that hit everything on grid. And one of the earlier versions allowed it to do so THROUGH a cyno so the titan didn't even have to be on grid. The titan DD was revised and revised because it was too powerful. A single titan could wipe out everything but BS's, and two titans would clear all subcaps from the field. As titans proliferated, soon people had enough titans to DD entire fleets of dreads and carriers. This simply ruined fleet warfare.

There is always the issue that you can "blob" using AOE weapons just like you can blob with regular fit fleets.

Now, today we have two common AOE weapons that are fairly regularly used:
A.) Smartbombing BS's. The latest changes to BS's have limited the number of ships with 8 highslots and increased the cost of most BS's, making this less popular than say, two months ago, but it is still occassionally used. The primary technique, often called pipebomb (see R&K's videos) involves catching a fleet unawares, and will effectively wipe out almost any fleet. The trick is, have a fleet warp into a bubble, and once the target fleet is in warp, cyno in 15ish smartbomb BS's onto the bubble's catch point. See, smartbombs have such a low range, that you essentially need to have the fleet land in a focal position that you can hit with every smartbomb in fleet, and getting an opponent into this position is not easy! This is what "limits" the power of smartbombs.

B.) Stealth Bomber bombs. Bombers are a very common tool to decimate enemy fleets. Timing the bomb launches, so your targets and your bombs coincide requires quite a bit of coordination. And the fact bombs do damage to each other significantly limits the power of bombs. There is a current technique called doomcats that allow you to launch bombs that don't travel, and makes coordinating massive bomb runs easier, but still requires a titan or BO to bridge in the bombers (see doomcats videos).

Both of these AOE tools are very much used in today's fleet warfare, but they are somewhat one-shot gimmicks, where you either decimate your target, or fail. This goes a long way to balance them.

Now, let's examine your new ship type: It seems reasonably balanced in terms of power (props there)!!! However, why would people use that ship over a cheaper hull? It's marginally better for pipe-bombing, but outside of that I just don't see a lot of utility to it. Maybe as anti-drone support when fighting slowcats. Also, rather than do the CPU & Cap reduction, just give it a smartbomb damage boost, and reduce the number of highslots it has! (so, +100% smartbomb damage, but only 4 highs). This is 1/2 the CPU, and half the cap to do the same damage then.

P.S. Target breaker spectrums have been sometimes deployed in fleet fights as a large ECM burst to mixed success. And Supercarriers, when fielded, ECM burst like mad!!

Not to mention the whole 'making POS shots impossible' thing.

A real problem with "blobs" is that AoE weapons/EW only really work well when blobs cluster up in blobs. The moment you have a distributed blob, a real "fleet" if you would, you have just as many ships to deal with with far lower susceptibility to AoE attacks. Now I'll grant that that also makes spider work (repping, cap, etc.) more difficult for unbonused ships, but the increased separation can be worth it in terms of lowering the effect of AoEs.

If you really want to do something to "fix" the "the only way to take out a blob is to bring a bigger blob" "problem" is to either change player thinking or introduce ships/modules designed to live and thrive in large scale battles without being overpowered for smaller engagements. Personally, one thing that pops into mind is the Unreal Tournament "link gun" which does rather low damage initially but increases in power the more people you have shooting one at the given target. A similar arrangement in EVE might be worth considering so long as it provides an initial damage penalty and an upper cap on damage so that you couldn't have 20 linked battleships "OMFGWTFBBQPWN" a titan in 15 seconds.

I don't really see changing how EVE's players think as a viable long-term strategy so I don't think I'll suggest anything for that.

yes, but this doesn't work in lowsec, where you get blobbed too (not to say i agree with OP tho, but having a mechanic to counter blobs in low would be great, other than docking indeed)