Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Faction BS do more damage by the drones and are way faster with the MWD, so the new marauders are over tanked and hardly interesting compared her current iteration.

As for armor Incs the Paladin is at the same level with other faction BS(1 slot tanked NM is the better contest boat, mostly because the Paladin takes ages to get locks, Paladin is the better grind ship, because doesn't need support to take down frigs). The good capacitor, 90% web, extra utility high slots and T2 resists make it fairly good(I would even call it the overall best armor Inc ship). Even with the lower dps I like the Kronos more than the Vindicator atm, simply because of the utility high slots what are really good in case of logi disconnects, capping stuff up if you just run with Onis or having enough cargo for tons of ammo, sniper fitting, travel fitting and a shuttle.

The lack of sentry dps and lacking of the 90% webs will hit both very hard.

I already have plans to use the kronos for small gangs, and as a sniper and a blaster brawler.

I will use it everyday for anything. I think it's too cool not to fly it around. No, really.

No matter what anybody says, changes to marauders are overall good.
One more thing, if we are getting all this extra tank, can we get lvl 5 missions in highsec too?

I rather prefer my Kronos the way it is with rails. It can do Buzz Kill without even scratching the armor in 18 minutes, it can mwd quickly to the gate in AE, take down the gate spawn at range with sentry's and rails reasonable quick and utilize the 90% web + sentry's in stage 2 and 3 to kill everything from the warp in(total time of the mission is like 20 minutes, mostly by the low dps, what is actually still higher than your Blaster fitting).

I realize there is a certain use of ships that support doing it wrong(like fitting a cap booster, dual prop and blasters on a Kronos) and that can't be lost in any situation without being completely afk but I think it is a big mistake balancing the hulls around this, since it is pretty bad for people that fully utilize her marauders atm.

If you have to, at least leave the web bonus on the Kronos and Paladin and add your new falloff(useless for rails) and optimal(not worth the web strength for a lot of application in the Pala) bonus instead of the active tank bonus, It is not relevant with the bastion mod anyway and even without it currently not really of value to me(since you don't really need tank for L4 with the proper DPS and it is useless for other PVE like Incs anyway). Also do not gimp her speed and drone bay by default, if you have to bind this changes at the bastion mod(becoming a brick with a lot less dps with it) to leave people that will never fit it at least the option to keep her marauder as it is, instead of a horrible over tanked brick with bad dps.

You put both on the ship...

Well, the main thing is that most battleships have to make uncomfortable compromises to fit both a MJD and a MWD - that's two mid slots and a lot of CPU and PG.

My concerns are:

1) the drone bays are a bit stingy. At the very least the Kronos deserves an extra 25m3 of bay, so it can fly mediums and have a flight of lights (or whatever) in reserve.

2) Given that the resist profiles are not full T2 ones, and that these ships are supposedly not intended for full-on fleet actions (i.e. their lore doesn't support 'buffed resists vs. racial enemies'), they could be smoothed out somewhat. The Kronos and the Golem (and to a lesser extent the Vargur) have rather large resist holes that effective eat a module slot to fill that the Paladin (and maybe the Vargur) doesn't have.

3) The Paladin's cap bonus seems odd, given all the other ships have some kind of application bonus (tracking, painter bloom). It only works as a damage application bonus if the Paladin is cap-starved as a normal state of affairs if you lack Marauders V. As it's base cap recharge rate is considerably higher than that of an Apoc, it seems unlikely to be horribly cap-starved. However, I'm not sure what would be a good replacement, as lasers generally have pretty good tracking, so a tracking bonus might be too good, and it does mean that a skilled Paladin pilot will be able to be very free with MWD useage when not in bastion.

4) The Golem's bonus to painters means that while other Marauders have a bonus to DPS, the Golem instead has two bonuses to application. This isn't bad in and of itself (avoids homogenisation), but as the bonus also effectively says "And Thou Shalt Fill Thy Mids With Painters", which seems restrictive to me. I'd prefer a missile explosion velocity bonus. Yes, that would give the Golem radius and velocity bonuses, but as torps have awful radii, and both torps and cruise missiles have very poor explosion velocity, I don't think this would have unreasonable results.

Points 1&2 concern me more than 3&4.

Or you get scrammed and webbed by a cloaky T3, when the gank squad, including hictor jump in and warp onto you. The thing is, bastion or no bastion doesn't matter a damn, because you're going nowhere unless you have friends to help get those scrams off you. Really expensive ships running solo get ganked, and IME it doesn't really matter what special tricks they have unless it's something in the order of a nullified T3 (and of course they tend to suck at anything other than being stealthy and slippery). I don't really think having bastion makes marauders any more gankable than not, assuming normal caution is applied (aside from being really unlucky when a WH opens into your system). The nullbears that don't dock up as soon as they hear about a local spike a system over will get ganked, but they do anyway.

And yet Ytterbium's example fit featured short-range weaponry, with the MJD used to get into trouble rather than out of it.

The MJD in this context is unnecessary. Fitting a web in it's place would arguably provide superior kill rates. If the MJD drive is unnecessary, so is the MJD bonus.

I argue once again that marauders would be better served with a velocity bonus rather than a velocity nerf, if they are intended to engage NPCs at close range.

A velocity bonus would also give them better gank evasion characteristics in hostile space.