Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Why not get rid of the dumb webber for BS and have TP bonus instead ? Webs on a stationary defensive ship? really ? also drone bay needs to be at least 50,

And for the golem , maybe have a bonus which affects tracking computers to affect missle explosion radius/ explosion velocity at 10% per level. So TC with tracking/range script will give 30 X 50% = 15 explosion radius or 15 explosion velocity at max level depending on script.

I'm really starting to like my idea of 5th turret/launcher hardpoint with bastion module requiring a turret/launcher hard point. Here's how I would set it up.

Role Bonus: 80% bonus to large weapon damage, 100% bonus to range and velocity of tractor beams, 70% reduction in Micro Jump Drive reactivation delay

This would produce the equivalent of 9 active weapons if you fit a weapon in each slot, while having 7.2 active weapons with a bastion module fitted. This would allow you to balance the bonuses and drawbacks of the bastion module against 1.8 effective weapons instead of against what you can fit in a utility high slot. Now that you are replacing something of great value, the bonuses and drawbacks can be much more interesting.

As it stands now, the bastion module has to be balanced when compared to another utility module:

• Drone Range - worthless with the current drone bandwidth and bay)
• Nuet/Nos - great utility for PVP and some using Nos in PVE
• Remote Repair/Boost - without a range boost this is lackluster
• Energy Transfer - no range boost
• Smart Bomb - decent close range support considering the new drone stats
• Regular Cloaking Device - Useful in some situations

* Please add to this list if I overlooked something

The current bastion module has some extreme drawbacks because when compared to what it can replace it would always be used if it didn't. The bonuses it provides far out shines the items listed above, thus enter the immobility and no remote assistance. If you paired the module against something of real value such as number of active turrets, you can now provide real, useful bonuses without resorting to including drastic penalties that eliminates its use in most scenarios except level 4 mission running.

He wants to avoid running gates with his pimped Marauder in null-sec, obviously. And BlackOps don't have the punch and tank of Marauders.[/quote]

Black-Ops are also next on the rebalance queue per Ytterbium over here, along with Electronic Attack Frigates and then probably the various over and under-used pirate-hulls.



Different but similar. These ships receive heavy bonuses to a set of modules as opposed to simply being able to equip one module that makes the hull useful like a Dreadnaught with Siege Mode. Even Carriers don't compare since they can be extremely useful in a variety of roles without ever fitting a Triage module.

Also the Vagabond probably doesn't belong on your list since most Cruisers rely on a prop-mod of some sort, and the hull has no bonuses to prop-mods.



And there are going to be trade-offs on the module for every one of those "Strong bonuses" or on the hull like we've seen with the loss of the repair bonus in the current iteration.



For a very specific type of warfare yes, but you still see Battleships used to a greater or lesser extent all over Low-Sec and even in Null.

Mobility is certainly useful but it's not the end of the line for ship balance. You can be immobile as long as you have other things that make up for it, like a thick tank and good damage projection and application.

Not every Battleship hull, T2 or otherwise, should be modeled after the Machariel.

Also you can bet money that if Marauders had been the best thing for the job that's what PL would have dropped. They're a perfect example of a group with enough resources to bring the best thing for a job if they really want that job done, no matter how much it costs.

It's an interesting concept but I think it would lead to Bastion being over-powered and put the hulls into a DPS race with the Pirate Battleships. You'd essentially be giving the ships 10 effective turrets of damage (even ignoring the 25% damage bonus from ship skills) and reducing their damage bonus to compensate would result in a 4 turret setup doing less DPS than any T1 Battleship which probably isn't worth the cost or application.



And I countered your points, to which you failed to respond (some 80+ pages back if I recall).

CCP have since buffed blaster ships and right now they're almost as fast as comparable Minmattar ships while having higher agility (again, see previous counter for numerical examples). Overall they are in a better relative state to other hulls than they were 5 years ago.

CCP's original logic with both the web nerf and the speed nerf that precipitated it was very sound. Overall you seem to be implying, quite against evidence, that Blaster Battleships are in a worse state than any other Battleship hull and have been for the last ~5 years.

If webs were limited to one per ship then the 90% webs might somehow be justified, but as things stand it's hardly required to catch and hold a comparably sized ship and mostly serves to utterly destroy any smaller ship that gets within your web-range.

As for a resist bonus, that would just lead to absurd levels of tank on the order of Command Ships and for self-repair the local rep bonus is actually superior.



Except again, with low overall EHP you can just break their tank with DPS, either from short or long-ranged guns, and they'll burn down very very quickly. For the first proposal ~3-4 blaster battleships would be required on most, for the current iteration it's only 2-3 in Bastion. Or you can just neut them out, if they're using an ASB tank then they've either chucked most other utility too fit that or they're running a single ASB and you just have to run them out of cap-boosters. Either way it's not infeasible for 3-4 battleships to blow through the shields on an ASB Vargur before it can do a rep cycle at which point armor and hull damage will kill it before it runs out of cap boosters.



Yes, this has been brought up in various forms. They've been given the full T2 resistances for their empire, which counter their racial enemies. This would not be an issue if they still had the local repair bonuses.

As a side note, if another group of Marauders is ever done I would have to say the natural hulls for a "transform into a defensive Bastion" ship would be the former Tier 3 BS.

To me the blocky and heavily armored Abaddon, Hyperion, Rohk, and Maelstrom would visually be perfect for bits and pieces to expand out into a defensive fortification (especially the Abaddon and Rohk).

Also, I hope that part of the animation includes plates or panels dropping down over the "vulnerable" engines. That would help explain the ships immobility and toughness in Bastion Mode.

Why is it so unreasonable to have marauder pilots train one more skill to get the most out of their ship? In what PvE content are these ships going to become so useless that players stop using them altogether if their rep bonus is replaced? In fact, why is the rep bonus sacrosanct to begin with? I get that current proposition has them losing 37.5% reps on (only) racial NPC's when they're out of bastion mode, but that alone is not such a great amount to render the ship useless by any stretch of the imagination. Especially when so many (T1) ships without rep bonuses have no issues tanking the exact same content. By the same token, your entire reasoning to retain the rep bonus is because of the ship's home region rats, yet the T2 resist profile would allow the ship's tank to perform much better in a majority of other regions in the game. Which raises another point, I would wager that a very healthy majority of Paladins and Vargurs are also flown outside of their home faction space. You would deny a (likely much larger) group of players the benefit of T2 resists over the rep bonus, simply because a(n even smaller) group of players use those two ships only in their home regions? Where is the sense in that?

It may also be worth bringing up the Armageddon at this point. Players had to (potentially) train a completely new set of skills to get the most out of this ship when they changed it. Miraculously the ship is still being used today, even after such a drastic change to the hull.

"fast" wasn't just in terms of velocity, but reaction time - referring in the sense that "whatever they do it must be done quickly"

takes less time for cruiser gangs to move to and from a target several systems away than a battleship, easier to chase down people over many systems.

and with the bastion loads the dps battleships have to get close enough, without bastion range bonuses most of these marauders can already fire effectively at near on 150 km with close range weapons, afterwards this'll be pushed out to near 170 - a standard t1 battleship with close range guns will function at a max of 50-60 km and a pirate BS at about 100 (yes damage reduction over extreme range applies but that's still a damn long way to be slow boating under fire)

let alone the idea that these ships will be able to effectively carry heavy artillery weapons with the fitting requirements - props to anyone that manages to survive the journey of approaching the marauders sitting off the gate camping, then surviving again after they MJD off into the distance when you get 50 km from them -.- (the scenario i worry about when saying 'the only effective way to remove these things is with artillery')

You're right about the hull bonus. I dropped it out because i usually compare the nightmare to the paladin (bit of a laser head apparently). I agree that it would take some effort to balance my value equation. However, the apparent dev value equation is even more difficult. It doesn't take much to easily over power a 4th utility high slot so you wind up having drawbacks that are almost equally bad as the bonuses are beneficial.

Basically I'm talking about equating the bastion module bonuses and abilities to 20% damage compared to 5 turrets or 10% damage compared to the TQ version of the Marauder. The combination of 12.5% damage increase over existing TQ hulls coupled with the removal of the tanking bonus would at least smooth out some of the PVE mission issues. I think that would be a fair trade from an efficiency stand-point. With the added damage, the total incoming dps would drop quickly. I think 12.5% would be enough to reduce the volley count on some of the tougher cruisers, battle cruisers, and battle ships.

Going to break this up because there's a lot of different points in one 'paragraph'...



I am honestly not sure where you got this since it's certainly not in that large block of text you quoted.

If you're referring to the Bastion, then I would very much prefer the Bastion Module to be a mostly self-contained set of trade-offs that are balanced against the Marauder hulls (not all trade-offs are balanced for all ships) rather than a module that rounds out an otherwise incomplete hull and is largely required for the ship to function usefully.

This is simply my preference because I believe it makes for a more rounded ship and more balanced gameplay overall.



I went into this in a great deal of detail a number of pages back but I'll sum up the main points for you.

First, a majority of T1 ships do, in fact, have trouble tanking a lot of higher damage missions. They have to warp out, possibly repeatedly, if they can't bring down incomming DPS fast enough.

Second as has been pointed out repeatedly the local repair bonus lets you juggle around modules more freely and/or fit a less shiny tank which makes you less of a gank target. As things stood before the local-repair buffs of the last patch a dead-space tank was pretty much a requirement for efficient mission running. There are certainly exceptions to this but not very many.

As for your claim that they get a significant buff against a majority of other rats, that's somewhat up for debate. As I pointed out previously though, you're generally best off fighting your faction's rats in that faction's ship because you can hit them in their weakest resists. This is less true for the Golem and Vargur but the Vargur also gains the least out of its resists since Thermal is only a primary damage type on Mercenaries (generally not hard to tank anyway) and laser ships. On the flip side the Kinetic on the Paladin is hurt by most Kinetic damage enemies not taking as much damage from lasers as other weapon systems.

This creates an inequality between the various Marauders where the Kronos and Golem are left with a flat buff to their resists for most missions while the Vargur and Paladin are forced to choose between dealing more damage or tanking better and still won't tank as well as the Kronos and Vargur for most rats anyway.

If they were keeping the local repair bonus this wouldn't be as much off an issue. The inequality would still exist to some extent but at least these ships wouldn't be getting a straight downgrade from their current stats on TQ.

It's also worth pointing out that given this flat downgrade you're generally going to be better off swapping to a Pirate Battleship for the higher DPS since you're not really tanking any better.



Yes, but the Armageddon's old role was pretty sub-standard anyway. It was an intro level Battleship and with the skill requirements moved around and the other hulls rebalanced it would have been left as little brother to either the Abaddon or the Apocalypse.

On the other hand in its new role it has quite a strong use as a dedicated cap-warfare ship with strong drone damage which is quite useful in a variety of PvP situations.

Overall this is hardly comparable to the Marauders which have something of a dedicated little niche already, they just need to fill out that niche better and be expanded into other roles, not be moved to a completely different part of the balance map.

You never replied to my points here:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3570733#post3570733

But I understand now that is because you have no background or experience flying blaster Battleships and therefore are in no position to comment on changes that occured before your time - concession accepted.

Edit: You ducked/misunderstood my point about self-repair for 'high end stuff' - it's totally useless, as Incursions e.t.c ('High end stuff') are all based around remote repair....