Player Features and Ideas Discussion

A small whinge re: Amarr ships.

• Contrast Sabre and Heretic (dictors). On the one hand neatly aligned bonuses that are all on the pilot's primary racial weapon system. On the other, mixed bonuses on the pilot's tertiary weapon system. Rockets? Srsly?


• Contrast Broadsword and Devoter (hictors). On the one, bonuses aligned just as they were on the Sabre. Ideal. On the other, bonuses switch to a different weapon system. Fortunately - I guess - the racial primary system. The only good thing to say about it is that weapons aren't very important to a Hictor's role anyway. (Which rather begs the question, why not bonus something else?) It particularly smarts that the Devoter was at least tanky as f*** until the recent resist nerf. A heavy-handed measure that punished Devoter for sins it did not commit.


• And then the battleships - pride, or I should better say lions - of the Golden Fleet. Put bluntly: train for something else.


• Thankfully the T3 is... actually no. The Legion is widely regarded as the weakest of the T3s.


• The Pilgrim is not horrible - quite tanky and decent role bonuses. Yet, still, generally the weakest in its job out of all the cloaky recons. The Curse is threatening in specific situations: essentially suffering a conditionality that makes its hard to justify investing in. Contrast the Falcon - which dramatically affects fight-flee decisions. Or the Arazu and Rapier. Both useful ships.


• The Oracle is conditionally good, although grossly over-shadowed by the Naga and Talos.


• The Purifier (bomber), Retribution (assfrig), and Arbitrator and Omen (T1 cruisers) are decent and I think stand up quite well as they are. The Anathema (cloaky-prober) is as good as any other. The Harbinger and navy version of same is also decent.


• The AHACs have their own issues. I'm not really sure what the Sacrilege is for right now. But the Zealot is one Amarr ship that stands out as solid in role.

Part of the issue may be armour vs shields. With the groupthink seeming to favour the latter a bit more these days. But also when I look at Amarr ships I see a jumble of bonuses, highly mixed weapon systems, and very conditional ewar. I would advocate at the very least ensuring the core ship line have aligned weapon bonuses. Or if the idea is that Amarr is supposed to be skill-intensive, then where is the payoff for that?

Another part is of course carving out design space. I'm not advocating that Amarr ships be stronger than the other races. Of course not. But they do certainly need some love. Especially the battleships. But also the force recons, hictors and dictors, and T3.

How to fix Amarr:

1. Remove the 10% laser cap use bonus/level from all Amarr ships that still have it, except the Revelation. Replace this bonus with a tracking bonus, or if the ship already has a tracking bonus, an optimal range bonus.
2. Replace all RoF bonuses with damage bonuses.

This fixes every weak Amarr ship except the Legion, without boosting any of the Amarr ships that are already strong. The strong Amarr ships are pretty much universally the ones that don't have the super-underpowered 10% laser cap/level bonus. For example, the Abaddon, Apoc, nOmen, nAugoror, Curse, Sacrilege, etc. Lasers are strong enough to be worth the cap they drain, what gimps Amarr ships is wasting a bonus for a very small benefit.

Also, the Zealot is phenomenally weak and an RLM Cerberus is better than it at literally everything. It can also be soloed in any configuration by basically any frigate, which is absolutely hilarious.

I would like to note that several of the ships given as examples for strong Amarr ships while talking on the strengths of lasers either have vastly compensating damage bonuses or don't even use lasers.

The Curse and Sacrilege both don't use lasers, being Khanid ships, and the nAugoror and nOmen both have a reduced amount of turrets with a large damage bonus to compensate (if you look at the Naugoror it has close to in class effective turrets with a cap use bonus, in essence).



Getting rid of the cap use bonus would kinda gimp the Zealot. I really do appreciate that the bonus somewhat makes up for the only middling cap regen compared to other HAC's. Of course that could be repaired by buffing the cap regen...

by those who use them wrong, they are. worst tank vs gank fits I've managed so far were with lokis.

Thread closed.