Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So, from the perspective of a WH occupant that generally prefers PVE content I have to say I’m just underwhelmed with the Stratios. I’m going to EFT warrior this ship because I fly a Gila so I should be able to compare numbers when applying the same play style.

My play style is to wait for small stuff and pick it off with light/medium drones, stay at range for the medium ships while I pick them off with heavy/medium drones and then fly in to short range and circle the Battle ships at 5k while pounding on them with heavies. This minimizes drone loss and maximizes effective DPS.

For this, my Gila usually has 100 shield/sec with ~80, 71, 78, 82 resists, 62k EHP, ~650 DPS, 560 m/s with an AB and a 225m sig. This is a passively tanked cap stable Gila. With drones alone I get just under 600 DPS, the missiles are only used to pull agro.

I can easily modify this spec to get 173 shield/sec with 78k EHP and over 500 DPS if I ditch the AB and the drone damage amp for another shield extender and a shield power relay.

Or, I can get 760 DPS by dropping to 76 shield/sec from swapping the Shield power relay for a second Drone Damage Amp. I still move 560 m/s in this spec as it keeps the AB and it is still cap stable.

There’s a lot of versatility there for clearing missions and WH sites and it take no ammo or chargers to run (unless you want another 50dps from wasting missiles), but you have to be careful with the drones. Because of this, when I look at the “balanced” Stratios I have to ask how much is a covert cloak really worth?

Keep in mind my design goals here are: Cap Stable, no ammo or charges, reasonable EHP to take the absurd Sleeper BS damage, and an omni tank. This is what will make the ship useful to me.

For tech 2 gear the best all-around fit I could come up with has these specs:
110 armor/sec but uses nanite paste with only ~75, 67, 67, 69 resists, 50k EHP, ~500 dps, 511 m/s with an AB, and a 150m sig. It’s not cap stable (but not far from it), and the 4 heavies only pull 380 dps.

So I get a smaller sig but a slower ship, that’s going to die faster, it takes significantly longer to kill stuff as the lasers have to track, and I had to use conflag to get the ship to 500 dps so I have a lot of up close fighting to do. Also, I’m going to loose more drones as orbiting at max speed at 5k around an enemy to scoop drones on a moment’s notice significantly reduces my DPS. This isn't an issue when slinging missiles in the Gila (still a waste of ammo, but at least you don't have to worry about reduced damage from your speed/transversal).

For a cloak, +10 to hacking, a probe bonus (for a launcher that I can’t fit at the same time as the cloak without taking another DPS loss), and a smaller sig I’m giving up 10k ehp, 25-35% of my DPS, 50m/s and cap stability. I don’t think it’s worth it. Swapping from a dedicated probing ship to a hacking ship to the Gila for fighting makes far too much sense when this requires refitting for each of those roles to be effective at them anyway.

I personally think this is underpowered compared to its brethren. Give it back the 5th heavy and 500 m^3 drone bay. Applying both effective heavy drone DPS and Laser DPS is near impossible without gimping your tank (speed) so while I love seeing the 700 dps number in EFT I know it’s not realistic. The Gila - with similar play style and limitations - reasonably does 584 DPS, or 650 in empire in L4 missions because missiles are also OP for PVE. This will reasonably do ~500 with the extra drone bandwidth. You have to give up a lot of tank to get that drone damage amp, and giving up that tank while maintaining minimal transversal on a target to maximize DPS is going to make the Stratios really squishy. Even if the Stratios has Gila bandwidth the Gila is still the better DPS drone boat.

The PVP aspect is a conundrum though. Cloaking is strong in PVP because you can wait for your target to get into a bad spot before engaging. This will effectively minimizes the chance they leave before you can lock them down and a 600+ DPS boat means the easier to fit buffer tank opens up a lot of gank options.

A reasonable option might be to remove a high slot (or two) and give it another low slot. Drones (even with only 4 heavies) are still the majority of the DPS. 1 Laser for starting fights, 1 probe, 1 drone link augmenter, and 1 cloak is sufficient when you are pulling just under 500 DPS with your drones alone.

Regardless, as is, this ship isn’t for me. It seems like it should be perfect for Wormhole exploration but execution wise I’m still going to have to return to base to reconfigure constantly and if I’m going to do that then I might as well just hop into a more specialized ship. Fixing this problem requires fixing the slot distribution issues, and by that I mean three types of slots is insufficient for categorizing ships the way you want. I.E. trying to give this ship enough mid slots that it can effectively equip analyzing equipment means that it has a lot of opens slots for EWAR, shield tanking, cap stability, or damage projection.

_WAter_

Still better than the tempest that cannot excel at any role.

From the dev blog ...

"Both of these ships will be on offer from all Servant Sisters of EVE corporations in the game, which means these will be the first ‘pirate faction’ ships available in high sec. This doesn’t come without a cost though. Only the Sanctuary Corporation, who are credited with actually creating the Stratios and Astero, will offer them at the normal pirate faction prices. If you get them from the Sisters of EVE Corporation in high security space get ready for a mark-up of up to 50%."

The Sanctuary Corporation doesn't actually exist in game, is it being added in Rubicon?

Sanctuary . Vigilant cost about 240 000 LP. If Stratios is 50 % more, it makes 360 000 LP. I hope they will nerf the ship so much, that no one will want to buy it. Cause I do ;) And I do not see any possibility ot earn those 360 000 LP in reasonable time frame. So please remove all turrets hard points, make all high slots utility slots. For eve online tourists like me it is the best ship to fly and make pictures ;)

Nooo, when? No no, I can't believe this is true

That is easy the slot layout doesn't allow a real shield tank and adequate damage mods, so to do any appriciable damage your have to shield tank and ignore a tank bonus.

And still do less damage than an armor tanked ishtar, with a bigger sig, worse resists, and slower.

Who would have guessed that?

Expect them complaining when we get SOE battleships that the ship cannot match mega firepower and maelstrom tank while warping cloaked.

Question, how much ISK and LP will the BPCs and and ships them selfs cost? Thanks.

I see what you did there.

Thanks for the info. So pretty much I should be able to get the ships and/or BPCs in Osmon I'm guessing.

I do think they just seeded the SoE ships on the test server as of now, no BPCs yet, but I have been known to be wrong,rarely haha,