Player Features and Ideas Discussion

After the recent mobility nerf/buff I've heard many people express that battleships are not as PVP-viable compared to HACs, Command Ships and T3s that apply damage much more flexibly and with greater mobility.

Do you agree or disagree that something is wrong? If you think something is wrong with battleships, what would you change to improve them?

In my limited experience, they seem underutilized by basically everyone. Sometimes I see one playing station games. Whether they have a problem isn't for me alone to decide, but I personally don't want to fly one. I'll kick this off with my own thoughts, but consider these secondary to the larger discussion of battleship PVP viability:

1) The addition of MJDs indicated CCP felt battleship mobility was too low. I don't personally like MJDs, I think they feel cheap. I do acknowledge they make things interesting, but the mechanic just doesn't give me good vibes. You know, "surprise, they got away". I think they need mobility in some other form, but I'm at a loss for exactly how to do that.

2) Battleships with drone damage bonuses can use mediums/lights to efficiently counter frigates and cruisers. With the relative scarcity of battleship-sized targets in my own experience, that leaves large-turret-battleships in an uncomfortable place. If drone battleships can drone-down to hit smaller targets while keeping bonuses, why can't turreted battleships gun-down and keep their bonuses in the same manner? For quick comparison, a small-rail medium-drone Dominix deals 373 paper dps with good drone tracking, whereas a small-rail medium-drone Megathron deals 293 paper dps without bonused tracking from drones or guns. If it were allowed to apply its rate of fire and tracking bonus to small railguns, it would deal 338 paper dps with better application. This is not to say such a change would be balanced, but is intended to highlight the imbalance between drone-battleships and turreted battleships in dealing with medium and small targets.

Please, share your thoughts on battleship viability and my opinions.

This issues surrounding battleships have more to do with bombs than the fact that battleships are slow. The ability of T3 cruisers to reach battleship sized EHP totals, range, and damage levels while still retaining cruiser sized signature, application, and speed doesn't help either.

What if rather than buffing battleships, bombs got the nerf?

Reduce bomb resistances and EHP so that you can't launch as many at once.

T3 cruisers , HAC's, ABC's, some faction cruisers .. there are so many alternatives that under most circumstances are better all round for the task.

solutions
- T3 cruisers need tank and dps nerfs, especially the T2 resists
- HAC's, mainly ishtar and cerberus offer lots of dps and high resists/low sig/good speed mainly ishtar needs the nerfs
- ABC's offer battleship dps at a lower cost with more mobility .. pushed to T2 might help with this and slight dps nerf
- faction cruisers like gila, VNI offer plenty of dps and tank with low sig and mobility.. some nerfs here needed

Battleships are used for roles where no other ship to fill that role exists.

For example, in Wormholes the only two battleships you will see in PvP are Armageddon and Bhaalgorn, because no smaller ship does energy neutralizing that well. For every other role in a fleet, there is a cruiser that does it better.

A few thoughts here since you took the time to post. I do agree that t1 battleships are kind of meh for a number of reasons, but I don't think that CCP needs to go so far as to introduce a concept like downgunning or secondary batteries to make them work. A handful of tweaks to their on-grid performance would easily bring them to the point where bombs weren't such a hard counter and HACs weren't such stiff competition. T3s will probably be nerfed, but judging by the t3 destroyers and ishtar tweaks I don't think it's going to be very severe.

Battleships aren't completely useless though; they're still a lot of fun to fly, and if you've got links and implants you can mitigate many of their downsides and use manual piloting to do some truly amazing things. It takes a lot to make them powerful, but if you want to take the time and risk you can bring a lot of power to bear against an opposing gang. Tools that people think of as defensive, like the MJD and neut, can become offensive in the right circumstances, and allow you to line up the perfect shots.

I think for most stats they should probably see a 10-20% increase. Speed, native HP, cap regen, applied or raw dps etc. Endurance is a region that they suffer quite a bit in as they consume cap booster charges extremely fast relative to cruisers or frigates that rely on cap boosters, so I'd like to see a considerable increase in cargo capacity. Shield battleships could use quite a bit more ehp or a reduction in their sig rads, as they're not only extremely vulnerable to bombs, but are very easy to score perfect hits on, and are very hard to rep, even with shield logi landing at the onset of the cycle. It's pretty variable, with some stats only needing a smaller adjustment and others need a slightly larger one. James Baboli has written a pretty good thread where I and others go in to detail about suggestions to improve t1 battleships already, so I won't go in to terrible detail here except to say that I think that any buff should be fairly general, relatively moderate, and across the board.

Even adding enough survivability to endure one more bomb wave, or a enough to survive one or two more seconds under opposing alpha, or enough speed to get out of a bubble two seconds faster is a significant improvement. Bear in mind that they're also just t1 ships too.

These same people didn't fly BS before the mobility changes. BS have not been in wide use for solo/small gangs since CCP killed the 8 heatsink Geddon and cavalry Raven.

You can give BS as much love as you want it won't fix the one and only problem they have and which is always going to make them unfeasible in small scale or solo: players. As soon as they see a BS roam around alone, they flock to it and hammer it into the ground with the same vigor and enthusiasm as if it was an expensive capital.

Tier 3 Battleships with XL guns!

That is the entirety of my "idea" for PvP viable Battleships.