Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Just take a long hard look at all the Capital ships CCP.

Exactly, imagine if there were moros' using void, phoenix's using rage, naglfars using barrage, and revelations using scorch. By making T2 guns for capital ships, they'd give some more life into a ship class that was practically made obsolete by the supercarriers (Which still need a massive HP, Damage, and EW immunity nerf, but that's a separate discussion).

The reason why this wouldn't be a problem is due to the inherent weakness of a dread.

in a 100 man dread fleet, there is the dps of 100 dreads, but the defense of 1 (each dread relies on only itself (fleet boosts notwithstanding)).

In a 100 man supercarrier fleet, there is the dps of 100 supercarriers, and the defense of 100 supercarriers.

That, right there, is a massive balance problem. You can either reduce the capacity of supercarriers, or buff dreads so that their inherent weakness is offset by a massive dps increase.

CCP themselves admitted at the first fanfest that titans and supercarriers were never meant to be cost effective (supers are basically mini titans, as they require the same sov upgrades and a comparable amount of effort (when comparing them to carriers/dreads)). Paraphrasing, since i cant find the exact quote "Titans were never meant to be cost effective, it's a huge ****."

Which, if you think about it, is actually a good point.

Lets say that supercarriers are 3x as effective as carriers. An alliance with a large amount of supercarriers effectively proves that it has the isk and will to ignore cost efficiency, and go for far more "Blinged out" tools, that are not nearly as effective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVmS5uBgaEU

Edit: CCP Fanfest video, where they admit that Titans were never meant to be cost effective.

Because, simply put, the ROLE of dreadnaughts is to be a big gun, providing the workhorse and offensive power of alliances (how they were originally intended).

using your analogy, my issue is when 100 caracals can outperform 100 atrons at TACKLING, which is the core role of an atron.

By buffing the damage of dreads, and by nerfing supercarriers, you have a two-fold solution to the current supercapital proliferation problem.

1. smaller groups can actually impact larger standing supercapital fleets, even at a complete loss of their own.

2. larger groups are forced to use dreadnaughts as their primary offensive power, which not only forces them into a position for 5 minutes or more at a time (no more warping off as soon as a neut enters system for POS shaving), but which also ensures that when a fight concerning a structure DOES happen, the defending side KNOWS that there will be a fleet around their tower/structure that will have the defense of ONE dread (thus allowing a group to actually pull off "Attrition" style battles).

This will decrease the size of fleets in large engagements, as for the heavy lifting, capital/sov bashing structures, a single dreadnaught's worth of defensive power is available, and gives only offensive bonuses for a large group.

I understand that your alliance has sunk a great deal of income into building supercarriers, but surely you realize what the continued supercapital proliferation has done (since they were changed in the Dominion expansion). It has forced 0.0 into two major coalitions, because ships that can warp off whilst deploying the offensive power of a dread, and gain defensive power with increased numbers.



Do you know what happened the last time there was a fleet comperable in isk value, consisting of dreadnaughts, that tried to take down a supercapital fleet?

HED-GP, and the server literally could not handle the numbers required, and the dreads died, often without loading grid.

It was 600 dreadnaughts vs 150-200 supers and another 100 carriers, and the dreadnaughts all died in a fire, due to the server being INCAPABLE of handling it.

Did I miss a memo where dreadnaughts were in the role of damage dealers, but supercarriers were not?

It would only be a comparable role if the Atron was a low damage tackle, and the Caracal could both move and tackle like an Atron but deal damage and tank like a cruiser. Which it can't.

Exactly what role do you think supercarriers hold after your proposed changes? It's obviously not damage, since they will deal half of what your dreads are likely to (which would only take maybe a 25% increase in dread damage). It's obviously not heavy spider tanking, since you outright stated that equal numbers of dreads should easily punch through an equal number of supertanked spider Aeons. It's not being sturdy DPS, since they can easily be defanged by killing their single flight of fighter bombers.

What is it?



I'm sure it had absolutely NOTHING to do with CFC/RUS jamming literally 1800 players in subcaps, mainly lag inducing Dominixes into system. Not a damn thing. CFC/RUS totally didnt say aterwords "Damn we probably could have won that if we didn't crash the server with our subcaps and instead sent in our dreads first." Nope. CCP totally didn't say "Hey guys, 1800 domis kind of fucks the server, ok?"

The server can handle a 1500 man fight with relative ease. Especially when the majority of the players involved are dreadnaughts instead of Dominixes or Ishtars.



My alliance is so insanely light on supercaps and caps it's silly. Today during our primetime an FC called for dreads and got 4 people. I assure you of all the things we have in abundance, supercaps are not one of them. Nor will I likely ever fly one, they just don't appeal to me.

EVE has been divided into two main coalitions + Russians on the side since long before Dominion. Since IT alliance ruled as early as 2005, there has always been a group ascendant and one another striving to kill them. And then the Russians on the side. Nullsec coalitions are a result of the tendency of players to congregate into ever increasing groups for safety combined with the relatively small rewed of conquering marginally better sov compared to the effort required. Trying to pin it on supercaps is quite bullshit, as the forces that drive players towards it would still exist even if you were to remove all caps and up tomorrow.

I'm just tired of seeing people look at groups that have worked to get to where they are, invested massive amounts of ingame time, skill, and effort into building their ingame arsenal and the support network to go with it, and then whine everywhere cause they can't realistically win against them with an equal number of people. Yes I'm looking at you Mr "Let me suicide cheap ships into the second most hardened ships into the game and kill 30% of them at 7% of their loss"

The servers can handle them fine. They produce no more lag than an ordinary carrier and only slightly more lag than a Dominix.

A Talos can deal a massive amount of damage in a glass cannon format. A Megathron can deal nearly as much damage as a Talos, but is far tankier and has more utility than a Talos.

Your are insisting that since a dread's role is a damage dealer, that no other ship can also deal large amounts of damage and should all be nerfed as so not to compete with the dread. This is just plain silly. The inferiority of the Talos to the Megathron does not mean the Mega should be nerfed, nor is the inferiority of the dreadnaught to the Supercarrier direct reason to nerf it.

P.S: many of the major groups in EVE started out as little to no capital power, newbro friendly, throw subcaps at everything and explode gloriously groups.

Yet somehow, they managed to take sov and grow into large groups with capital power over time. Goons started that way. So did TEST, and Brave, Nexus Fleet that later rolled into Nulli, and the fledgling PFR. Probably a lot more I can't name off the top of my head or from before I started to play.

You don't need supercaps to take sov. You only need supercaps if you wish to fight toe to toe without allies, using equal numbers against an established group that uses supercaps, in an effort to wrench their space away by force and not diplomacy or alliance.

And if you want that, suck it up and get over it. EVE is not so kind of a place as to spoon feed you the ability to beat enemies that are richer, more prepared, better equipped, higher skilled, and willing to risk far more assents than you without you even bothering to bring greater numbers.

P.P.S: Anything you can use to fight a big blob can be used by the big blob against you more effectively than you can use it.

A Megathron hull requires around double the materials of a Talos to make. For which it receives a greater tank and fitting capability.
Glass cannon to tank + similar levels of cannon. Doubled the construction requirements.

If you want to let Dreads receive RR so they scale with remote reps I'm totally fine with that, as long as they require a similar 50% of the construction requirements of a supercarrier. Or perhaps we could remove the ability of supercarriers to recieve remote reps while they have fighters deployed, but drop their construction requirements down to double that of a dread. I'd totally go for glass cannon 5 Bil isk supercarriers. Or we could mix and match. 5 Bil isk Supercarriers with a dreadnaughts DPS, and a supercarriers tank, but unable to receive remote reps with drones deployed. You know what? Supers would still wreck dreads. More supercarriers would die ofc, but they would be easier to make in the first place.

Dreadnaughts already deal as much damage as a supercarrier, at an end cost of roughly 1/25th that of a supercarrier, and their primary downside is their glass cannon status that means you need to bring roughly double or more of the enemies number in order to go head on against an enemy supercarrier fleet. I'd say that's a hell of a good tradeoff.

But you don't want any inconvenience. You want super DPS higher than a supercarrier on each dread. You want the dreads to stay cheap and insurable. You want the ability to punch through enemy reps on their pimpfit spidertanking larger ships than yours with your equal numbers in your cheap ships, and most of all, you want the enemy supernerfed because boo hoo you don't feel like you should need to have any big ships to deal with big ships, or actually bring more small ships than they have big ships to fight them.

You are not going to get your wishlist.

Unless you are open to the whole supercaps as 5 Bil isk dreadnaughts with drones and more tank thing and an inability to be repped while they have drone out. I'm totally down for that. Course you would still get wrecked in equal numbers of dreads vs supers, but I'm sure you would come whine about it more. Maybe eventually 10 rifters would take at leat 3 titans with them in a 10v10 fight, because bigger ships having more utility just isn't fair.

And as I have already explained, they are nowhere near cost effective. You can kill a supercap fleet with 20% of it's isk in dreadnaughts, assuming you are not stupid enough to shove 1800 people in subcaps in to strain the server to the breaking point first like CFC did in HED-GP.

You are making the assumption that because they are not isk efficent as compared to dreadnaughts, that they cannot be people efficient when your primary concern is the number of people you can field at once. And that since they are more capable than a dreadnaught on an individual basis, that there is an imbalance that needs to be corrected.

This is a false assumption. Given equal numbers, frigates will wreck noobships, cruisers will wreck frigates, battlecruisers will wreck cruisers, battleships will wreck batlecruisers, capitals will wreck battleships, and supercaps will wreck capitals.

To say "Oh supers are better than dreads on a per pilot basis, that means they need nerfing" is a fundamentally flawed assumption because you are comparing apples to oranges.

Dreads are not competetive with supers given equal numbers. Big ******* suprise. Want to guess what happens when you take equal numbers of rail Moas vs rail Megathrons? The same thing that happens when you take dreadnaughts against supers in equal numbers.



You started out this whole argument with your statement that you wanted your cheap glass cannons to be balanced against ships a full class size larger than they are. It's as silly as saying that since the Rail Megathron has more tank than the Rail Moa, Rail Moa should get a massive damage buff to let them punch through the Megathrons much greater tank, because otherwise they won't be competitive against equal numbers of Rail Megathrons.

Stop comparing apples to oranges. Dreadnaught is a glass cannon. It trades survivability for DPS. That is how it justifies it's massive damage output. To look at the glass cannon status and use that to thinly try and use it as an excuse for massive buffs on top of it's massive damage bonus so that it equally compares to supers is just silly, since it already got the tradeoff for it being so flimsy.

When Goons started, people were not fielding 100 Titans on the field.
When Goons started, they also did not win a military victory to take down the current champions, but did it with spies disbanding the alliance and stealing everything.

Saying 'because the goons did it years & years ago in a totally different meta, anyone can do it now' is patently false.
Dreads issue is that they can't do damage and get reps. And with the numbers of caps being fielded, this has become a major issue.

Tip.
Under heavy TIDI dread guns don't work.

Quite often they shoot without damage, don't use ammo, siege is not working how it should.
You are sitting in a ship that cannot receive remote reps , while on the opposite side you have fleet that is using remote capital reps to 1 ship in whole fleet.

Sorry i tried this multiple times.
Dreads and TIDI - this simply don't work.