Player Features and Ideas Discussion

PG/CPU rigs don't have any drawbacks.

I wouldn't call it "powerful". Its more about being able to move with your group that you're supporting, and not slowing them down, or being too fast. Which is kind of the point of a "battlecruiser", it should be able to keep up with its cruiser fleet. Or not outrun its battleship brethren.

Sig increase isn't much of an issue, so i think that will be more favorable. Especially when BC/BS already have the sig of a moon. Not to mention, this is a "tiny" interceptor nerf. All these travel fit ceptors with i-stabs might actually be caught by the sensor boosted loki's that keep crying on the forums.

Oh, well then, i guess let the sensor boosted tears continue.

The fitting ones, in fact I'm 99% sure all the "core" ones do not, including the egress ones which are very powerful for spider tanks.

I'm wholly convinced it's a powerful thing so much as a horrible handicap/straight up not fun to spend most of the evening in a warp tunnel/have the entire fleet waiting on you. Were battleships the final word in subcap power, demolishing everything smaller (I do not think the should be, for clarity) the yes the warp speed would absolutely factor in keeping them in check. As it is though...not so much. They take ages to arrive and are fairly lacklustre in the current meta (ironically, if BC had a strong presence, there would be a greater call for BS )


@Spugg Galdon: People would just use command ships, no point in doing it half arsed and an OGB can sit in a command ship out the gate.

Sorry but GRAPHS and eve when a pilot is present are VERY different scenarions.

And minamtar ships are NOT more agile. They are less agile. The minamtar speed advatage means nothing (with a very few exceptions), because to be combat efficient you need to stay not much outside close range tackle from your enemy (bad dps requires that).. so if you keep your prop mod overheated... you will burn and die. Ifyou wait to react with overheat, you WILLGET CAUGHT, because gallente ships gain speed MUCH MUCH faster when you overheat and by the time you react ( at LEAST 2 seconds later... it is too late.


Real combat in eve (at least on small scale warfare where mobility of this type is relevant) is not like graphs. You need to take into account reaction time by players, server ticks, overheating, the need to kill thigns before they get to gate ... etc...

Which means they either need more fitting space, to make the oversized props slightly more viable as a standard, or a mass reduction and agility modifier tweak. As the mass reduction (with a corresponding agility modifier tweak to keep align similar) also makes nanos and i-stabs much more effective but the MWD bonus mass hurt more, I am also in favor of this. It means that without a base speed increase, a BC could outdo a CA in a straight line sprint, but that the cruiser can use agility and piloting wiles to shake the faster but clumsy BC until it can disengage the MWD and re-approach. Although this could lead to bad things, like BCs with lower mass than cruisers (another place I would like to see a similar change, so prop mods hurt agility more but move things faster)



BCs currently have 2 major advantages over HACs. They are T1, with BPOs in easy reach of a dedicated newbie, and they get good insurance payouts compared to t2/faction hulls. so,

While they have more native tank than a cruiser, the lower agility and high sig mean that they take way more damage before resists. While BCs can get higher resists due to more slots.....

Buuuut while they have more slots, but need more support slots as they can be outrun if not nano-fit, damped hard if without sebo, TD'd to death if it doesn't have a TC, etc. Most cruisers are more able to fly in a way which reduces the ability of their opponent to negate their damage, because

They have lowish agility and speed, so you better be pointed in the right direction when you hit the prop. You better not run into a scram with a micro as your main prop, or boom, you hit zero speed in no time flat, which sucks because:

You have ~20% more DPS, but have trouble applying it to many common cruiser hulls, so if they aren't running a weapon with a near identical profile, good luck. Kiting cruiser beats brawling BC by kiting it to death. Brawling cruiser is almost as fast and much more agile than most kiting BCs, with more DPS. Generalist cruiser gets it's choice due to the huge role positioning plays in solo, or the better mitigation from sig/speed tank than any BC.

Now, how do we make them distinct and competative, without erasing all of these differences.....

For this, we should probably take a look at what fueled the age of battlecruisers online. This was a time when drakes were the major fleet ship, canes were the biggest solo boat, and it wasn't uncommon to see brutix or harbies flying around in groups. These lovely ships weren't the quick and fragile frigates, nor the medium lumbering battleships. They were able to grind cruisers to dust by doing almost everything a cruiser could, and more, with some small tradeoffs that could be fit around. In short, like the pike or musket in their time, or the modern assault rifle, they were versatile medium weight weapons that could be gotten into action as a reaction or used offensively even with only mediocre training.

The first thing that kicked them hard was the loss of much of the performance in the BC tieracide/nerf combo, which meant the gap between them and cruisers was much reduced, and the versatility that they were most prized for mostly went away.

Then warp speed changes hit, and they became too slow to be used effectively as a heavier defensive tool if not pre-positioned or when fighting on the ends of one's space. While this wasn't too much more of a nerf, these lovely ships were already falling out of favor for BSes as the blobs got bigger, solo got less common and the platforms themselves were hit in almost every vulnerability, falling especially prey to the loss of fitting room which had let them be very easily adapted to almost any purpose on the fly, without double and triple checking that everyone could fly the ship properly.

The real kicker was the cruiser tieracide, which brought up almost every cruiser's performance and closed the gap between almost every cruiser and battle cruiser, some particularly nasty t1 cruisers ending up with performance like the former battlecruisers.

So, this helps with giving them back some of the ability to be used in a versatile manner. Now if we could just get the room to make versatile fits with them.

Another thing that may help a LOT BC and battleships is a reevaluation of buffer modules sizes. What that means?

Right now the only plates used are 1600 on everything larger than a cruiser and on MOST t2 and t3 cruisers... extenders the same (large ones). That means 3/4 of the content in game on that area is wasted.


Myy view. Increase the fittings AND HP bonus of ALL plates and extenders. Enough that 1600 plates are unfittable with realistic fits on cruiser sized hulls... but giving more HP for the ships that canfit them ( that is a HELP for battleships and BC).

Most cruisers would drop to 800 plates and some to 400 plates (but these as well would add MORE EHP and use more PG). At the end cruiser sized hulls would drop to a place where most use 400 plates ( giving much more EHP than now, closer to what 800 do now) some would use 800 plates ( t2 and t3 ones) giving something between current 800 and 1600 plates. And 1600 plates would be territory of battleships and BC that decide to go heavy on tank. The penalties of mass and signature radius need to be bumped a bit as well.


Same logic applies to shield exnteders, with the addendum that extenders need a modifier to recharge rate.


The end result is that Battleships get a real advantage on EHP when they focus on it, and BC as well. Cruisers sized hulls will lose a BIT of EHP, but not that much since they will move a bit faster than now. That solves a LOT of the Battlecruiser combat capability, because they will be able to go 1600/large and heave good ehp, or go 800/medium and have a lot of spare fittings and more mobility. Battleships on other hand can go dual Large/dual 1600 and get a LOT of EHP.

And MORE CONTENT IN THE GAME BECOMES ONCE AGAIN RELEVANT!

I agree with you here. Module balance is incredibly skewed, especially when it comes to tanking modules. Your suggestion is the most logical ,one caveat, XL-Shield Extenders Please and these can be created by shifting everything to the right and removing micro shield extenders (why do they even exist?).

I also have an issue with the naming of shield extenders and shield boosters/armour reps (in general, I have an inssue with any module in game that has a small/medium/large prefix).
I'd far prefer that they were called something more like:
Small Shield Extender -> 250 GJ Shield Extender
Medium Shield Extender -> 1000 GJ Shield Extender

Similar to armour plates being sized by their thickness not by an arbitrary "Small/Medium/Large".

If you suspect bad things coming your way, pre-align. If you absolutely must align quicker, fit a nano/polycarb/aux thruster. Ive found the best way to navigate in a BC is mmjd. Longpointed while aligning to next gate? No problem, just jump out of it.

For me, my drake is setup to kill dedicated scram tackle. Once they die, i moonwalk away from all their longpoints. So even though BCs are not the fastest aligning ships, they can still surprise most small gangs if you fit correctly. At this point, they almost require a MMJD to survive.

The problem is they still require a slot even if you slash the fitting requirements.
And most BC struggle to give up 2 slots for prop mods. If the MJD/MMJD had some normal prop mod function AND a Jump function, they would be much better mods, even if the AB/MWD were better mods for pure normal drive function.

.....and this is my problem with BC's... they do look like very good ships on paper. I will link some of my fits for ridicule but the stats are very good and when you consider that people need to get a scram on you to hold you down they're very scary in that extreme close range.




The main issues I find are trying to use that MJD offensively. To do that you need to be able to lock a target at 100km to have them pre-locked to instantly surprise sex them on landing. To do that requires a large sacrifice of a slot and the minmatar ships simply can't do it.

Shield ships also find it obscenely difficult to fit two prop mods, tackle and tank.