Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Rather than pick apart bonus and stat allocations for battleships, or wade into "I wish" land, I'd like to open up a comprehensive thread about general battleship balance. This thread will focus more on roles rather than attributes for their current meta, and will hopefully try to seek something resembling a consensus about where they should go with the ships. Let's start by talking about the issues they have relative to other ships:


CONCERNS

"Battleship-sized weapons are too slow."

They are generally fairly clunky pieces of machinery, and don't exactly fare well against smaller ships. This was initially half-assed by giving most of them fairly decent sized drone bays, but currently the only setups that fare well against smaller ship sizes tend to either be drone-focused (which is another can of worms entirely) and have good ewar options, like the Armageddon or Scorpion.

"Battleship hp is not reflective of their vulnerability to vessels with higher mobility."

Currently the kite meta is king, and ships as slow as the battleship are more often then not big, squishy, sitting ducks. Battleship ehp is not noticeably higher than some of the elite cruiser or battlecruiser setups, and in the case of faction battlecruisers, have less base hp. This plus a lack of tracking options leave them extremely vulnerable to most of them being burned down by smaller targets quite easily, and further reveals the endemic problems with buffer tanking in battlecruiser and battleship classes. Active tanking is also suspect, although this is less of a problem in shield tanking than in armor tanking.

"Battleship cost is not related to battleship usefulness."

Case in point: Other than paper dps, why would you fly a battleship over a HAC, or other high-end cruiser? Currently the only major advantage battleships offer is increased damage projection and increased damage. Sniper ships tend to be favored more for this reason although for small to mid-sized PVP purposes ABC's tend to be used much more. Apart from PVE performance, there is little reason to use one over the other, excepting instances with drone ships like the Geddon, which not only negate the issue by having the option for bonused undersized weapons but uses its ewar effectively in regards to its cap warfare range bonus.

"The class is fairly homogeneous, and doesn't offer much variety"

To compare, cruisers get very clear class roles. Logistics, Electronic Warfare, Attack, and Combat. Battleships do not, even though an effort was made to move more in that direction. Currently the only disruption battleships are the Scorpion and Armageddon, the latter of which can only really be fielded out of the entire weight class as an effective solo boat.


Please add more concerns, or expand upon the ones listed.

Potential solutions to concerns will be listed below:

I feel James Baboli's thread on Battleship balance linked HERE would be a worthy read for you and it might be more profitable for you to continue on his basic platform since i have linked that one to various CSMers and through them to the developers.

Also its incredibly well reasoned and thought out with a well done google doc involving various cases...

I am trying to keep it alive and i have done all i can to make sure the powers that be read it.

At fanfest they did say they were looking into ways to make "big ships feel more fun" or something to that effect. Not sure what that plan is but given the BC warp stuff it feels like they are atleast AWARE of the problem...

yeah I gave it a bump too. I'm hoping that we can cover both macro and micro parts of the discussion with these threads. What are your thoughts on bringing battleships up to more distinct class lines in the way Cruisers behave?

I don’t think "making the numbers bigger" is how we should look at solving this though, and i especially don’t think nerfing cruisers en-masse is going to solve the problem.

Personally (and i have to admit this isn’t something i have hard numbers for) i think the problem is bombers, The natural enemy of big blobs of battleships is bombs, let’s be frank here it just is... Since bombing runs are fairly easy to set up (i have done it and am **** at pvp and especially **** at small **** pvp) you need to design doctrines on the "bomb survival scale" i.e. How many bombs does it take to wipe this fleet off the map?

Now so far this is all stuff I have heard from people whose expertise I trust, People who FC for major nullsec blocs in contexts where they had no reason to lie to me.

And based on "the math" the trick to surviving bombs is either A) utility highs with smartbombs in them (which pandemic did on their TFI doctrines in their bashing on test) or B) small sig high tanked and maneuverable targets (i.e. ishtars and tengus).

So having established that TANK isn’t going to make bombers not wipe out battleships like its going out of fashion since DBRB and/or Templeman N (and whoever else does bombers on an industrial scale) can always whistle up a few more guys quicker than you can throw more tank at battleships. Unless you do something utterly ******** like give battleships carrier ehp or something in which case meet the new fit of the month.

Then we reach the other side of the coin, Gank, Again here we run into the problem of "f1 warriorism" people run fleets the way they do because –simply speaking- IT WORKS! Orbit the FC or keep him at range or whatever and then press f1 whenever a broadcast shows up. If you're lucky you're in time and you get on the kill mail, if you're slow you don’t. Now we reach the problem point, since N+1 cruisers kill stuff just as well as n+1 battleships do the problem isn’t volley size, the 1400 maelstrom and tachyon fleets are gone for a reason. But since individual damage is less important than damage projection since rate of fire and all your friends can take up any slack you have in individual units damage output.

IE. 100 tengus locking in 5 seconds and shooting for ~500 every 4 seconds kill **** a lot more EFFICIENTLY than 100 battleships locking in 10+ seconds volleying for 1500 (assuming they even have the tracking to do that much) every 8-15 seconds.

The battleships might have a higher (theoretical) alpha but since all that matters is the total damage you do before the reps land on whatever you have just called primary rate of fire and lock times are a lot more important than whatever theoretical alpha advantage you might get out of the slower/bigger(and in my opinion cooler) ships.

Then there is also the thing that it doesn’t matter what your fleets theoretical alpha is if you have 1000 alpha fitted machariels shooting at a target with 100k ehp whatever damage you do after that first 100k is wasted, and again here, smaller chunks firing more quickly is much more useful that one big all in knockout punch. As the smaller chunks of damage allow it to be projected more piecemeal. This could of course be partially handled by splitting guns into 2 stacks instead of one big one and calling 2 primaries instead of just the one. But I doubt anyone is going to do that, it’s too much more work.

As such I feel I don’t think “make numbers bigger” or “make other people numbers smaller” is how you solve this.

In my ideal world we’d see some kind of system where mixed doctrine fleets would work better, but let’s face it who would want to deal with that kind of hassle just getting enough logi is hard enough as is. And since you don’t really need dedicated webbing ships and stuff in that line if you have enough tracking and/or projection to just alpha targets off the grid.

I get this might not have been the most helpful post since I don’t come up with a solution but I feel understanding a problem before you start fiddling with a solution helps a bunch. But then I am an engineer IRL.

In regards to the post above mine,
Added subtypes might help variety but personally I feel a battleship’s role is TO DO BATTLE, screw tackling stuff and a battleships job (much like the bigger dreadnaught) is simply to do as much dps as possible before it dies using whatever weapon system its fitted with. Scorpions and Geddons might fall a bit outside that mold since scorps at least don’t do damage (and should never be fitted for that IMO) but in my opinion that’s not what they are there for. My ideal battleship is more or less an Abaddon, rokh, Megathron and the others of that ilk. I am here, I have a boatload of guns, and I am now going to reach out and touch you.

“Show me on the rifter where the battleship touched you. This is a safe environment and they can’t come and hurt you” as it were.

1. Battleships have several times the EHP of HACs.
2. You can't kite sentry drones. HACs have no chance against sentry domis. You can't really kite Tachyons either, but unless you're in Navy Apocs those aren't viable weapons.

It's pretty hard to beat Domis on cost-effectiveness if you can force your enemy to engage you. There's no hard counters and the soft counters (brick-tanked Tengus and Vultures) are much more expensive.

The real problem with battleships is that compared to the Dominix they're all complete ****. The sentrydomi has better DPS, better range, and better application than any other gun BS, and since it doesn't need powergrid to fit its weapons or cap to fire them, you can shove a gigantic tank on there, and what the hell fit some tracking disruptors and/or sensor dampeners plus 2-3 utility highslots as well.

1: HACs have substantially better mitigation against most weapon systems. So while the battleship can soak up more damage, a HAC takes less damage and thus needs less logi.

2: Totally can kite sentries. Just need something absolutely ridiculous to do so.

3: Drones are a problem in all size categories. Drone bonused ships are able to push their primary DPS without making any fitting sacrifices. Some, like the tristan and algos, are mostly balanced because of the relatively low fitting space for their class, and low number of total slots. Then there are things like the ishtar and dominix, which have the fitting room for tough armor rail kiting fits, but don't actually need to fit rails to fight effectively, leaving tons of CPU, grid and space on the table.

On a less related note:

4: Some increase in differentiation between attack and combat battleships would be good. Focus on more tank and a bit more room for the CBS, and add some speed and avionics while bringing the tank up a skosh for the ABS. Then there are compelling reasons and times for both.

5: Agreed, sort of, on the enlarged modules for things like tackle. Prohibitive fitting cost for anything but a t3 built mostly around it, and 30-50% better performance for similar materials cost to current, and a slightly lowered drop rate on these off battleships wrecks.

6: Burst weapons are amusing, and might be a viable way of giving you good anti-support results. A true beam laser, with 1s fire rate, some flak guns, a multiple rail array, it's all the sort of thing which anyone in a sensible world would be working on in eve.

7: Bombers are their own special set of issues. The push I want to modernize ABS avionics would help some with this.

Going point by point on this one.


So, they should have even HP profile across the 3 kinds of HP, or do you mean the they should have something like the omni resists of the gnosis, or do you want something else?
Cause, for the first 2, the answer is a resounding no, and any other option would need some pretty massive justifications.
They aren't built to the same specs, and shouldn't be homogenized like that, and the ratio of where their HP is is one of the major factors in the balance of these ships.



Why would you make buffs to things outside the specialization of the ships, especially of the sort that aren't helpful to game balance? Right now, there is a distinct ability to tailor the tank of most battleships to the engagement types you intend for the ship, and the type of tank you prefer. The fact that it is practically required to use 3 slots for resists and 2-3 for buffer, with a full set of buffer rigs, or write them off as alpha-able in larger fights points to them being low on either native resists (yeah, right) or native buffer (yep.) or lacking a suitably impressive single slot buffer module (yep again.) Fixing those makes much more sense than going around making them all tank in armor and shield, as well as the niche hull fits.

As for a hull resist bonus, do you want 600k hull HP megathrons? because thats how you get 600k hull HP megathrons.

I want to find a better way to use this. Maybe a meme of an EFT screen with 30% base hull resist silliness shooped in.