Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Utility highs are a big factor when fitting a Battleship, and some ships such as the Abaddon, Rokh and Raven Navy Issue do not have any highs spare for a neut / smartbomb which is pretty much required in small gang. 8 turret syndrome also doesn't allow further balancing to add highslots without reducing the damage output ( unless you add a damage bonus ).

My suggestion is to rescale the battleship turrets ( and maybe cruiser ones ) to take up less slots, so instead of 6/7 being the normal amount it would end up being around 4. This allows potential balance changes to add highslots if necessary without having to change the bonuses of a ship. Turrets would increase in price, PG and CPU to keep the cost of fitting effectively the same in both ISK and fitting resources as well as rebalanced in damage to keep the outputs near what they were.

EDIT: The number of utility highs for each ship would remain the same, this is mostly a precursor change to make future balancing easier and also in the case that more utility high modules become available.

Another advantage to this is Marauders and some pirate ships don't need an ugly 100%+ damage role bonus.

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Onto the Missile boat fitting problems.

Now usually when fitting a ship, the long range version of a turret would cost more fitting resources than fitting a short range one, however this is not the case for torpedoes and cruise missiles. As a consequence it becomes far harder to fit a PvP capable missile BS with torpedoes due to the increased requirement for PG due to neuts / cap boosters, but there isn't enough of it. The Golem suffers from this and the Raven too, but most of the time you just go for RHMLs instead because of the much smaller PG and CPU requirements.

Torpedos and cruise missiles need their fitting resources to be swapped and tweaked a little, and maybe reduce the PG requirements on HAM launchers too. Rockets and Lightmissiles are fine.

Part of ship balancing is making trade-offs for what you want, plenty of battleships have a utility highslot, some dont, thats called variety. Make your choices with whats available, weve made it work for a decade, we'll keep making it work.

Abaddon 10 effective turrets
Apocalypse 8 effective turrets
Armageddon 5 unbonused missiles/turrets + 2 utility high (drone/cap warfare ship)

Raven 8 effective launchers + 1 utility high
Rokh 8 effective guns
Scorpion 4 unbonused guns/missiles + 1 utility high (ECM ship)

Hyperion 9 effective turrets + utility high
Megathron 9.33 effective turrets
Dominix 6 unbonused guns (drone ship)

Tempest 10 effective turrets + 2 utility high
Maelstrom 10.67 effective turrets
Typhoon 8 effective launchers (or 6 unbonused guns) + 1 utility

Each race have atleast 1 Battleship with utility high, and for the ships we can compare they give up 0.3 effective gun for each utility (Hyperion vs Megathron and Tempest vs Maelstrom)

If anything Amarr should have a gun battleship with utility high (armageddon dont count as its a drone/ewar ship)

EDIT: fixed a derp :)

I think there shouldn't be a Battleship without a utility high, it's just too important not to have. Definitely agree with Amarr getting one, they need one with utility highs badly. If there were more options for utility highs in the future this only becomes a bigger problem.

The first part is why some BSs suck not all ( some are marginally viable ). The fitting resources would of course be rebalanced.

And you train Heavy Missiles for your PvP BS, it really does need to be changed. I'll have to check out Baboli's thread.

8 guns will have 2x the "crit rate" compared to 4 guns, but the 4 guns will do 2x the critical dmg compared to 8 guns (avg the same total dmg over time)

ignored here

derped on that one, Apoc is only 8 effective :P (no idea where i got 11 from)

Really have to agree that this change is a nightmare to balance and seriously reduces thd benefit to the ships with that massive 100 or150 percent bonus. And thanks for plugging my thread. Link is in my signature.

BS fly with support. Accept and move on.

Want the support pull a weapon.

Rokh was caldari's only accepted fleet bs for years. Apparently some learned how to fly it right. Why don't you try that.

You also lost me at it can' t ft smart bombs. Its one of the most liked smart bomb bs choice in game ffs. Go disco...or go lr with rails. Your rokhs are't dying in small gang because its lacking a utility slot. Your pilots are flying it wrong and/or support is not tackling **** worth a damn. Good tackle, rokh at range....stuff goes boom.