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As a new Amarr player I'm currently flying a Tormentor and I was planning on "upgrading" to a Punisher. I ran some fittings in the Eve Fitting Tool prior to playing EVE and ran the numbers to see which ship would win in a perfect sterile fighting situation. On paper the Punisher, as I fit it, defeated the Tormentor by virtue of its superior tanking ability. However, that is merely on paper in a sterile situation assuming uniform damage and ignore other factors. Having actually flown the Tormentor for a little bit I'm not seeing how the Punisher can be considered an upgrade. The two drones alone give me 25 km range projection in addition to 16 or so extra DPS. The third mid slot allows me to fit the Tormentor to be practically cap stable and offers a PvP fitting alternative. In practice, I cannot see how the Punisher's extra defensive strengths will prove worthwhile when the Tormentor performs so well with a weaker resist profile and the added DPS and utility.

I'd like to make some observations.

"+1 Turret slot" and "Replace the 5% damage bonus with -10% laser cap use per level"

The supposed "bonus" of reduced laser cap usage is, in my humble opinion, a bogus bonus. Not just with the Punisher, but all Amarr ships which have such a bonus. This "bonus" is merely compensating for a design flaw. It doesn't directly add anything to a ship's offensive or defensive capabilities like a tracking, damage or range bonus. It simply aims to correct a negative attribute which is exclusive to Amarr weapon systems. Given the greater capacitor drain of laser weapons compared to other weapon types, the far more logical choice would be to simply use a turret type that requires less cap. Coupled with the lack of any offensive bonus to laser turrets this is the only rational choice. I can achieve greater damage, tracking, and capacitor use with blasters vs. pulse lasers. Screw a -10% cap usage "bonus" when I can have -69% with blasters or -100% with projectiles. Even now (with my current skills) antimatter blaster DPS on a Punisher is 2 DPS higher than with multifrequency pulse lasers and the ship is genuinely cap stable with an energy vampire vs. practically cap stable with lasers. I'm not saying it is worthwhile to use blasters, but I just wanted to point out how weak the damage bonus is currently.

Consider your statement, "we currently aren't huge fans of dropping a missile T1 frigate into Amarr's stable without having solid support all along the T1 lineup for a missile-focused skillplan". Do hybrid and Projectile turrets currently have solid support all along the T1 lineup of an Amarr based skillplan? Because there is absolutely no way I'd fit lasers on a Punisher with the changes you proposed.

Another issue is capacitor stability or, at least, practical capacitor stability. Without an energy vampire this ship cannot field an active armor repair module. Armor plates simply will not cut it in a PVE environment. This effectively makes the ship suitable for solo/small gang PVP only. And given the lack of a third mid slot it would suffer in that role (especially solo). This ship is currently designed for PVE in my humble opinion. PVP requires a propulsion module for speed, a stasis webifier for control and a warp jammer to keep the target on the field (and for control in the case of scramblers vs. MWD). This is by your game design. I honestly cannot understand how three mid slots is not a standard bare minimum number of mid slots across the board on all ships.

What does this mean? I cannot afford to fit the fourth turret. I absolutely need the energy vampire. Which equates to a decrease in DPS because now I'm stuck with the same three turrets, but no damage bonus. A 10% decrease in laser capacitor use is not going to make this ship stable enough to even complete a "Refuge" anomaly. Projectile weapons are the only real option if I want to have four turrets. So much for Amarr pride. But fitting missiles on an Amarr T1 frigate is somehow a source of confusion? At this point the Punisher become just as "skill-intensive" as the Tormentor. About that...

Some other things of note.

"We also think that the "laser tank and gank" archetype deserves to be represented in Amarrian T1 frigates, especially to provide a less skill-intensive alternative to the Tormentor."

The Tormentor fills this roles and does it better than the Punisher. Also, what is so skill-intensive about the Tormentor over the Punisher? I went from an Impairor to a Tormentor. Drones III and light drone operation I is not by any means "skill-intensive" compared to training up small projectile or hybrid turrets. A dragoon is the first skill-intensive Amarr ship that I see upcoming and it has missiles. But apparently that isn't a point of confusion for our little pea brains.

"it will continue to be extremely good as a newer player PVE boat and to strengthen its (quite niche) existing role in T1 frigate gangs. The two midslot layout definitely hurts the ship's power and flexibility, but that can be an interesting tradeoff if compensated for in other ways."

Compensated for in other ways like? *cricket noises* PVE boat? It can't even run a repairer! I'll admit I'm new. I don't have a lot of experience. Can someone who likes these changes explain to me where I've gone wrong in my appraisal of these changes?


P.S. If you are intent to intentionally sabotage one of the T1 Amarr frigates my suggestion would be to swap the Tormentor stats with the Punisher. I'd rather fly the attractive Punisher over the fishing hook with the big smiley face. I can't be the only person to see the front windows as a big yellow toothed smile, the armor engraving directly above it as large nose and the two flashing lights on either side as eyes. Add turrets and you have ears. Looks silly.

how does giving it a full drone bay make it a combat frigate?

This is also an MMO where its expected that you have friends. Not every ship needs to have 3-4 mids to be viable. Does it help? Certainly, but homogenizing all the ships just so they are all viable for solo pvp is boring. There are actually a few ships that work well even with only 2 mids.

Navy slicer
Kitey beam coercer
Arty wolf and ac wolf (mainly in null)
catalyst (not just for ganking)

The punisher and retribution seem to be geared towards pvping with a gang/logi. A 400mm punisher gang with some resist mods and inquisitor/navitas support is going to be mean. Its also not quite as slow as people make it out to be.

Yes the punisher has 2 mids. But your friends have all the tackle you will need. This trends similarly into HACs as well. Zealot/muninn used to be very good fleet doctrines before legion/loki/mach/TFI became the norm. Both suffer from "not enough mids" to be viable in solo pvp (outside a couple niche fits) in the same way. They are fleet orientated. Hell the zealot doesnt even have drones.

Caldari suffer similarly. Yes you have mids but are very slow. Almost on par with an armor plated ship.

Amarr = Armor fleet orientated (ships generally follow an armor fleet doctrine)
Caldari = Shield fleet orientated (ships generally follow a shield fleet doctrine)

As mentioned already, the tormentor and executioner are strong ships with 3 mids. Why do you need a third laser boat with similar slot layout. This at least gives armor gangs a cheap tanky ship for tackle in FW. I already see retribution/wolf armor gangs on occasion. This is no different.

You're talking about fleet doctrine and then mentioning tackle? What? Of course you don't need tackle in fleet doctrines, the whole point is to alpha the other guy off the field. Tackle is pointless, if they live long enough to catch reps they don't need to warp out because they're not going to die anyways. If you need tackle in a fleet you bring 2 guys in bonused T3s or recons, the 200 other guys in your fleet that are there to shoot stuff don't need it.

Armor tanking sucks. I mean it just flat out sucks. That's not to say that all armor ships are bad, but the good ones are good despite their armor tanks not because of them. Every single one of them would be far superior if you swapped their low/mid slot counts and swapped armor bonuses for shield ones. There's pretty much only two cases where armor is better than shield:

1. You're flying battleships in nullsec and are worried about getting bombed.
2. You're performing a role where literally absolutely nothing matters except your EHP total. (HICtor)

In small scale PvP, range and speed are king, and that means shield tank. In large-scale PvP, you don't need tackle and DPS is king, so again shield tank is the best because it frees up all your low slots for damage mods. Then there's the fact that shield capitals have more than double the EHP of armor capitals once you start fitting deadspace modules to them, so shield is better there too. It's pretty much just battleships where armor tanking is still worthwhile.

You mention Zealot/Muninn, but when those were good, they were good because no shield tanked medium gunship existed. The Tengu didn't exist, the Vulture and Ishtar had completely different stats, (as well as DDAs not existing) and the Eagle was literally the worst ship in the game, it was so bad.

The proposed Rifter changes are just blah. Giving it the (flex)ability to be a poor arty ship hardly makes up for the fact that it's totally outclassed by the other T1 frigs. The Rifter needs a fundamental rethink to bring its DPS up to par with its contemporaries.

If I had a nickel for every time an amarr gang lost tackle on an oversized AB target because nobody had a web......

3 mids is better than 2, every single time.

3 mids and 3 lows > 2 mids and 6 lows

And as I've said earlier, even in the logi gangs the tormentor is the better choice because the logi/ewar are going to be shot first. The tormentor brings more projection and dps, applies it better, and has that magical 3rd mid. All that extra tank on the punisher matters not until you're the one being shot at. And if you're being shot at, odds are the logi is all dead and tank isn't going to matter much.

eh not always. you often need to bring the deeps and have the tank. being able to hold tackle on lots of things, you can worry about that when your ships aren't instapopping. and oversized prop ships? having 2 mids doesn't mean everyone fits a scram, that's stupid.

You cant say mids>lows. Thats simply not true in many cases.

The Punisher never had issues with cap (actually has a better stable cap than the Retribution, also), the 2 working fits for it are an active tank+nos fit and a passive tank+neut fit.
It has a lot of issues applying the damage though, cause the tracking is really, really bad; the lack of a third M slot to bring a web really makes it difficult to apply the damage properly. Even with Skills at 5 and implants, its 130 dps are like 40 or 50 at best during a fight, because it misses a lot. It lacks the speed to even try to intercept a kity frig, it lacks the tracking to even brawl around another Punisher, or anything else.
Let's see what these changes will bring... but seriously: A THIRD MIDSLOT!

And there is your issue. Both are T1 frigates, neither is meant to be an upgrade to the other, they are different tools for different jobs of roughly equal overall power level all things considered.