Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Can you give me 3 examples of what you would do with this ship?

Why, exactly, do mining ships need a buff like this?

Also this wouldn't do jack for suicide ganking. You can tell what a T3 has equipped visually without ever breaking cloak on a scout ship. Also shield vs armor doesn't actually have a significant impact on the amount of EHP, especially when you're using Catalysts for gank, and generally speaking Shield can get more EHP as long as neuting isn't a factor due to the active Adaptive Shield Hardeners.

There is literally no reason to ever run an armor tank on a mining ship, ever, and any ship that could potentially do so would likely just be abused for increased mining yield.

Except that most of the time damage type is either Kin/Therm because you're using a Catalyst with Blasters or it's whatever faction projectile ammo is cheapest because you're using Thrashers or Tornadoes and most good shield tanks don't actually have much of an EM or Thermal hole.

In the vast majority of cases resist holes do not factor into suicide ganking, and that holds for miner ganking as well.

If someone wants to just shoot then any tank at all will probably defeat them, those players do not factor into a discussion of what is or is not balanced or generally useful.

Also, as a side note, if you tank your Hulk you can survive the vast majority of solo ganks quite easily.

The only way this would have a significant impact on miner ganking is if a new ship had a much higher ratio of tank to ore yield than is currently available, which would be a buff to mining that is not currently in any way warranted. In fact introducing a "T3 mining ship" is a buff to mining that isn't warranted or needed and you've provided no justification for that. What you've said here is that you want a better mining ship under the veil of wanting "more options" without addressing the possible balance ramifications of those options.

Skipping 8 pages of hurfblurf.


Just to correct you on one point:


Amarr are MOSTLY armor only
Caldari are MOSTLY shield only
Minmatar are both/lean shield
Gallente are both/lean armor


ALL of those are in a general since because there are niche fits that forego all the general rules, inquire within for details.



That being said, there are many gallente ships that shield tank pretty much as well/close enough for desired role as they armor tank, or hull tank. There are some that are far better as shield tanks than they are as armor, as well.






Now, all THAT being said, Yes, I agree the cookie cutter/paper thin fits are bad. However, most miners don't/won't use more fitting flexibility, because their game focus is primarily m3/hr(isk/hr), with a secondary focus on survivability. Give covetors 4 lows to hull tank, they will be used as 3 mining laser upgrades and a DCU. The inherent problem with mining is that outside of surviving gankers, it has no other reason to fit anything but maximum isk/hr, a bit of shields, and drones for those belt rats. For there to be a reason to give up isk/hr in favor of something like an armor tank, mining gameplay itself would have to change in a significant fashion.

Okay, I think I must have missed something because I'm not seeing anywhere that you outline how you would work around the problem of a ship you can armor tank having a better mining yield, so let me outline for you the issue here:

Mining Upgrades take low slots. So do armor tank mods. Even if the hull is bonused for armor tanking you need more low slots than on a shield tanked ship in order for you to fit an Armor tank and other things. Normally you can restrict this somewhat with CPU limitation but CPU Upgrades are *also* low slot modules, and you need quite a few low-slots to fit a decent armor tank while leaving any kind of utility room.

On top of that mining is balanced around ships with fairly restricted slot layouts because if you open them up you end up with a massive swing in mining yield between tanked and un tanked ships. It's just easier to have most of the bonus on the hull and a narrower band between the min and max yields.

What this means is that if you have a hull with an Armor tank bonus and an Armor slot layout you can, instead of fitting any tank at all to it, use the slots that might otherwise be used for tanking to fit CPU upgrades and extra Mining upgrades. This increases the difference between the min and max mining yields on a hull, effectively making it worse to fly a tanked hull vs an untanked one since you bring in a smaller proportion of max potential yield.

Shield tanks don't have this issue because they can A. tank more with fewer slots due to Invulns and B. don't share slots between tank and mining yield modules, only CPU and Power Grid.

You could make the tank difference entirely on the subsystem, but that completely invalidates your original point since that would tie the tank to a ship skill not any of your existing tanking skills which only apply to modules.

Also, just based on some rough napkin math, it would likely make the best balance of tank and yield a ship with the armor tank module fitting for max yield and then use any mids for shield tank since that doesn't cut into your ability to fit for yield as much.

In short, yes trying to make a mining ship that is meaningfully armor tanked would be inherently imbalancing to mining, and would almost certainly be an inherent buff to mining overall.

Because he can use a fitting tool and do some math...

This isn't real life, this is a game, and CCP have limited time and resources. In real life we'd be happy to let you go off and spend your time and money creating something no one is going to use because that doesn't impact us, but this is a game so things kind of need to be balanced or the game isn't fun.

Also it isn't your time and energy you'd be spending it's CCP's and that's limited and could be better spent on things that are likely to see actual use outside of a niche corner of the game where people would rather fit armor tanks instead of spending a few days training a few skills to get a better result than their maxed armor skills can give...



At which point you've now turned a complex fitting choice into a binary one of "do I fit this thing or not" instead of a series of fiddling trade offs.

And yes, you absolutely can get more yield out of more slots, unless you ridiculously simplify mining ship fittings in the name of being able to fit an armor tank, something the class really doesn't need...

Yes, assuming maxed skills and a single objective, but there are still trade offs and a spectrum players *can* choose to play with. For example you don't need to fit all tank or all mining on a Hulk, you can go for a middle ground if you find yourself in a situation that warrants it.

Also, and IMO more importantly, if you don't have maxed out skills that wiggle room and options that more slots and a non-condensed mining upgrade give you are very useful since in that specific case the "cookie-cutter" fit won't work for you and you need to adjust.

Oh and because I'm not sure this was obvious, not everyone fits Mining Upgrades in sets of three on every hull, so there's that as well against that change.

This wiggle room allows for interesting and creative fits that aren't broken and creates fun for players. However, this is not the same thing as asking for more wiggle room by asking for a specific niche fit to be made viable if it will break other things. Not every niche fit or idea needs to be given form in the game, and enabling some of these will break things in a major way, like giving miners enough slots to armor tank.

This is flatly false. Quite often maxed skills should be assumed for balancing but that's not the only thing you should look at. For example your idea of turning a Mining Upgrade into a single module that you can't fit multiple of with three times the fitting cost of the current module completely cuts out a segment of newbie miners who might be able to fit two but not three currently. Now they either can fit the full module and get the full benefit, or they can fit no module and get no increase.



You have not "addressed the third one" you've hand waved away a bunch of counter arguments you apparently didn't understand and keep insisting this wouldn't change things it *very clearly would change*.

The claim that you don't have options is ridiculous, you do have options for countering ganking, you just either aren't aware of them or choose not to use them. For a few examples:

• Fit more tank instead of maxing out yield.
• Fit a prop mod and orbit, this works against both bumping and someone warping onto you with probes to surprise you.
• Pay more attention and keep an eye on D-Scan/local to know when someone may be about to gank you so you can dock up. Maybe even change ships and shoot them until they leave.
• Fit your ship as bait and kill them with drones when they try to kill you.
• Join a larger group that will protect you, either in High Sec or Null.

Your whole complaint here seems to be that you want to fit tank, don't want to train Shield skills the *at most* week or two required to fit a full T2 shield tank on a Skiff, and don't believe anything anyone in this thread has tried to tell you about the inviability/balance problems associated with an armor tanked mining ship.

Your solution to these complaints is some mythical T3 mining ship that will replace all T2 mining ships but somehow won't be OP or broken and will just give choices and let you armor tank, which is ridiculous to anyone who knows anything about fitting and the tradeoffs inherent in it...

It actually takes quite a bit of time to get maxed fitting skills, quite a bit longer than it takes to get into a basic Exhumer fit, especially since you can't train both at once and have to choose. Why you think these players somehow don't count or shouldn't be considered is beyond me.



Then that's your choice to make and choices in Eve are about consequences. If you want to be a miner and tank your ship then you should train shield skills. The game doesn't have to adjust itself to fit your arbitrary conditions, and I speak from experience here as someone who started Caldari and trained Hybrid turrets and stayed that way for years. All for no particularly objective reason beyond "I wanted to". In all that time I did not once go around complaining that the game wasn't bending itself to my arbitrary choice.



But not with any weapon you choose and the ships available may not be good in the same ways as the ships you would have access to if you trained shield skills.

Also, as I have explained to you several times now, the reason mining ships don't have an armor tank available is because the slot layout required would be amazingly broken, or create a situation where the mining yield on a tanked ship would be well below the mining yield on a max yield one since Mining Upgrades, fitting modules, and armor tank all compete for Low Slots.

The changes you have suggested here would either be a pretty significant buff to mining, which is not warranted, or pretty significantly break the balance of mining between newer and older players, which is also not warranted or good for the game.

Just because you pay doesn't mean that CCP need to cater to your whims any more than they need to cater to mine, and especially not if what you're requesting would adversely affect the game in ways you do not intend or understand.

T3 Cruisers are also the most broken ships in Eve and the most in need of a rebalance. I've mostly been ignoring that and giving you the benefit of the doubt on this "T3 miner" thing, but since you're going to draw a direct comparison I'll say this:

Saying that something is a good idea or balanced because it is currently present on T3 Cruisers and that is the only example you can provide is completely invalid as evidence. T3 Cruisers are amazingly broken and still have not been tiericide. Using them as an example for balance or future development is a *terrible* idea.



You have provided no system that I've seen in this thread that would do what you're saying here. You've said you want to remove Mining Upgrades and replace them with a single module you can only fit one of that takes 3 times the fitting space. This would be bad for new players for reasons I've already outlined. It in no way scales down with age in any way since those bonuses are multiplicative with bonuses from ships and skills.



I'll reiterate it again here, because why not. You are pointing at two of the most problematic ship classes that CCP have ever released that have caused them more balancing headaches than anything except *maybe* Titans and saying that's what CCP should be basing a new mining ship on. Do you not see or understand why this is a terrible idea?

Creating a huge mass of options for players to mess with is a recipe for a balance mess since players will pick the best ones that synergize the best and the result will inevitably be more powerful than the sum of its parts. This works okay with modules since you pick a static hull and fit dynamic modules to it. With T3s you basically get both *more* bonuses and you get to swap them around, which creates a multiplicative effect on the potential end-states and thus the potential bad end states. Then you can't remove bad end states without also removing lots of good ones, and that's how you get a balancing mess...