EVE General Discussion

I guess the question is, "balanced/ Nerfed" equals, how many need to be fielded for the ermagerdzerg button to work?

They arent the "best".
A Gila is better as a cheaper craft with less SP requirements.
A Stratios is better as a dedicated covops scanning ship with a larger cargo hold and drone redundancy.
HACs are well and fine in blue space, (albeit some are pretty crap such as Minmatar HACs. Ishtar stands head and shoulders above the rest).

TC3s are optimal for nomadic deepspace operations in hostile sectors and refitting for specific tasks onsite, albeit as higher cost, cargo space issues and risk of SP loss.

Furthermore the TC3s are different. For example the Loki being a suboptimal choice for PvE content.

TC3 changes need to include consideration of the above. There is a substantial segment of the playerbase using them for this kind of playstyle in the sandbox, and they should not be unduly penalized.

People who want to play this way, have invested into the skills and assets to do so in TC3s.
So can anyone else, or they can run them in Gilas/Stratios/HACs if they wish as the game is right now.
Nothing is stopping them from choosing either path, as suits their situation/means best.

Nerfing TC3s without consideration of this wont cause deepspace solo nomads to swap to Muninns or Gilas.
It will just cause them to stop living that way ingame, as well as make WHs/Null even safer for locals as a result.
It will remove content and activity.

Only the prot has that significant combination of dps and tank - there are some trick legion and tengu fits that can have around 1000dps but they take a big hit to tank to get there and the prot largely sacrifices utility high and mid slots to get there - it also doesn't have the greatest projection in blaster form and while not bad with rails you take a fair damage and tracking drop doing that. Legion has some ok options there but outclassed by the Absolution in many cases which is less penalised than some of the other commandships by its sig and mobility due to having the resist bonus and naturally large armor hitpoints.

If you want a ship for say a defensive op - that can maximise the damage output and stand its ground on the field then ostensibly you'd be looking at Gallente - back in the day maybe a Brutix or Megathron - these days where you are likely to encounter tier3s warping in at range, bombing runs, carrier fighters, etc. you might as well run around with your pants on your head as use those and while OP the Proteus is the only ship that has the tank to work in that environment while retaining useful levels of damage you can take that away and wax lyrical about the meta but that doesn't really do anything good for the game - this isn't necessarily a defence of the Prot but see below.



Problem with that is keeping things balanced within the tiers below - just changing say the Deimos or Brutix significantly to fill in the gap left if you remove the Prot as talked about above is going to have further knock on effects as while maybe they "should" be able to fulfil that role on paper the way things have changed doesn't make it that simple and could require rebalancing of entire tiers of ships.

Looking over some of what people are saying in this thread though a few things strike me:

-Consolidating sub-systems isn't necessarily a bad thing but if the goal is to make it easier to do things like skin the ships and promote micro-transactions, etc. then you need to retain that connection people have with the ships or you aren't far off a zero sum game.

-The concept of one ship that can be refit depending on scenario on the fly might sound great on paper but in reality after someone has lost a couple they are going to become resistant to filling it up with modules (never mind the logistics) that are just going to be lost and either go back to having multiple ships with different static fits as T3Cs are now or become far more reluctant to engage unless they have a significant;y high chance of winning. You also have the problem that you basically need EFT implanted in your skull to do anything useful with refitting and dealing with the PG and CPU limits, etc.

-Knocking T3Cs back to that tiericide entry making them a jack of all trades would run into the issue of making them not powerful enough and hence no one uses them or too powerful and making too many other ships completely redundant - as you'd also have to reduce the cost and investment to put them into that spot meaning even less reason to choose anything else. Also don't underestimate how many people just play the game to purple up their T3C as its a viable platform for blinging out. You also pretty much have to savage the current T3Cs completely or you are handicapping any chance of actually making that gameplay work ingame anything remotely close to how it sounds on paper and that also won't have a net good result.

To me it sounds like they should rebadge the current strategic cruisers as some kind of modular battlecruiser, give it an initial balance pass as its new reality as a battlecruiser and start implementing new strategic cruisers that have a static slot layout, no rigs and can be adjusted on the fly via a bunch of sliders in a window i,e. granular changes between offensive ewar and defensive ewar resilience i.e. on a Gallente ship you'd have say point range bonuses of 100, 50, 25% on one side versus sensor strength of 25, 50, 100%, trading damage output for ehp, between signature and capacitor, etc. and turning covert capabilities on or off (with some appropriate mechanism so it can't just be instantly switched) - which would probably mean they'd have to have 7-8 high slots though i.e. a covert cloak fitted wouldn't always be enableable depending on settings. Problem is the risk of rendering other cruisers obsolete entirely though would leave space for the T2 variants.

You just bought all the minmatar engineering subsystems on the market didn't you?

I really am going to enjoy watching people cry when their overpowered thing becomes less overpowered.

Whats going to be really funny, though, are the people playing who don't pay attention to things like forums and fan fest and so won't know it's coming. We've all seen it before.

On patch day at least 20 people will come to this forum screaming "the last patch screwed up my tengu, I'm missing whole sub systems, is anyone else having this problem?!?!? I tried relogging and my 5th sub system slot is still missing!! EVE is dying!!"

So I take it you think the dram wans't overpowered, or remote doomsday titans, or the nano age, or max heatsink geddons, or cavalry ravens.

All of these things were the optimal choice of their age because all of them were overpowered. T3C are just as bad or even more overpowered than these.

I remember that there was some really obstinate people defending each of those things too, even though they are measurably bad. The arguments were very similar.

"but this thing allows small groups to fight bigger groups"

"getting rid of this thing will hurt the people who spent time training for it and they will leave!"

"There are no other good options, so you should leave this thing alone"

It never ever changes, and the people making the arguments never notice that they are rehashing arguments others made about things they knew were bad but liked anyway.

This is not correct, it's likely that some tuning will be required but the general premise here that there's no room to nerf T3s without creating another problem is just flat wrong.

There's plenty of room for a ship that can be good at a couple of things at once but not as good at any one thing as a specialist T2 ship. Given that the cost doesn't need to be adjusted significantly, since these ships will perform almost as well as specialist T2 ships and they're already almost the same cost. A small change in cost shouldn't significantly change usage either way so long as there is still some value in the ships.



You, again, have zero evidence or data to back up this assertion. You're just making vague hypothetical alarmist statements about the playerbase in an effort to justify your view that T3s should somehow be left OP.

I get it, having your shiny toy nerfed doesn't feel great, but not being able to fly a ship you like because it's been completely forced out of the meta by this OP god-ship sucks too.

Please either cite some statistics or actual evidence that all of these hypothetical players with this hypothetical playstyle actually exist as anything more than a small niche group or please stop making these claims.



First off, point-buy systems are inherently incredibly difficult to balance and extremely easy to break, because the value of any given stat is not fixed and rarely follows a clean or easily defined pattern. The result is often a system where unneeded stats are left at zero and needed ones are maxed as far as they'll go, which results in an extremely powerful ship with the minimum possible in meaningful tradeoffs and a very stale and static system.

On top of that these are already the "Strategic Cruisers" we've got, and there's no actually solid reason to remove them in favor of some hypothetical other variable ship concept beyond you think it would be cool.

I actually agree that it looks like the re-balanced T3Cs are going to fit more into a BC role than a C role, but that doesn't mean they actually need to be bumped up to BCs or that if they were CCP would need to create a new T3C class to replace them, let alone something as hilariously likely to break the game as what you're proposing here.

"1000 DPS" isn't some magical number here. All of the T3s are extremely strong in both short-range and long-range configurations. Often more so in the long-range ones these days because T3s can fit 100MNs and kite while still projecting very good DPS for their size. If you use another short-range weapon system you trade raw DPS for tracking, projection, or some combination of the two (ignoring issues with medium ACs).

The whole reason the T3Cs are OP is because of this combination of tank and DPS.

This is not some niche that should be preserved, or some bar that everything else should be elevated up to.

Each weapon system has situations it does well in. Blasters tend to favor smaller and faster fights where you can either get on top of your opponent and finish them quickly or disengage and run away if the fight doesn't look to be winnable. Not every weapon system needs to be good in every situation.

Rails are absolutely a viable option here, you just don't seem to like the trade-offs they require in DPS and tracking. That doesn't mean that they're not usable though, it means that you either don't like them for arbitrary reasons or you haven't found a setup for them that works. Neither of those is a justification for keeping the Proteus in its current state.



So, first off I never said "significant changes" to either of those ships, in fact I rather specifically said that any changes CCP might make to improve ships T3s were previously eclipsing wouldn't be as severe as the nerfs to the T3s need to be. The role you are looking for here is inherently OP and should not be filled, you just don't seem to accept this even as you accept every fact leading to this conclusion.

Consolidating subsystems isn't just a case of art asset issues, it's also a problem with the design space of the ship and having subsystems that rarely if ever get used. The more options these ships have the more chance there is that the players will find a combination that's OP and breaks something. By tightening up the design space from 5 subsystems with 4 options each to 4 subsystems with 3 options each CCP reduces the possible number of combinations from 1024 to just 81 which is *much* easier to keep balanced and interesting, as well as making it easier to keep all the subsystems interesting and useful.

It's also not at all about selling skins. The major barrier to Skins for T3s was the projection tech that they showed off at the Art presentation at Fanfest. That works no matter how many Subsystems there are in the game.

The fewer subsystems there are though the less maintenance work the T3s represent and the more time the art team has for other things whenever a T3 needs an art or texture tech update or whatever.



You don't need to carry around your fittings with you for the modularity of T3s to be useful. Whether it's only needing one hull in your Wormhole or being able to do a forward Null deploy with a T3-based doctrine so that you can easily vary the amount of different roles in the fleet on a whim and in response to what your enemies bring there are plenty of potential uses for actually fully modular T3s besides filling them full of modules and a mobile depot.

I still have hope the CCP can get there. But they aren't the only ones who have had that general idea, and I've never seen it work right.

In the turn based table top game Battletech that had 'mechs that were supposed to fill that same kind of role (of course there were a blatant ripoff of Robotech and it all ended up in court, but that's another story). The idea was that the had a mech mode that wasn't a very good mech, a fighter mode that was worse than real fighters, and an 'airmech mode' that made them almost but not quite like helicoptes (VTOLs) BUT it was all combined in one package and that versatility was supposed to be the selling point.

It wasn't, the choice between being a crappy mech that died in 2 turns or a crappy aerospace fighter that died in 1 turn was no choice at all. The ONLY real selling point was a quirk on the original rule set that made them crazy overpowered (transforming dissipate all heat generated in a turn, heat being the primary balancing factor for offensive weapons in BT).

Likewise, the idea of a versatile ship that can' transform' but it pretty much a crappier version of several other ships sounds great in EVE, but human nature dictates that most people will simply fly the thing that works the best in the situation they choose and just run away or dock up and reship is the situation changes.

TL;DR, Tech 3s are probably a failed experiment.