EVE General Discussion

Not playing the game puts your opinions on it's current state in question.

In the last two pages we got:

People will quit if you nerf these ships

There are no other ships that can do what I currently do in a T3

But all of the other options are ****

dont take away my get past the gatecamp free card

But they cost so much


My OP ship nerf bingo card is just about full.

I don't know who told you this but it's pretty much completely incorrect.

CCP have flatly stated previously that one of the major problems with rebalancing HACs was that they were originally just "T1 but better" not as super long range or fast in a straight line ships. If you read through the original HAC tiericide thread and this post by CCP Rise specifically and majorly the first post of the second HAC thread they had to do which contains the following lines regarding HACs and their role:



Emphasis mine.



Again, not sure where you got this from but I think you've been misinformed. The Deimos has never had a Tracking bonus or an Optimal Range bonus. It had a Falloff bonus but two of its bonuses have always been damage and the fourth used to be MWD Cap Penalty. Of those the Falloff was always fairly secondary to the other bonuses since the ship used to be used mostly as a brawler.



Except, as noted above, CCP specifically called out the tank and general resilience of the hulls when they re-balanced them, and excepting the *very* specialized and tank-focused role of the HIC the HACs have always been the tankiest and generally most survivable Cruisers in the game until T3s came along.

That combination of DPS and very good tanking potential is what made the AHAC doctrine work in the first place.

HAC are suffering from the T3 plague just like AF do. Their role is better done by another ship so they see really low usage. The way to correct the HACs problem is not to buff them. You have to move away what flat out stomped them out of their designed role.

Could not disagree more.

First, the famous line that needs repeating right now is cost is not a balancing factor. Or, perhaps a bit more nuanced way of putting it, cost cannot be a *primary* balancing factor. Besides, if you argue "well it's OP but costs more", you just hand the keys to OP toys over to the richest players and let them bowl over all the poorer saps. That's not good from a game development platform. Entire wings of remote DD titans.

Plus, your first and second points coincide with bit of reality that negates both as legitimate arguments - the cost and SP loss only mean anything if it blows up. A one-time cost of anything can usually be shrugged off, especially if it gets used for a long time and you get great return on your investment. And SP loss is meaningless if it doesn't blow up - the chances of that happening are already reduced by the OPness of it to begin with. Plus...hate to break it to you, but the SP loss is rather insignificant unless you are losing one every week.

You can send the T3C line through a car wash of nerf bats and they'd still emerge from the other side as great and versatile vessels. In fact, let me put it this way. I'm going to quote one snippet of your line there...

T3Cs are the only hull that

Isolating that tidbit and going from there - that is an important thing in EvE. But not just for T3C. Every vessel should be able to be described with a similar sentence. "[X] is the only hull that...", and a decent description of it's role should follow. Ideally, in a perfect EvE, each ship should have one thing that only it can do (within it's weight class of course), one or two other things it's great at, and a ton of things it's bad at. That's my interpretation of what the Devs seem to be working towards in this game based on statements they've made like "every ship should have a use".

The problem is that many ships do NOT have a statement "[X] is the only hull that...", because T3C also do it and do it much better. See Baltec1's Proteous/Deimos example from earlier. And because of the versatility of T3C, a bunch of ships that "also great at" also get overshadowed by T3C.

I'm going to speak just for myself here, but add a caveat that it seems to be the common sentiment here based on what I've seen from others. I want T3C to be fun, versatile vessels. I want there to be things that only T3C can do. I just don't want them to overshadow other ships in doing so. In the same vain as HIC recently getting a quick nerf smack so they don't overshadow Gallente recons, there can be a little overlap so long as one isn't obsoleted by the other.

I would kind of like to disect these three things because I don't think they're really true...






Yes, ish, but not by much. The hull plus subsystems on a Proteus costs around 275-300m, an Ishtar (one of the only HAC with much demand for it these days) costs 192m, and a Damnation Command Ship (one of the most used) costs just under 400m. That means that a relatively widely used T3C hull costs about as much more than a HAC than a Damnation costs more than the T3C, and we've already clearly established that the Command Ships are inferior in terms of raw combat potential to the T3Cs and have fewer options. Even the Astarte, a relatively little-used Command Ship costs 325m, 50m more than the Proteus.

Based on that they're pretty severely under-costed for their current performance and utility.



This is pretty much just an ISK cost these days. Injectors mean that a pilot can keep enough Free SP floating around that they don't even have any performance downtime to re-train in the event of successive losses. A pilot isn't actually losing much if any time to a ship loss here.



This I just find kinda false and even CCP called this out in their own balance presentation. The vast majority of T3s just get fitted with subsystems and are left static.

Because of rigs T3Cs are basically one ship one fitting, just like every other ship. There are a couple of places you can skirt around this but you still probably need to dock up to swap around subsystems and modules, and if you have somewhere to dock you have somewhere to keep other hulls.

So yeah, T3Cs are more versatile than most other ship hulls, but in practice this doesn't really enable any sort of special gameplay in hostile space. The cloaking and interdiction nullifier make them great raiders, but again that's not a function of the subsystem swapping. Mostly the versatility gets you multiple hulls for the price of one ship's worth of training and not much more than that.

CCP are buffing this somewhat by making the rigs swappable, but this still won't have a huge impact on this mythical "nomad living in hostile space" playstyle.

Purifier, stratios, pilgrim.

Do you know what "nomad life" mean? It's not roam for a day. Stratios? outside hisec? SB? for what? data site? DED?

Strategic cruisers fail this thing.

I threw together a 2B proteus build which could grab hold of a polarized nightmare with 6 shiny damage mods in the lows and not let go. Ever. I was playing with this in the in-game fitting tool with all subsystems at IV and no armor implants of any kind.
You can't neut it (unless you're packing a lot of neuts and/or are neut-bonused), it's highly resistant to jamming, it doesn't run out of cap booster charges, and it doesn't care about weapon disruption because that wasn't the point. Damps don't really work because it's designed to be in your face. Target painting doesn't help unless you're part of a fleet. The very best you can do solo is avoid the fight, because you're not killing it.

Oh, and your shiny-fit solo prot won't break it, either :)

The regengu has a similar problem, except it can kill things with RLML.

You flow megathron in frigates fleets, you are not good statistics example.