Ships & Modules

No changes needed. Caldari gets screwed over for PVP with many ship classes it isn't funny.

HAC? Don't make me laugh, they're both beyond terrible compared to other races. Slow, with pitiful tank.
BS's? Rarely used for PVP
HIC? Worst of the bunch
Capitals? The only viable shield caps, thus everyone uses armor, thus shield caps do poorly.

We get a solid PVP ship and the CSM screams nerf because it has a heavy tank, thus is popular? Why not nerf the Hurricane/Vagabond speed while your at it?

The intention of giving it a tiny damage boost along with a useless missile velocity bonus is laughable. Because it's so useful on the Cerberus /s.

Edit: Hell, this change would make the problem Drake Armies (I think this is what started the 'NERF DRAKES' thing?) worse! Now instead of having a 'Drake Army' having a predictable damage profile (Kinetic), it's going to be completely random. And it'll still be abused because of the range.

I honestly don't know what you're trying to achieve with this.

Maybe consider adding a rapier/huginn/loki/interceptor to your stupid gang?

There is this thing called remote repair. Perhaps you could try looking at their resistances.

Well, wrt to PvP it's a hands-down buff that will basically obsolete a lot of other ships at a clip. But for easy PvE, it's a definite nerf.

Drake already melts to so many ships it is silly. Don't need a nerf just bandwagon nonsense.

The Drake would still be easily the tankiest tier2 BC, and being able to do 500 DPS at 110Km is awesome no matter how many iditos try and claim it isn't

If I wanted to do DPS at long ranges the Caldari have two other battlecruisers that are quite capable of doing that and worse, with the capabillity of actualy staying at that range and not moving like a slug.

But wether this change is a buff or a nerf isn't realy important.

What does CCP and CSM actualy want acomplish by changing the drake and will this change make that happen?

This Drake "rebalance" if it's really ever done will make it just the next cheapest pownmobile, and there will not be that much counters other than very long range sniping to kill a gang of those, bring some ML cerberus in and they will never ever get a warpin or able to jam.

You people don't use missiles? -+missile speed +rof?

"wooohooo I shoot you from here, thxbay"

Actually if they kept the shield resistance bonus but changed the 5% kinetic damage to just Rof or velocity that would be perfect.

That is what they should do.

That would be an outright buff and the drakes does not need it. If it must be changed (I think there are other more pressing priorities in the "ship rebalancing" section) I vote for stealing the Cyclone's active tanking bonus.

-this would be largely suboptimal for drake blobs, which I guess are the target,
-this would get carebears to know about active tanking before flying a raven,
-the drake has the capacitor to back it up, active setups with the current bonus are working fine,
-the Cyclone OTOH have a sucky cap as all matar ships, not enough med slots to field a proper active tank and anyway the buffer cyclone is already as popular as the active one.

I don't understand why this discussion have simmered out so much over the last few pages.

The proposed changes are bad because it takes from an underutilized side of the game (heavy shield tanking) and give to an overutilzed side of the game (100-150km mobile sniping), resulting in a thinner game a whole.

It will achieve nothing in terms of the overpopulation and profileration of BC-hulls in fleet scale PvP, since the main reason people use Drakes now have everything to do with resources and insurance.

What it will do is continue to streamline the game to contain less variation and potential counters, by usurping existing ones and presenting them in a more affordable and accessible pakage. The same criticism i've given time and time again to the introduction of Tier 3 BC.

The existing Drake may be a good and popular ship, but you can counter it by applying sniping tactics that outrange it, rush tactics that tank over it's KN-peak and exploit it's relative immobility, as well as sig-speed tactics that exploit the simplistic accuracy equations of missiles.

That's three separate tactical archetypes, encompassing a multitude of different gang concepts - races, hull-sizes, classes and tech levels.

The proposed changes also take away part of those weaknesses, resulting in marginalising those counters and replace them with the weakness of less staying power. That means more Drakes will go pop, but when they don't cost anything to replace the only effect is that you buff the numerical advantage that such concepts already rely on. A weaker tank is easily supplanted by more able bodies, so it's a self-fulfilling inflation (more blobs, pets, afk-empires, bots, ISK hoarding and RMT) . Remove the prey and it's predators will disappear as well (no Falcons - no Cerbs, existing Drakes - counters).

The existing Drake also only hit top performance in an environment that allow it to devote all it's slots to the things it does well, while avoiding modules that rely on functions the ship is less proficient at. For example, if you void yourself of the necessity to tackle, you don't have to give up midslots crucial to it's abundant tank, nore is it as impeding to be relatively slow. Hence, most "issues" with the Drake only manifest themselves in the (by necessity) stale environment of complex resource juggling that is large scale fleet PvP fighting over static objects on a given grid.

The more you scale down the size of a gang, the more demands are put on ships to perform allround roles and functions.

Thus, the only nerf the Drake "needs" is a nerf to it's relatively free cost-efficiency: it's insurance return. The same go for every BC and to some degree tech I as a whole. Insurance is the problem, not HML, not resistance bonuses and not running missions or mining in empire.

What the game as a whole need the most is changes to the "stale, large scale, fleet PvP fighting over static objects on a given grid" paradigm which feed the blob, that Drake-blobs are a symptom of.

The biggest problem EVE as a game is facing is that for the past 4 years our designers have continued to struggle with this problem and unbeknown to them made continued choices that has driven the game in this direction (both in terms of changes they have done and by choosing not to do changes that has let trend run rampant). They are still doing it (tier 3 BC, these proposed Drake-changes, et. al.). The only continued trend of 0.0 is less and less actors living there, resulting in less gameplay related to the buzzwords (sandbox, emergence etc.) CCP hold as their ideal. It's quite conflicting.

In a game like this... trend is afterall the result of framework, which also means that when attention have been given to the game, changes that have been made have gone against sandbox content and away from emergent gameplay.