Ships & Modules

nerf everything until rfters blot out the sun(s)

Sounds like you are butthurt freddy boy.

Here is a pro-tip: Humans overcome a lot of things, we now store food in a jar the size of your fist when in the past you had to hunt for it every day of your life, meaning that you had very little in the way extra food laying around. Amazing isn't it....that you don't think the same thing would apply in a game and the human element would find way to produce massive amounts of titans so you have extras, like those jars of peaches sitting in your cabinets that were probably 4 months old by the time you consumed, lets not even think of the shelf life we managed to extend it to .

I belive that Titans should still have AoE doomsdays + normal type turrets with tracking better then frigate guns to pop noobs trying to aim for the 2 meter themal vent and Super carriers should still exist as it did pre-crucible with massive numbers of drones. Titans knock out those fleets of battleships every ******* idiot always brings (cause its a good idea, to just blob the feck out of everything amirite? ) , Super Carriers countering the Titans because they can't track fighter bombers, and it would be ******* glorious the amount of bitching from every stupid n00b that belives their ****** trained sub cap ship should be able to destroyer the biggest investments in the game when you consider that it takes far longer to get into a cap ship vs a battleship after you have thought: Titan pilot spent 1.5 years + paying real world cash and you spent six months for you battleship. Its a harsh universe and titan / SC pilots deserve the right to smack your whiney ass around.

The tech 2 lotteries were CCP's biggest mistake, titans are up there but not as bad.

The recent PL titan loss shows a few things about how the game has evolved.

EVE tragics who have spent 5+ years in the game and skilled into supercaps, and actually got a supercap, are likely to band together into one of the large power blocs with other supercap pilots, for safety and synergy. This has resulted in a handful of alliances and organisations with double, and in a few cases, triple-digit supercap numbers.

This is a natural endgame scenario for any collective of groups within a population; consider the IRL current geopolitical situation, with several powerblocs, two superpowers, and nascent third-tier powerblocs forming. Plus of course, pirate powerblocs. That nullsec (and to a lesser extent lowsec) in EVE should begin resembling the real world is not surprising; humans play the game, at least outside the DRF.

This kind of group-organising behaviour was forseeable, but not part of the dev brief for supercap balancing (if there was one). CCP balanced (i know, bear with) supercaps on the basis of them being rare special toys, which they are; they gave them abilities beyond normal caps, power off the charts in some cases, and some drawbacks (eg, no docking). They did not think of them being deployed in blob numbers and hence, the emergent game of EVE destroyed the balance.

So now they have to consider balancing supercaps in the game, for the game's sakes. Odda's titan loss shows what the superpower blocs of EVE are capable of; dropping 140 caps and supers on the field within 5 minutes, to blob a suicide dread fleet. That Odda lost his Erebus, well, he was pushing the envelope of what a Titan is supposed to do, not only by having a luls smartbomb fit but by camping a lowsec gate to clean up the peons. Wolfsbrigade, all props to them, knew what they were getting into and pulled it off despite Odda/PLs cries of lag, disconns, blah blah.

The PL response to this hotdrop shows the problems CCP has to address in balancing not just titans but supercaps. I'm not saying you shouldn't lose 33 dreads to take out a titan. But clearly the emergent game has progressed to the point where 100-man-plus supercap and cap fleets are common, where such fleets can project across large pats of EVE, instantly. PL has the organisation and discipline to do this; many others do not. Good on PL.

Removing the Titan's abilities to shoot subcaps does address the problem where the superpowers can wipe out vast numbers of ships with a handful of superweapons. If a small alliance (like mine, luls at it is) tries to carve a niche like the CCP propaganda splerg would have noobs believe is possible, then we could field 150 ships and get vaped by a couple of guys in supers. That's not good for the game - even if we kinda know we are down the food chain and being roflstomped by the big guys is coming. We can deal with being bitchslapped, but corps shed members, people shed accounts, the game suffers.

After all, as various people show on their blogs, max logons haven't peaked past 45K for months (Crucible honeymoon), representing a shrinking of the player base; having Odda camp Amamake forever with total impunity won't encourage anyone to play the game. Having small powers instagibbed by bored powers, etc, isn't good for the game.

CCP has a lot of work to do in rebalancing the supers to the new realities of EVE. Hell, they are soon going to be faced with the need to tweak the tier 3 battlecruiers now people are figuring out how to use them, and deploying fleets of them in true nullsec blob numbers. Its part of the cycle; CCP makes things with set attributes, people theorycraft and experiment, and accumulate wealth and skills to fly them, and then some smartass nut comes along and begins exploiting particular peculiarities in the maths or attributes, and makes it broken.

Raiden/ has built an empire on a business model of the titan blapfleet. Maybe they need to work on their social skills and engineer in a subcap support blob. Either way, the cycle goes on.

Well, all manner of crazy things have been suggested, and the above person's ideas aren't even the wildest of them.

I personally don't think Titans should be unable to shoot subcaps. Post-nerf they will be able to, but not this side of 2013 with that scan res. But they should have some handicaps unable to be overcome with Cormack's SeBo's - which as we know, anyone can afford given enough time, so CCP has to wargame all supers with full faction fits and balance accordingly.

To be honest, if you gave XL guns the performance of large rails at tracking and signature resolution of the guns, you'd be fine. Try, just try, hitting anything at 5km with large rails. Its apalling, even with angular, total velocities are <10m/s. I'm almost ready to give up on large rails because they actually suck horribly unless you are shooting rats - and that's with 2 tech 2 TC's scripted.

Anyway, no one would design a supercap totally vulnerable to subcaps. So Titans probably need a point defence weapon, to deal up to 2000 DPS to a single ship inside of 24km. Couple that with paltry scan res and crap gun tracking for their XL guns, and you'd only pop people who wanted to stick around tackling you, or which another person has webbed down. 2K DPS will stop people soloing you. I dunno.

Perhaps supercaps should not be able to fit points, preventing hotdropping supers and only supers upon hapless people, and requiring the supers to bring long - in the very least - a carrier to do the pointing.

Supers should not be able to fit cynos. You want instant 100 man cap and supercap backup, get an alt or a friend.

There does need to be a capital-killing ship capable of taking out, primarily, carriers. I think somewhere somene suggested Juggernauts or whatever, I was high so I didn't take much notice. But whatever; carriers do logistics and suitcasing ships; dreads are anti-structure; supers are anti-structure POS-soloing overpowered pwnmobiles; Titans post-nerf will just be 100 billion ISK portable holes.

There is a need for an anti-capital capital. A dread with smaller active tank ability (no siege), equal gank, which doesn't get stuck in siege while DPSing. Something that costs 1-2 billion which the smaller alliances and the smaller botting syndicates can afford, which you can dock in station, and insure. Put an asset like that in the hands of the pubbies and supercap blobbing will become much more dangerous.