Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Dear Denizens of Pew!

Today, I would like to address an ever more growing problem that I, and most of my peers, consider to be a severe detriment in EVE warfare: Absurdly Strong Remote Repair

History:

If you, like me, have been around for over a decade you should recall that for the first few years remote repairing was an oddity that was hardly ever observed because it was woefully useless, meaning that people either fielded DPS, Buffer Tank, and/or EW.

EVE was in effect lacking a "healer" class, meaning that almost every engagement, produced casualties on both sides.


But half a dozen HP buffs and remote repair buffs later, Remote Repairing, i.e. the Healer class, became a viable thing to field in any given engagement. This of course famously apexed with triage carriers that could effectively project tanks who could contain whole fleets worth of dps.

This, in my mind, was bad because it turned much of 0.0 warfare into "Who can switch targets the fastest, and who can field the highest alpha?". Now, some might say, that this is what PVP was about mostly anyway, and you would be quite right, but what the carriers did was to allow for a fleet to remain unscathed while the other one either retreated or got obliterated.

Granted, at first this wasnt very wide spread, and logistic ships like the guardian were still relatively uncommon.

It was a problem, but it was contained to boring 0.0 anyway.


Problem:

Now you might ask: "whats the problem here then?"

The problem is that we now have ubiquitous t1, t2, and capital remote rapair ships in every gang ranging from 5 - 500 people alike.

Let me just show you the math for a second:

A single t1 Augoror can effectively project 2.200 DPS tank on a standard ft t1 ship, without overhating, once in a cap chain FOREVER.

And since usually no one fields one logi, but rather 2-3 at once, you have a situation where:

In any given 7 people t1 cruiser gang, said gang has access to at least 7.000 DPS worth of tank, forever!


Now still, some poeple might say, "So What?!"

Well, it means that you need 15+ cruisers to break said tank. So, in effect, 3 people are outdoing the work of 15 people. While that in itself might sound like not too bad way to *fight the blob*. The truth is, that the blob uses logistics more than anyone else, meaning that the blob becomes exponentially more powerful.

The counters to remote repair are obviously

-ECM (which forces every fleet to field Caldari Falcons etc, which are unreliable too due to 140+ sensor strength on logis)
- EXTREME Alpha, which either means artillery and/or 50+ people
- Luck, hoping that the logi pilots are noobs who cant read a watchlist....
-Neutralizers, which work fine, but are utopic to effectively use in any 10+ engagement, especially if the logis are at 40+ km range.

But despitbe being very much unpractical to counter, logis create an even greater challenge:

No Risk PVP!

Instead in a fight 25 vs 35 of both sides losing half their ships, where everyone has to pay a price, we are now in a situation where either no one in either fleets can break each others tanks, and they just mutually disengage. Or if one fleet malfunctions that entire fleet is wiped out while the "winners" are in no danger of losing even a frigate!

That is the bane of meaningful PVP. Fights dont become close, they either become a 15 minute light show which everyone leaves intact, or they become a one-sided risk less ****.


It gets worse:

This problem has been around with t3s + guardians / basilisks and/or carriers for years. Driving thousands of people out of 0.0 into what they call "small gang pvp". However, with the recent rebalancing for t1 ships (which was direly needed), logistic ships have become ubiquitous in EVERY gang.

T1 frigates? logi crap
T1 cruisers? logi crap
T1 battlescruisers and above? t2 logi crap

Unkillable t1 frigate gangs, really?! A few days ago we were in a fight where 25 of our t1 frigates supported by a total of 3 logistics ships battled a fleet of 28 t1 frigates with 4 logistic frigs, in close range combat in a plex, and for 30 minutes straight NOT A SINGLE FRIGATE died.

With our fleet only warping off after two of our logistic frigate pilots CTDed.

Who in their right mind would think this is a good mechanic?!


FYI ccp has been blocking logi spam in the PVP Tournaments for years now. Why? Because it is boring and detrimental to PVP enjoyment.


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Or alternatively start fitting out your gangs with counters to logistics platforms... theres loads missing from your list and even some of those can be made to work effectively but people rarely bother bringing them to fights hence stalemates.

RR isn't the problem...


EDIT: Don't want to make it easy for people but for example even 3 remote sensor damps from an unbonused ship will force T2 logistics into neut range or stop it being able to rep from range. Combine with some ecm and additional scan res damping and that gives you loads of chances to break a hostile gang's logistics.

I don't like at all the priest/chaman "healer" style but mostly because I don't feel any logic behind it on space ships.

I'm not a big fan or user, mostly ran my Basi on SISI in large fleets and it's stupidly OP what you can do with without much effort other than keep the chain cap.
On tandem with a Chimaera and a Guardian we could keep an entire 50+guys fleet (and several others too) without a single loss or an occasional inty OS vs other large gangs often full of pirate gank ships, and I'm really really terrible at using those since I don't like this gaming style at all.
Only way to get us killed was to bring either double the numbers with healers or Supers and heavy neut ships with tons of dps

On TQ I don't fly those mainly because once you start having one in your hangar you can't do anything else, everyone will bother you at log in to come with reps here and there like if they were unable to train themselves for those.

Besides this useless point, those space priests (Basi/Guardian) or shamans (oneiros/Scimi) are clearly OP.
Those are great ships for players who like that gaming style, in large fleets numbers it's just insane those can keep reps on a 150K+ EHP BS getting alpha strikes from hundreds of BSs. (alpha strikes can get 20k critical, regulars around 12/15K)

But in the end it's the number of reps and how good they keep your fleet alive that makes the difference, not really the DPS it self so yes imho there's a problem with those that needs a good take a look at.

Try splitting your DPS among several targets. If they have 3 logis and you are firing at 4 targets, they can't rep everybody. Make sure your 4 targets include the 3 logis

There's no special doctrine against that a part from "set your tab to logistics only and by range, primary "x,y,z" fire on my mark": boum!- alphad logi with over 2000000K Alpha, that's not strategy it's logic you can't keep reps on whatever ship with as much alpha and it's the only fleet type that can handle vs guardians/abbys or almost everything else, only because alpha is as stupidly OP as Logistics.

EDIT: because it's worth the edit = and you can only alpha logistics if you have a fleet with people with 2 neurons working together, the moment you have half of those that are simple pawns putting a gun on each ship on grid to put a shot on them just to be on the km's and you will never kill any logistic or any ship at all.

New module: Emission Disruptor

Reduces remote transfers from the targeted ship by x%, stacking penalized.
Affects shield, armor, hull, energy, nos and neut, either with a script to switch of different modules for categories (shield, nanites, energy)
High slot module, more CPU heavy than PG, fit as utility.
T2 versions of the T1 logistics frigates can become specialized ships on it.

No more derivative countermeasures against logistics, you now have the specialized tool for just that (and nothing else).

Well you have reccons and EAFs that have, or at least were designed for, this role. Main problem is that those can't survive long enough with their terrible EHP.

Armor fit the lachesis and it gets a paper thin tank on top of pretty bad DAMPS, long point is clearly very good.
Fit it with shield MWD and long point, you can push it at 80k EHP 109km point mwd all around the place AND cap stable, yes sir !!

The point? -it can't do it's main job: damp = because damps are crap for fleet/large gang work
ECM?-pick scorpions instead of Falcons or Griffins
TP?- should I say lol?
Tracking disruption?-can help but just as like damps for large fleets/gangs it doesn't have a significant impact logistics can't counter.

Actually the only counter to a good logistics fleet is a higher logistics fleet and dps numbers unless logistics mess up -which happens often

i see the problem stated in the openings post



i totaly agree here



this solution is going to **** WH people like crazy so if this is going to be the solution (which i think it isnt) they need to rebalance WH sites completly





T3 ships are meant to be very versatile and highly adaptive in some cases they are doing that too well for instance boosting any T3 ship wil outperform any commandship on boosts and optins (nullified, covert op cloak) but this is allready under the attention of CCP we just dont know how they intend to fix it.

Fought hydra a few times, sometimes wins, sometimes losses, some of the most memorable fights I've been in have been against hydra due to their willingness to take a fight with a decently thought out setup rather than sticking with cookie cutter setups. How we'd have done in that particular instance I wouldn't want to call.

164 strength doesn't make you immune to jams and you only need one jam to stick to potentially pull apart their logistics platform (assuming you use jamming as part of your counter which isn't the only way).