Ships & Modules

plagiarist!

But yeah that's probably our best option at this point.

If you do not respect that your subscribers believe a design idea has merit (hence their +1 support), then why even bother putting up a dev blog forum thread to which players can reply?

If by "clean up" you mean remove subscriber input, then your lack of respect for your customer base is the same as it has been for the past several years. Your hubris is evidence that CCP's old guard is still set in its pre-2011 layoff ways and that does not bode well for EVE's or CCP's future.

A good idea is a good idea and stands on its own. All +1ing - and particularly the kind of high-volume +1ing that we were seeing earlier in this thread, and I'm sure it was entirely a coincidence that a whole bunch of Goon/Test pilots dived into the thread within minutes to +1 it - does is make the thread harder to read, and more likely that a good idea gets lost in the deluge of posts.

The only immediate problem with Shadoo's proposal is that Titans would lose the ability to shoot structures. Their DPS on POS shots would be missed. However, Titan pilots may often be just fine with not being able to shoot POS...

Balancing the DD/cycle damage would take a few iterations but be possible to eventually get right.

For what it's worth, I posted the link to the thread in a couple jabber channels but there was no broadcast, no asking for replies, no asking for support, or anything. People really just feel that strongly about the issue.

BTW -- just to be clear, a titan with turrets removed and DD dmg/cycle boosted would massively benefit entities with significant number of titans to a point of being fairly broken from overall game mechanics perspective

If I fielded 50 titans + 200 carriers w/sentries in that model, there's not a whole lot of anything anyone in EVE could do about it -- unless they brought more titans themselves. The supercarrier role would in that model be fairly limited to structure-only game, since a few titans would just DD blap a SC fleet fairly efficiently given the massive alpha from DDs.

So I'm not suggesting it's a good change, but it would accomplish the currently stated objective for the titan to be purely anti-capital combat ship.

I'd just wish that the proper resources are dedicated to Greyscale and the team to put he 2-3 devs on this to rework the ship completely and just move it out of the combat role because no matter how you twist this -- the ship just will always be OP given the number of them that exist and their concentration in few alliances in EVE.

Delicious goon tears in this thread.

Bottom line - changes in game mechanics should not be made to make happy only one alliance in Eve.

Don't boost damage: reduce cycle.

I think we agree, but because of the fact that your posts are necessarily short, I'll break it down:

The damage formula for missiles scales very well with target size and velocity, such that capital missiles from Titans (which get a bonus to damage normally, unlike Dreadnought's sieged damage bonuses, which are balanced by the drawbacks of siege) do minimal damage to small signature targets moving quickly. This is fine, as 'mass Leviathans' are unable to kill all sub capital ships without support, as they do not do exponentially stacking damage as amassed.

Your suggestion, for a 'blapping Leviathan' would involve the use of Target Painters and Webs, which are currently unnecessary for Turret based Titans to do large amounts of damage to sub-capitals, due to the fact signature radius on Turrets is not as significant as explosion signature on capital missiles, and because Angular Velocity is relative, as opposed to the absolute nature of linear velocity, so that for a larger group of spread out Titans (which is the issue, not solo Titans), angular velocity approaches 0 for one of these turret titans, and thus this numerical factor in the damage formula approaches 1 (which is to say, it is not possible to decrease damage this way).

To do the equivalent of this using webs and target painters would not be unreasonable, but it would require a significant support fleet of Target Painting carriers (which has already been proposed as the 'counter' to the since scrapped signature radius change) or a large amount of Carriers or Huginns using faction webs (as mentioned, Rapiers are paper thin, and while Huginns are far from invulnerable even with carrier reps, they at least can be tanked). Even still, with stacking penalties, ship velocity would not be reduced to 0, and this mechanical setup still requires a support fleet, something which current turret titans are perfectly fine operating without.

As far as I can tell, the 'goal' of these changes is to give Titans a role while operating with a support fleet, and as an anti-capital platform. Reducing tracking and the number of targets they are capable of locking goes part of the way towards this, but the underlying problem deals with the relative angular velocity of anything versus a spread out blob of turret titans (0), versus the absolute velocity of any ship versus a missile (not 0). This is evident in all the killmails of sub capitals killed by Titans.