Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Tormentor: Role change seems nice, but why not do all mining frigates at once? Now you're going to have newbies wondering why their race dosen't have a mining frigate but the others do.

Punisher: Ehhh, should compare better against the (pre-change) rifter, as for the new rifter, see below.

Merlin: Gun hominization: good. Damage for resist bonus, not sold yet.

Incursus: Falloff bonus was kinda nice, but repair bonus should be interesting.

Rifter: Why the "best" frigate needs a ~15% bonus to hp with only a 3% reduction in cap buffer, I don't know

Not fond of making the Merlin a gun-only ship. I made a long-ish post about it elsewhere, if you're interested:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=998555#post998555

If not, never fear - tl;dr:
* Ship homogenization (all combat frigs are now gun boats - boring)
* Split weapon systems with rockets allows some damage selection (now only Winmatar can choose damage types)
* Players willing to skill multiple weapons systems get rewarded (not every ship has to be low skill point friendly)

That extra 5% resists per level was a huge reason the ship was viable in the first place. It's been changed to be a faster and more agile long range gunboat, and that's nice, but I'm not convinced that it is a good enough trade.

Combine with the rig changes (buffer / resist rigs making a ship slower) and the terrible performance of active shield tanking on frigates in general (especially now with the resist bonus removed), and the Merlin seems to lose either way if wants to field any kind of tank above and beyond an MSE.

Additionally - a worse capacitor, with an extra gun sucking up cap. I'm pretty sad about the Merlin. It's quickly going from the top of my list of frigates to the absolute bottom.

Have you had some time to test these changes on your local development environments? If you have, what have your experiences been? Does it work as well in practice as it does in theory? I'm skeptical but maybe it works better than I'm expecting.

Are the other mining frigates going to be included in this first revamp, or is the Tormentor the only one being given a combat role as well?

I need that incursus in my life, right now. RIGHT NOW.

I for one look forward to what the Tristian becomes if this is what you are doing to the Incursus and Tormentor.

QFT.

Frankly, prior to this, each race had a frigate hull that had a good role in PvP that newer pilots could get into.

Gallente had the Incursus, a primo DPS machine even if it was a bit fragile. It's definitely not fragile anymore but you have to fly it up the tailpipe of whatever you're shooting at. I'm vOv on this: welcome to blasters generally. 50% armor rep bonus, while I love it as a gallente pilot, is kind of sick.

Amarr had the Punisher, Brick DPS. Now it has the Punisher, Brick DPS+. That's cool.

Minmatar had the Rifter, flexible hotrod of the frigate world. It still has that, though a little more minmatary now that it falls apart more quickly.

And Caldari had the Merlin. One of the tankiest things in the frigate line up, with a very flexible mid-slot selection which made it a primo tackler. The shield resistance bonus was the key to whole ship. Now the Merlin has a role as a frigate-sized sniper for wolfpacks, which I can respect except that they already have the Kestrel for that, and the Merlin could already serve in that role. Without more context for these changes it looks very much like a very important role has been completely stripped from the Caldari lineup and frigates in general. (The punisher just can't brick tackle the way the merlin could.)

I also agree that taking away the Amarrian mining frigate without giving it an alternative, and leaving other races mining frigates intact is especially poor form. The Arbitrator is the Amarr pilot's next mining ship and let's face it, mining drones suck.

You've basically told Amarrian industrial pilots: You should have rolled Caldari, ha ha.

I would suggest you reconsider the Merlin and how pilots are using it. In urban planning we have this concept we call "desire trails." When you look at an expanse of grass and see a line of dirt and dust where grass has been consistently trampled because people walk there? You've just found a route in your park that you need to lay down a sidewalk and route traffic around. Planning routes where people don't walk is a surefire course to angry voters.

The optimal bonus for the merlin is still a bad idea.

1) Small hybrid guns have already an excellent optimal. Even the smallest one (75mm) can hit far away with Spike. The 2 bigger brothers (125mm and 150mm) are overkill since they hit farther than a disruptor. The real problem with railguns+spike is the very low tracking speed (but that's normal).
2) The optimal bonus is useless for the small blasters.
3) Sniping without alpha is not used in pvp in EVE Online.

Yeah, because armor rep ships are used so much in PvP.

The argument is that they should do them all at once, not one at a time, with (knowing CCP) a significant delay between each wave of changes.

Questions/Comments:
- Blasters with Void benefit a lot from an optimal bonus, but the lack of a resistance bonus means you won't survive long enough to actually use it. I really liked the resistance bonus on the Merlin. A lot. I don't know about this change, but I'm willing to give it a spin.
- The Incursus still has a MASSIVE sig radius. I don't think this is reasonable.
- I'm extremely -1 to any change that lowers capacitor on ships that require capacitor to fire their weapons.
- The Tormentor is going to be useless. Still.
- Why are you reducing the CPU on the Incursus so heavily while giving it extra slots?!

-Liang

Ed: The Merlin isn't the Harpy, but you'll end up flying them exactly the same.

Combat navitas? Epic. Still, a frig like the navitas mines like a beast even compared to cruisers, so what are noobs to do?