Ships & Modules

You are misunderstanding his meaning.

You cannot have an unpackaged T3 Hull without any subsystems. In order to assemble a T3 hull it MUST always have 5 subsystems in it.

So you cannot for example have 3 T3 hulls with rigs but no subsystems. And then say one complete set of subsytems and then mix and match for the particular ship.

If it would be too hard to do this, one workaround would maybe be to have "placeholder" subs. They would impart no benefits, but be inexpensive so you essentially could have rigged hulls without having to buy duplicate subsystems for each one.

Yeah, a dude from Black Legion just straight up asked a dev to boost Muninns.

Sunglasses, gravity, "deal with it"

Given the (K-space) ease of keeping plenty of ships in one's hangar, plus the factor of rigs only being removable with destruction, and not to mention the skillpoint loss risk, people aren't going to use T3s unless they exceed at something. Certainly not at anything remotely like the current prices. A ship with a 500M ISK hull price and skillpoint loss had damb well better do something better than anything else, and that something had better be a good, useful niche.

Given the relative ease of skilling for them, and the width of the supply chain (compared to the technetium/BPO bottleneck, for instance) I'm not sure that it's all that terrible for Tech 3 cruisers to be significantly better than Tech 2s

tbh the only things I would suggest to rebalance T3s are

(1) Reduce the T3 ganglink bonus to +2%/level. Don't swap T3 and CS bonuses as is often suggested - T2 gang links are already extremely strong and gang bonuses as a whole could do with toning down a smidgen.

(2) Have a look at Cruise Missiles, because it's a poor situation when HMLs are better than Cruise even for killing BS. This would allieviate the Tengu's dominance over all other missile ships for PvE

(3) Fix the "orphan" HACs. The Eagle is utterly obseleted in every way by the Naga in it's rail sniper and blaster brawler roles - the only role I can think of for it is as a sort of blaster Vaga: give it speed and small sig so it can do something the Naga can't. Likewise, the Cerb is dominated by the Drake (close/med range) and the Tengu (close-long ranges), leaving only the near-useless extreme range niche. And the Sacrilege is just sad, partly because HAMs need a little love, partly because "brawler" is a bad role for a cruiser with only 5 slots for tank and damage mods, partly because that niche is amply filled by other ships.

(4) For the love of sweet bleeding jesus on the cross fix the moongoo bottleneck so that T2 ships can be more competitive in price. This can't be that hard; Akita T produced an excellent, racially balanced plan for you guys almost two years ago, with each race's T2 ships depending primarily on a different flavour of goo. Or it that's too hard, R32 alchemy. Whichever.

Thing is, T3 are not meant to be better than T2.

I'd post CCP's diagram from Fanfest if I can be bothered to find it to show you their official view, but T2 are meant to be the best in the area they specialise in, T3 are meant to be mearly good but across multiple areas.

A good example in terms of bonuses only is that when using the exploration sub, T3's can probe just as well as a Cov Ops can as they get the exact same probe strength boost. This is wrong, irrelevent of the differences in cost, as it puts them on par as a dedicated prober, while also allowing them to obsolete said dedicated ships by being able to do more stuff on top (ie, also do combat exploration sites with relative ease).

T3's are meant to embody the "jack of all trades, master of none" philosophy, instead for the most part they're currently "jack of all trades, master of all".

If you leave T3 alone and balance the other ships around them, you have a bigger problem: Power Creep.
Power Creep is a massive problem as it affects so many other things.

Full t2 resists, similar slot numbers to bcs, 6 bonuses that are more powerful than bonuses found on t2s, and 3 rigs slots...

It's rather obvious why they are generally the best sub caps at practically everything outside of max gank potential... However they all do substantially more dps than their respective hacs and are very comparable to dpls lvls of gank Field command ships while retaining the list of advantages posted above...

t3 do not obsolete just hacs... They obsolete Fleet Commands, Field Commands, and many other ships as well while having a relatively short training time. CCP has allot of work on their hands...

This is where it gets complicated however. It is easy for you to say "irrelevent of cost" but cost is a factor that has to be considered. Along with loss of SP upon death.

Sure I can make a covert ops T3 that scans just as well as my covert ops frigate. At 10X or more the cost.

Another example, in the opposite direction, which is a better comparison, since it is a command ship vs T3. Take the Nighthawk vs Tengu.

I have many friends who prefer the NH over the Tengu, for example, when running C3 sites. Similarily T2 fit, the NH gets a comparable tank and gank to the Tengu, but at a fraction of the cost. And no risk when they "inevitably" get ganked. IMO I think this is a situation where there is an acceptable balance.

Just thought I'd try taking a deeper look into the various facets of T2 vs T3. Overall I don't think the imbalances are that bad, at least IMO. Keep in mind that some of this is my own speculation as I cannot fly all races yet. But based on other reading etc I've drawn the following conclusions.


HAC
Amarr- General consensus seems to be that the T2 HAC are better than the legion. If anything the T3 needs some love in this area.

Caldari- Tengu is obviously king here. I don't know if I have eer seen a Cerb or Eagle all that much. But Given they all use similar weapon systems, I'm guessing maybe the T2 just needs some love and the Tengu could use a little toning down.

Gallente- This one is the most interesting for me, since I fly gallente the most. There really is no direct comparison between an Ishtar and Proteus. They are both awesome in different ways. Hard to say on the Deimos vs Proteus, as they kind of fit the same role. Overall though, if anything maybe the Deimos could use something extra rather than nerfing the proteus heavily.

Minmatar- I know the least about minmatar. But I have seen Muninns (and died to them) as well as vagabonds. So if I had to guess I'd say there is a decent balance between them and the Loki.


HIC

AFAIK there is no direct T3 loadout to match HIC's. So no problem here.

LOGI

As pointed out earlier in the thread, the RR subsystems do not have any bonus for range. So there really isn't a T3 replacement for logistic ships. Seems ok on this. I think leaving the RR subsystem as is works however, giving a RR gang option.

RECON

Aside from a web loki, and maybe a neut Legion it generally seems that T3's fail compared to their T2 counterparts here. Seems fine IMO.

COMMAND

this is an area that seems to be the biggest point of contention. And I would tend to agree. Given the lopsided bonuses, plus the ease of making a formerly unscannable but still near impossible to scan T3 booster, I'd say T3 command ships are unbalanced.
One thought I had was to maybe even out the bonuses, but then also give an additional bonus for command ships when on grid. It doesnt kill off grid boosting, but gives an incentive to bringing that ship on the field.


TLDR: in the T2-T3 balancing, the main areas seem to be HAC vs. T3, although mostly for specific ships, and command ships vs T3 boosters. The other roles seem ok.

Yep, it's not so much that T3s are better HACs than HACs themselves as a Tengu or Loki can be fit to survive seriousface fights whereas Cerbs and Muninns can't hope to match. Zealots are the 'best' HAC in that regard simply because they sport the biggest buffer.

Which IMO is fine. A T3 in a HAC role should have a better buffer considering I am risking on average 5 days of re-training every time I take one out.

+10