Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It will be interesting to see if this leads to some of the barges being more resistance to ganking.

don't forget "the retribution effect". Please give the coecer another medium slot (and adjust the other destroyers accordingly).

OMG YES A THOUSAND TIMES YES

Based off the Tormentor, can we assume that the old mining frigates are going to be turned into split weapon system ships that use both the primary and seconday weapons for a race?

The Navitas could be pretty awesome with a 5% small hybrid- and 10% drone dammage/ewar-strength/yield bonus!

Think of it as a micro Dominix/Vexor but with more reliance on its Hybrid weapons. Bandwidth for 2-3 light drones and storage for 4-6 (respectively) would make drones a sizable portion of its arsenal without making hybrids undesirable. 2 turrets would then round off the offensive capabilities. The Navitas needs at least 3 mid-slots and some extra lows along with the standard buff in stats. Either a 3/3/4 or 2/4/4 layout would be great; each has benefits and drawbacks in fitting flexibility but the latter would be more interesting (IMHO!).

With the bonus to ewar drone strength as an option, the spare drone space would become very useful for something like a flight of web drones (at level 5 gallente frigate, these drones would each have a -7.5% effect on target speed) to help you get in on the target if you were going for a blaster setup, then you could switch to Hobgoblins once you have your web on the target before applying blasters to the face at point blank range in true Gallente fashion!

TL;DR:
Tweaking tech 1 frigates is myopic, there are bigger, low-hanging fishy fruits to fry (to madly mix metaphors). Even new & future players care more about the larger playerbase being happy with the general mechanics in the longer term than just the tech1 frigs they can fly next. Please again reconsider throwing new assets into the complex equation when you've plenty of existing ones that need some quick loving, especially when you've only just done things like buff the existing destroyers and thrown in overpowered tier3 BCs.
The big EVE issues: ECM, Drakes, Canes, Tengus, Angels, Tech/moongoo, RR modules, Sensor Damps, Info links, Railguns, Marauders, etc
From one of the people you might remember as promptly raising your awareness to the mis-step of the bombardment role concept.

Wall-o-poast:

Must we start with T1 frigates, amongst the most diverse class of ships/bonuses? They're also all trying to achieve the same basic ability at the same time, they'll never tackle, scan or EWAR like the T2 ships, instead they're like T1 cruisers and battlecruisers, just trying to fit towards an averaged level of gank & tank. T1 frigs are cheap tacklers on the grand scheme of things. Sure new players start in them but they are still limited to the usual frigate targets no matter what reasonable changes you make within this class of T1 ships. You're just reshuffling which races/ships are particularly good within this 1 narrow category, while there are more pressing low hanging fruits IMHO.

Medium railguns are terrible at range, tracking and basic damage. Smalls work on our beloved frigates & dessys because PvP tackle modules don't scale with hull size, so you can kite with unbonuses web & scram on a frigate, while a cruiser is always better off with blasters + null ammo, and a rails BS will not be solo but outsource the tackling. Poor railguns affects 2/4 races plus people wishing to consider off-racial weapons on rare setups (think when people put ACs or Lasers in utility slots on drone/missile boats).

Marauders could do with un-nerfing aka actually receiving T2 resist profiles, decent sensor strength and scan res (let people PvP in more ~1bil isk ships, Pirate BSs get to exist already so nothing new there). No one will complain if you do this, and they will hardly become unbalanced at ratting. Some may even become viable compared to said pirate BSs + Noctis.

The base range of remote rep modules is stupid w.r.t. scale, in that they don't. Logisics ships have an unmatched magnitude of bonus to solve this issue, and are almost the only reasonable ship to fit such modules on. The Tengu is an expection because it has an unabalanced ability to project damage from range and thus ignore the positioning restrictions of un-range-bonused RR modules. The other T3s are near worthless for RR, as are the modules on any unbonused ships, especially outside of very niche roles such as RR BSs.

ECCM could do with at least a quick buff like halving the jam time of received ECM in addition to the current probabilty of being jammed (claimed) effect.
I note this year's AT cruiser prize is not following the theme of HAC + racial EWAR bonuses probably because everyone hates the ECM mechanic and yet still no action is seen to iterate upon it. Reduced effect duration would still leave ECM viable for disrupting fleet logistics but less likely to ruin the fun of small gang & solo PvPPPers.

Again, new players may start out concerned with T1 frigate balance, but very soon they will join the rest of us in being affected by the many larger mechanics problems that seem to have simple iteration options to try and find improvements for.

• Damps being weak (hello you nearly buffed TDs on TQ with Inferno before improving damps?!)
• Exequror needing a midslot moving to a low position just like the T2 version correctly had in Crucible. Fruit... so... low...
• Angels being OP (Dram was correctly nerfed, we still await the Cynabal and Mach nerfs)
• Tier 3 BCs. Do you really thing you got them perfect first go, with that speed & agility? Be honest.
• The Drake
• The Hurricane
• Projectiles alpha being far out of step compared to any other 'long range' varient weapon (it could be rebalanced by 1/3 to 1/2 less for the same effective DPS and still provide the most alpha/highest RoF on the flip side for ACs with a similar tweak)
• Info links
• Tengu, cloaky & neut Legions, EAFs (hello we are frigates too like those AFs that got love),etc

Since you are making a new frigate for mining, please consider making also a version of that frigate for cyno purposes or maybe even a new frig. Frigs are used alot for cyno purposes. We lack a small ship dedicated to this. Its time to have something dedicated with specific bonus for that activity.

Thanks

The Ibis *NEEDS MISSILE HARDPOINTS* I have dealt with literally hundreds of caldari pilots who buy drakes and then tell me they haven't trained missile skills yet.

Will non-combat frigates be getting combat roles as happened with the Tormentor, or will they be getting alterations to make them able to actually carry out their existing or new non-combat roles? Obvious example is the probing frigates (and, for that matter, their covert-ops variants)with combat/probing split bonuses when for the most part players would be mad to fit weapon systems on them.


Velatorswarm will ride again!


Isn't this dependant on what happens with mining as a whole? there's been much talk of the entire profession being reworked at some point in the not-so-distant future, it would seem odd for the balance team to be working on them separately from the team working on "Mining 2.0".


I just want a gallente droneboat in a destroyer sized package.

Would be nice. Up to and including a Marauder. Seriously, drone masters with a Marauder being a turret ship? Come on!



Certainly looks like it. I feel like a total horse's behind for burning a neural remap to train BC V now...

This.

Ships using sensor damps should receive a stronger bonus, and the damp module cap usage needs to be decreased.

I'd also like to add classic balancing issues, that have been brought up countless of times:

- Armor rigs (where did this suddenly disappear from the list?)
- T1 cruisers need to be looked at, too weak against BCs (BCs too powerful?)
- Tier 1 BCs are meh (Brutix missing a slot, useless rep bonus)
- Tier 2 BCs too cheap
- Drone boats are still not correctly receiving strength bonuses to EWAR & Combat Utility Drone effects
- Eos, wtf
- Electronic Assault frigs


I think these should be looked at first before introducing new problems.