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Before you make the Bantam into any kind of warship you really ought to consider making it look less like a flying ballsack.

it's not ground up. frigs are an entirely different beast from cruisers and bc's. unless your talking modules, which we're not.

Nice going, CCP!

New players seem to blaze their way through frigs and cruisers onto BCs and BSes. This led to having one month old pilots in drakes/canes who didn't know much of anything about anything about flying ships right, and lots of unnecessary heartache. By giving them more defined roles and making them more interesting, hopefully it will encourage people to learn how to fly what they can fly well, and not just sprint to tiers of ships they are not ready for.

Frigates are pretty much the ground here, that's where you start and what everyone can fly. Granted you fly them differently than other, heavier ship classes, but prioritizing larger ship classes, especially in the case of T2 cruisers which generally need a bit of a buff, only further exasperates the problems with frigates and risks pushing even some good frigates into obsolescence.

Any idea on when/if CCP will be looking into the turret damage formula? As it stands, any ship with a long range role that does not use large weapons is mostly obsoleted by sniper ships that do have large weapons.

Large close range weapons cannot track small targets. Why should large long range weapons be able to do this?

Would appreciate some sort of Dev response, even if it's just, "We'll think about it" or "We aren't looking into it at this time" or even "No, dumbass."

Thanks.

Oh, and these changes look great!

CCP, please keep the Hulk's current Cargo Hold capacity the same! There is an important reason for this. The Hulk is built to mine in 0.0 and w-space, and as such can mine all the different minerals in the game.

The Hulk can currently hold TWO SETS OF MINING CRYSTALS FOR EACH ORE TYPE. This allows a replacement crystal set to be carried on board in case you get a good mining stint going in game. It would be extremely annoying if it's cargo hold was nerfed to the point where carrying six of each mining crystal type is no longer possible.

Please pay careful attention to this issue!

Just add to the Hulks current EHP a bit, add the ORE Bay, and allow the current trade-off of max mining yield vs. setting it up for a decent tank.

A lot of players setup their Hulks with Cargo Rigs and Expanders to mine Ice when they are doing other things at the same time on their pc's... like watching Movies and TV shows on one monitor, while mining ice on the other. The large 17k cargo hold allows 'roughly' 25 minutes of ice mining to be done, making a little isk while you're chillin' out watching your favorite show/movie.

So when you make changes to the Hulk, I would suggest giving it a 15,000/18,000m3 Ore Hold (five or six pulls of ice with the three harvesters), and making sure that the Cargo Hold can hold 6x of each Tech II Crystal Type, so the pilot can carry a full replacement set of each crystal as they currently can do!

ORE frig for hostile space? Like in null?

It should be able to fit an MWD.

Be cool to be able to mine Merc in null. Hopefully with a suitable quantity. Zip, mine, zip out. It's not like we are going to Moscow!

Woohoo! Maulus love! Maulus love!

I fell in love with the Maulus within my first week in EVE, but it became obsolete before I made it past level 1 missions. I have a Keres now, but it still suffers for lack of an effective niche. I've always wanted that hull to be good at something, it's too beautiful to languish.

Other frigate changes are just as exciting: the Tristan will finally give us a Gallente missile boat to play with, the cute little Navitas gets something to do, and a drone+disruption Crucifier could be a monster.

I like the mining barge changes too. I actually went out in a mining frig the other day, just for nostalgia's sake, but it was so ridiculously ineffective I couldn't bear it. I've stubbornly avoided training for a Hulk, so the new frigate and barges will give me a more interesting set of options. I'm down to one account at the moment, so the solo-friendly ore holds are a huge win -- the new Retriever sounds like it might even make mining missions tolerable.

Best Ship Balancing news yet!

Very nice changes! Since I'm on page 20, I doubt you'll read this but...

Question about the following:

The thing with T1 barges and going from Covetor to Hulk, isn't the Mining barge skill. It's the astrogeology skill. I'm not sure how this improves things with going from a Covetor to Hulk. I guess you could train 1 and then 5 astrogeology but it's still a bear and I'm sure people would like to train mining barge to at least 4. What is the huge deal with not changing astrogeology to 4 for the Hulk requirement?

I like all the other changes to Exhumers, very good idea for role building.

One thing I really believe is needed is a Capital Mining ship. People say no, but a Hulk is far too easy to get into with max skill/yield/etc. Rorq's and Orca's are support ships, not mining vessels. Capital mining ships would only be used in 0.0 of course and could really help with the high mineral requirements (Trit anyone?) for 0.0 and the fact that we have the hulk to provide them.

Anyway, nice work!

50m3 x 16 ore types x 3 lasers x 2 (replacements) = Get Real...
IMO, the hulk shouldn't have a bay much bigger than 600m3.

I guess you'll have to chose which ores you plan to optimize for, and not bring a crystal for every type of ore you find... That, or get an orca alt to carry your crystals for you!!

Also, you know what the perfect balancer is for you're 25 minute afk ice mining machine??? --> A Single catalyst!!