My EVE

A curious read from the perspective of a group who has clearly never used supercaps and buys in to much of the rhetoric surrounding them. While short-sighted in most opinions, you do touch on some good points - specifically the log-off mechanics where I agree wholeheartedly.

A worthwhile read, thought there are about 20 image macros too many

It was a very good read, even for a non 0.0 pilot like me.

I have to disagree with you. As to motherships it wasn't the e-war immunity that caused issues. It's not even the damage bonus they received (but still exagerated.. imho 5k from bombers should be "well enough"). It's the ehp boost. Imagine you have 100 man drake fleet. It probably has 40 000dps. Killing a mothership (single ship) with that fleet will takes you 10 minutes if not more. Can you keep your hictors alive for that time? No.

The way I look at it, supers are too good for what they cost. I know that's shocking considering how expensive they are, but upon consideration I think this is absolutely true.

If you buy a prophecy for 15 million isk and compare it to an absolution that costs 220+ million isk, you are looking at 12-15x more isk for (depending on fitting) double the DPS and 1.5x more tank.

The same thing is true if you compare a T1 BC and a T1 BS with similar fits. You pay alot more (proportionally) than you get in terms of improvement. T2 BS are even more extreme in terms of price, but you also get a new ability (black ops portals or marauder carebear bonuses).

This is even true in terms of pricey officer or dead-space mods. You can pay several hundred million isk for 5% more resists. You never get 3000% more tank from a dead-space mod, as compared with a t2 variant, even though it costs 3000% more isk.

So then, given that this is how the entire game was balanced pre-Dominion, doesn't it seem insane to anyone that a super-carrier actually DOES get a corresponding proportional increase in dps and EHP in terms of isk investment? You have over 10x more BASE armor on a Nyx than a Thanatos, bombers crush sov structures + other cap ships without needing to ever reload, and they get total e-war immunity + area-effect ECM burst.

I think they should cost exactly as many minerals as they do now, but should only be a few times stronger than a carrier.

Don't forget that before Dominion, mother-ships and titans didn't have these crazy EHP totals.

Dominion Did This:



Dominion Patch 1.1 Did This:



It is therefore a very new thing that a ship should get such an extreme EHP boost simply because it costs much more. Nothing else in the game works like that. Everything else you pay 10x for maybe 1.5-2x the power.

Being 12 times as durable as a carrier simply because your super-carrier costs 12 as much makes them currently fundamentally different from every other ship class in the game.

EDIT ---- CCP has announced they will be testing a large number of capital and super-capital changes! Many of them were things I was advocating.

Link is here: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=2674

I love these changes, they even fixed log-off-ski!

I hope they go through with the titan turret changes too.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=165140#post165140

I welcome them as a first step, but these changes alone are hardly enough. Then again, let us wait a bit and see the rest of the list mentioned by Soundwave. May be the remaining stuff will cover my every single concern.

First off, if you think PL as a whole isn't hurt disproportionately by this you are nuts. Watch their "Byrds Of Prey" video and skip to the Z-UZZN fight at around 04:00 in the video. You will see them losing a fight at the sub-cap level, and being forced to drop titans who DDD all of the hostile command ships to break their bonuses, otherwise they would have lost (or so says a very angry Shadoo on voice comms).

Way too many fights end these days with titans one-shotting logistics or bonus ships, and it needs to change.

Anyway, this seems like a weird point for you to bring up, since I was simply pointing out that I don't expect someone from the alliance with the most supers in the game to want supers nerfed. Is that really a surprising or controversial claim?



The changes proposed by CCP absolutely DO get to the underlying problem, which is that supers with very little support can dominate the battlefield against a mixed fleet. The only counter to supers right now is having MORE supers.

Super-cap fleets can make mince meat of larger sup-cap fleets thanks to DDDs, huge EHP compared to pre-dominion levels, the ability to use drones in addition to fighters/bombers, ECM burst, and XL guns that can receive tracking links even though they are immune to all hostile e-war.

The nerf to doomsday weapons will prevent them from wiping out hostile bonus ships + logistics + hictors in one-shot. This is a huge change and if you don't think so you must not be involved in many fleet battles.

The drone-bay change to super-carriers is a lesser change, but still important. It makes super carriers more vulnerable to dictors, since they will have to kill them with fighters.




I disagree that spool-up, range limits, or requiring more cynos would make any difference in battle. You can take as much time to spool up as you need with a little planning, range limits can also be defeated with pre-planning, and forcing a blob of supers to get a few extra cyno alts into place isn't the same as requiring a real support fleet.

What the game needed, and what we are apparently getting, is more vulnerability for supers. They will remain the best capital-killers, but they are no longer good at beating down sub-cap fleets (assuming the proposed changes all go live on Tranquility).

As for why dread fleets are "better" to see in-game, that's easy. The reason is that dreads are not broken, in fact they are terrible against sub-caps AND supers, which is why no one flies them right now! Dreads need to enter siege mode to do their job, which prevents them from escaping or receiving any remote rep. A dread will die to sub-caps because it simply cannot self-repair against an entire fleet. Not true for supers.

Bottom Line: Currently, super-caps can crush sub-caps with impunity, which means they need very little support. They are supposed to be the biggest toys on the field, capable of crushing capital ships, but we have seen DRF fleets drop MORE supers than non-supers, and it's frankly ridiculous that the game rewards you for fielding a fleet with more supers than support.

I can see how spool-up time might buy you extra time to run away. It would make a difference for small gangs, I agree.

However, wouldn't it be better to make it so that they don't want to drop supers on a sub-cap fleet in the first place?

In my opinion, the core issue is that supers are too good against sub-caps, which is WHY you want extra time to run away from them in the first place, right?

Finally, I am not sure why you think I only care about large fleet battles. I actually enjoy large fleets the least of any form of PvP in Eve, but this doesn't mean I can't try to make big fights better though!

Let's just be happy CCP is doing the right thing in general here.

I had a long and elaborate reply written up.

New forums swollowed it without any notice or way of retrieving the post again, as you could on the old ones.

Time-out took me back to the core citation of Easley's post, and back-pedal took me back to the thread level.

**** you, new forums. Why do i even bother anymore?