EVE General Discussion

I've heard a lot of arguments for and against Fleet Boosting.

Fleet boosting, in general gives enormous boosts to fleet operations. No one can deny the advantages they provide. So, here's the pro's and cons to offgrid vs ongrid boosting:

Reasons for On grid boosting only:

• Your opponents have the ability to directly kill the booster. Since the booster is giving enormous advantages, it should be at risk.
• T3 Boosting becomes much more inline with Command ship boosting. T3's give better boosts than command ships, but it's very hard to fit several links to a t3 and still have it field viable. This would certainly eliminate the 6-link paper thin t3 setups... and make fleet command ships the most viable multi-link platform.
• It would give Fleet command ships their role back!
• Cadfael Maelgwyn suggests off grid boosting promotes risk aversion, the proliferation of alts, and allows people to do "solo" PvP without being really solo.

Reasons to keep Off grid

• Boosting characters are often highly trained alts, in feeble ships. This change would eliminate much of the time and training that went into making the alt.
• Offgrid boosters are often still engageable. You can scan them down and kill them. And if they are in a POS, you can destroy the POS.
• Offgrid boosters are often in capital ships... It's not pragmatic to risk a carrier, rorqual, or titan for the benefit of a home defense fleet.
• Offgrid boosters are widely used in group PvE, Home defense, and fleet warfare. Removing them will be a huge blow to leadership oriented characters, which are under-appreciated enough as is!
• Muad dib Added that flying a low dps brick in combat just isn't fun!

Please post with any other points I missed..... and I'll post them here...

P.S. Something we really need, whether we eliminate Offgrid or Ongrid Boosting, is an additional tab to the Fleet Management Interface.

Go Support it: Please Provide a Fleet Bonus Information Tab to the Fleet Management Interface

-- Something that shows what fleet bonuses we are currently receiving, and from whom.
-- Anyone that has tried to ensure their warfare links are properly working knows how hokey and buggy the current fleet bonus system is....

Give them all .25M EHP, remove offgrid, nerf T3's.

T3 wasn't supposed to be "better" than T2 for specialised roles.

T3 off-grid boosters clearly are better in terms of boost percentages. They are also significantly faster/easier to train for than Command Ships.

So what does on-grid boosting give you?

Nothing as far as I can see, Command Ships can survive on-grid where T3 can't but why go on-grid in the first place? The Command Ships do bugger all damage anyway.

The arguments I hear is that a Command Ship booster makes it easier for fleet movement, especially for small gangs. Bollox it does, its no great problem using paper-thin T3 boosters.

What it boils down to is that T3 can boost the fleet more than the specialised T2 Command Ships but they're paper thin so they stay off-grid.

Command Ships can survive on-grid but why go on grid in the first place? You're not going to do anything other than KM whore.

The game design is simply broken for fleet boosters.

Personally I think the simplest solution is to nerf the T3 boost percentages so its significantly worse than a Command Ship. That's the way it was supposed to be anyway.

/me shrugs, nothing is going to happen anytime soon anyway - if this is fixed by the end of 2013 I'll be amazed.

Against keeping them off grid:

Keeping them off grid means you are required to dual box an alt. This is turning eve-online into alts-online. If you don't want to buy and dual box a second account don't bother with eve.

1) Not a fan of a direct switch around on these due to various issues none the least a T3 running 3 links takes a much bigger gimp to its fitting running more than 1 link compared to command ships (tho some of the command ships need to be able to run 3 links with less overall impact). Not to mention the cost differences. Some tweaks to command ships and T3 bonuses wouldn't go amiss tho but only with careful consideration.

2) If someones boosting from a POS move to the next system or whatever and retake the tactical high ground, if your trying to siege someones system don't be suprised if they have entrenched defensive options.

3) I kind of agree on this one it makes sense from many perspectives including the technical detail - a ship transmitting and recieving the kind of telemetry, etc. data to be able to apply the kind of boosts of a command ship would have a huge energy signature that would be impossible to mask - I think there should be a trade off there somewhere tho i.e. a passive boost thats in the region of 12-15% that doesn't have blow your sig up on scan or full links which do. Infact I'm of the opinion that the ganglink modules should always give a passive boost even when in warp, etc. tho only in the region of the affore mention 12-15% type range.


One thing I thought could have potential tho its quite complicated - and a lot of people already struggle with things as simple as moving the fleet booster to wing, etc. - is that you could designate a limited number of people in the fleet as "link coordinators" i.e. the eyes and ears on grid and off-grid boosts only apply to ships that are in the same grid as the coordinator ship (which doesn't have to be a specific ship or even a squad leader, just an assigned fleet position) and that hostile fleets can see who is the "link coordinator" - killing the link coordinator ship would mean that any ships on grid with it would lose links but also means that you can have a fractured fleet i.e. camping 2 different gates in the same system and still get boosts without having to have a specific ongrid command ship present at each gate. Obviously there would have to be some restrictions in place so people don't just keep re-assigning a new "link coordinator" position in fleet to keep boosts going. All in all a bit complicated and doesn't address on its own all the issues but does put the tactical aspect back in and makes the advantage of links possible to neutralise by the opposing force without making all those leadership trained chars redundant, boring someone to death having to fly a ship on grid that does nothing interesting from the perspective of the player flying it, etc. etc.

Another idiotic post with no basis in fact.

Damnation:
2 1600mm plates, 2 faction EANM, Full set HG slaves, perfect skills, 2 T1 trimarks = 605K.

Proteus with 3 links: I am not even going to bother pointing out how stupid your post is regarding 1 million HP.

If you are going to talk about this intelligently, post up some actual numbers, instead of puling numbers out of thin air.

They're both on battleclinic. It requires use of A-type hardeners instead of EANMs, and I believe a single T2 trimark, along with the new, buffed t2 plates as of the last patch.

I'm not going to google numbers that you can find yourself.

Running eanms leaves a resist hole, significantly lowering EHP.

If they are required to be on grid people simply won't fly them anymore as they will be a primary target and they lack the ability to survive. The command-T3 booster ships would need to be completely reworked before putting them on grid.

Most Fleet Command Ships easily have enormous EHP...
and
most command t3s can still wield a 100k EHP tank while fitting a single Warfare Link...

Also, the damnation can have an obnoxious tank (make sure you include mindlink armor warfare bonuses to it too)... whether it can hit 1+m EHP or not is moreless irrelevant, as any subcapital tank above 200k EHP is more than battle ready....

Roqual Pilot would love on-grid boosting only...

No need to sit in a POS, just put that Roqual right out in that belt.. oh, hot-drop by a carrier? oh no real defenses while in that compression mode... there goes the null sec mining... but I am all for it, being a high sec miner, I will make a Bazillion ISKies... so by all means - On-Grid only!!!