Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You way underestimate the power of missiles and mid slots. :)

-Liang

Caldari is also supposed to be first for electronic warfare, and Minmatar fourth. This is why we need to be careful of ideas that involve changing ECM to still allow one lockable target, or giving Minmatar T1 ships a web bonus instead of one to painters, as this turns the racial ewar balance on its head.

Many of these ideas don't alter the ECM mechanic, they alter the power of its effect. But I'm of the view that the balance of ECM boats is generally okayish, it's the mechanic that's godawful. Hence, some of these ideas seem to be taking the worst of both worlds - we end up with weak Caldari ewar that still use a terrible mechanic. Since general racial balance requires powerful Caldari ewar, solutions of this fashion are not good. Which is why I favour removing ECM entirely.

At the frigate level Caldari and Minmatar have the same slot layout. What exactly am I underestimating?



That might explain the imbalance for disruption frigates (and their larger family), but it hardly seems fair to give the Caldari crappy versions of everything-not-a-ewar-ship in return.

To be fair, it requires a experienced PVP pilot to make the above true.

w.r.t Maulus:

1. Will Navitas still be "sniping" drone boat?
2. Why drone bonus and not another damps bonus (such as capacitor use of damps per level)?

I'm not sure what to think of that either.

//Vigil
Come to think of it, I don't even know how much of a "Disruption" Target Painting is. It is more of a support/utility tool than an actual EWAR tool like dampening, ecm etc.

All others, minus Griffen, seem to be capable of deploying some 5 drones while the Vigil has
and correct me if I am wrong please

a) apparently half the velocity bonus it had before (not sure about this one)
b) -1 drone, meaning none while all others do
c) Being able to paint perhaps across a whole world, yet what's the real point if everybody sitting in a missile boat takes a painter + web along as standard?

The old velocity bonus was pretty much the key to success. The single drone still allowed us to tease and poke like a mosquito - and "back then" some two years ago, it was more of a specialty to have painting. But now, everybody who is using a missile-heavy ship will fit a target painter; that extra optimal range on Vigil will be too situational.

I see 5 med slots, which is quite powerful for a frigate, but the dual painter bonus suck in my eyes. It is not that much of a disruption frig like the others unless one were to do a "wannabe disruption frig fit" and fit ECM and Damps ~.~

I don't want the Vigil to be Winmatar, but it was great as it was :/

The more I see painting bonuses, the more I feel it should have all gone to the Breacher, as that frigate is a real missile ship.

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. I didn't mean to suggest that "Caldari class-X is worse than Minmatar class-X" for all X. The part you quoted was just me observing that Caldari and Minmatar frigates have the same slot layout (by class). My more general point was that the "base template" for Caldari ships appears to be much worse than the "base template" for other races.

Now it could be the case that Caldari have better role bonuses, or use better types of weapons/modules, or some other factor that is not easily observable and makes up for their weaker base stats. So far I haven't seen evidence of that.

I really like these, for the same reasons as I didn't like the Attack Frigates update - you've kept the focus on e-war frigates, greatly improved them in their existing role, without jumping head first into the 'T1s should be good at everything' thinking by giving them double weapon bonuses or anything silly like that.

For the maulus, yes, the drone bonus you have here seems lacking. One thought you could look at, how about a bonus to the effectiveness of e-war drones along with an increased dronebay? That ties in closely to the gallente and e-war frigate themes, while giving the hull a large degree of flexibility (though it may well require some rebalancing of e-war drones first).

If i understand correctly. It does. It increases the changes of a hit.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Turret_damage

The bigger the sig radius is the higher the chance is of hitting the target.

If you ad the TP bonus from the Vigil (assuming minmatar lvl 5) to a T2 TP that would give a 67,5% sig increase to the target. (Do the TP percentage and the hull bonus stack btw? I am not sure)

So for example in this case; a MWD ing Taranis would normally have a sig of 81m. Painted by a max skill vigil it would have a sig of 136m. So it is easier to hit by medium guns and large turrets than it was before. Hit chance calculation also takes tracking into account of-course.

Hey everyone. Thanks for the feedback, it's been great to see so much discussion on these ships.

Remember that we have plenty of time to tweak things and take feedback into account with all these ship changes so we'll be continuing to iterate up to and beyond the winter release.

From the feedback you've been giving I'm preparing the next (and definitely not the last) set of slight tweaks to the ship design, including heavily considering giving the Griffin and the Vigil their drone buddies back. Will update the OP soon.

To answer a few specific concerns:

I don't think we'll be seeing the full speed of an old level 5 Vigil return. The only way to balance that kind of speed on a t1 ewar frigate is to make the ship otherwise suck, which isn't really the direction we want to go with it. If you are looking for a superfast tech one frigate I advise taking a peek at the new Slasher, it's pretty dope.

The idea of matching the painter bonus with a missile damage bonus was actually the first one on the table, but we rejected it mainly because painters have virtually no effect on frigate size missiles in practical use. Look for the idea to return at ship sizes where it can work more effectively.

We'll be getting the proposed changes to ewar out to you guys as soon as we can. Don't worry, it will be available to you long before the patch release so we can have a good discussion about them. I totally understand that you can't give full feedback on these ships until you see those details, and I'm going to be setting aside time to focus on this thread again to digest the extra wave of feedback once we make that ewar post.

As for the Maulus, I'm keeping the idea of changing the drone bonus to a damp cap use bonus in mind as a strong option. I do however believe that with the design of the ship as it is making that switch would reduce the power of the Maulus. I look forward to letting you guys get your hands on the ship on the test server as I think the relative weakness of that one bonus belies the fact that the rest of the ship stats (especially the big dronebay and the speed/agility) have turned it into a very powerful and fun frigate for small and medium gangs. If you guys still think it's underpowered after getting a chance to kick the wheels I can always swap the bonus to damp cap use to help focus it even more on the ewar role.

Keep up the feedback I really do appreciate it.