Player Features and Ideas Discussion

no no no no no no no no no no no no no no. DO NOT CHANGE THE COERCER FOR F*CKS SAKE.

This is literally one of the best ships in teh game, precicesly because it has one mid. Dont change it. Please! what can i do to change your minds on this?

This destroyer's rebalance will change nothing. Just useless westing of time and resources. They need new role bonuses like mwd\ab boost, middle-range webifieres, long-range small neutralizers for effective fight against frigates-tacklers or good boost of target painting.

Just give them all that frigates hate.

Im no massive experts on Dessies, but I fly them on occasion and you see a lot of them in FW.

Here are the common fits you see in FW and why people fly them:

Corm ( awesome sniper)
Coercer (brick or sniper or cockbag (insta-lock alpha))
Thrasher (OP, Cockbag, AC kiter, AC in your face, awesome slot layout).
Catalyst (because some crazies (like myself) like to fly Gallente ships just because - really no other reason).

Cat is the worst dessie already. These suggested changes make it even worse.. Cat is a gallente ship that needs to be able to fit full tackle. Other than for suicide ganking an unmoving hauler, people just rarely fit blasters on them because of the lack of tackle. If it needs to be balanced in other ways, that is fine, but give it a third mid. It is outclassed as a Rail ship by the Corm, and blaster fits dont work because there is a lack of web. Thus, there is really no reason to use it.

Basically, just because the Catalyst is a good high-sec suicide gank blaster boat doesnt mean it is balanced for normal pvp. :)

Removing the fourth mid on the cormorant for a low is a huuuuuuuuuuge nerf to an already suck-y destroyer.

Its slot layout is honestly fine. In general, its a fine ship

Removing the 4rth low on the coerer defenitely takes away it's ability to tank and gank at the same time.

I was able to fit it with 6000 ehp tank + 2 HS II and an engagement range out to 38 km's :) Now I will ahve to either sacrifice a HS or tank.. in either case, it looses uniqueness. I was able to sucessfully deal with any other destroyer out there. Either by warping out when they sniped, or by simply outlasting them while delivering 280 dps on target. Usually by the time they realised my tank wasn't breaking and ther glasscannon was going down, they didn't have the time anymore to align and warp.
Tanky designs on the other hand got out-dpsed.

No need for scram.

Removing one low will reduce this aspect, by either taking away tank or dps, in both cases making the performance mediocre and taking away the uniqueness of the coercer.

Personally I'm in favour of removing the utility high from the Cormorant and moving it to a low. That or just giving another slot to destroyers in general.

Also seriously WTB a Caldari missile destroyer.

The catalyst is still an unfocused mess after this change - falloff and optimal bonuses leave it in a confused position compared to the other three. One solution might be to split the class in half by swapping out the optimal role bonuses on the catalyst and thrasher for falloff bonuses to make them more dedicated close-range ships compared to the sniper-focused cormorant and coercer. That would leave the catalyst in an unusual position of having a double-falloff bonus, but I'm not familiar enough with small blasters to guess if that would be a good thing, or whether the Destroyer skill falloff bonus would then need switching to something else.

CCP Ytterbium,

I am concerned that ships undergoing re-balancing are starting to look a bit too.....standardized. While standardization makes balancing easier, it saps uniqueness and variation from the different races and ships within the same class.

The slot layouts for destroyers....8/2/3 or 8/3/2.
You did this also for the EAFs.....2/4/3 or 2/5/2.
All ships within these two classes also have bonuses that mirror each other (racially, of course)

Where's the variation? Why are there only 2 slot layouts per class instead of 3 or 4? Where's the destroyer that uses speed and damage to take out frigs, the destroyer that's slower but focuses on scram/web to take them out, and the destroyer that doesn't have the big damage but tanks the assault frigates better? (I'll refer to these as sub-roles)

Lets take Combat Recons for example. Same role, EW based. 4 different slot layouts. All have racial EW bonuses, but fight very different because of their sub-roles....Huginn based on slowing people down, Lachesis based on locking people down, Curse based on disabling ships down, and Rook based on jamming ships down. Shouldn't all ship classes try to be as varied and interesting?

Can you take some time to explain your philosophy on keeping ships within the same class unique, while making them balanced?

And the cormorant needs to keep it's 4th midslot....thanks :)

See my comments above about splitting the role bonus to create 2 short range ships and 2 snipers.

T2 Version: Corvette

A cloak-ship hunter. A bit out-of-the-box Ideas.....

Corvettes have special equipment to hunt down cloaked ships.

High-Energy Flashlight:
This high intensive light beam overloads the light bending cloaking technique that keeps stealth ships invisible. Also it cannot defeat the sensor cloaking of a stealth ship.
Function:
All 20 Seconds a beam with 30 degrees is emitted up to 100km. In this beam a cloak ship becomes visibile, but not targetable via Overview or right-click onto it. Also it is only visible for Corvette Class ships. The beam is emittet into the viewing area of the pilot, similar to the directional scanner.

Light, Medium and Heavy Plasma-Mortar
These weapons firing a contained plasma field similiar to Blasters. A small cartridge containing the field generator are fired from the barrel, emitting a force field containing the plasma, dragging the field behind the cartridge. After the battery charge of the cartridge runs dry, the plasma is no longer containted and a violent explosion errupts.
Function:
The Plasma-Mortar fires in the direction of the viewing area, similiar to a directional scanner. The Mortar has fixed ranges and area effects, the splash damage becomes weaker every 100m. Light Mortars have the shortest range, but a big radius, while heavy mortars firing a longer distance but with less area effect.

Stardust-Cruise Missile System:
The Stardust Cruise Missile System is the combination of Scanner Probes and a warp-cable Cruise Missile System. A cloaked ship in space leaves a shadow, an anomaly into gravity and starlight. Blankness, perfect void space were normally something shoul be. It is the silence, in an Ocean full of noise. This hole in space becomes easier to detect the longer a ship remains in place or moving with sub-warp speed in the same area. In the first hour it is impossible to find an cloaked ship as long as you don't put the probes on the same grid as the cloaked ship. With every hour afterwards, the area to detect increases. The Stardust-Cruise Missile locks on the probes, travels by warp speed in the vincinity of the target and explodes. The nuclear charge creates a small area damage effect, but more importantly, the strong EMP weakens the cloak and a full hit deactivated it. Afterwards a conventional scanning-ship can detect the hidden raider.
Function:
Probes with an special probe launcher. Works like conventional scanning. Detection range is deternined by cloak duration and starts after one hour. Stardust Missiles weakens the cloak and can make it possible to warp on the same grid or to decloak. Startdust Missiles are fired from the same launcher as the probes.


Maybe as an direction a new way to install a cloak vs. counter cloak with modification of implemented features.