Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I agree, cap usage of lasers should not go up. What I'm suggesting is this.



More than anything I'm interested to hear some dev comments on this.

Tristan's hybrid bonus make sense when you use smaller guns than 125mm to defend itself against fast moving targets...like drones and those T1 tackling frigates.

Those who are complaining about losing the "Cyno" Kestrel....you do know the Exploration Frigate revamp will still give you a T1 option for a suicide cyno run :P

actually "gallente training" for subcapital t1 is "rather" easy with blaster(hybrids)/ drones and armor tank.
imagine training a minmatar character; you need projectiles, missiles, drones, armor & shield tank.
i do not see anything wrong when the combat philosophy of a race gets a bit more pronounced. this way you stop making every race the same.
just because there is one t1 gallente frig which uses light missiles and maybe rockets, why should you train every missile related skill? i like the philosophy of having the gallente frigs more hybrid and drone focusses and less using "foreign" weapons. this way you see, whats this race is all about and when moving past t1 and start specialising into t2 or broadening into other races you always can start training for the other toys. it may be a contestable opinion, but when specialising for a t2 ship, i find it acceptable to train for a "specialised" weapon type.

the main idea behind the bombers was not making them torpedo spitting missile boats, but have a platform for deploying bombs, which do not have much in common with missiles. it would be rather cool if only the caldari bomber would use torps and the other bombers would use large lasers/projectiles/ blasters.. heavily modified to make them only viable when shooting larger targets. like a penalty on signature radius.

The funny thing about that is that the current bombers are modified in favor of having BETTER damage application (but not raw DPS) than battleships. And you're suggesting making the turret ones significantly worse? Heh.

-Liang

So five tristans walked into a minor... And each dropped a sentry. That would be comedy gold to do at least one time.

I know it. I am Gallente and I don't know what for this tristan needs guns. It needs drone optimal bonus if you against webifier optimal bonus. Change turret's bonus to 2.5% and add drone optimal range 5% per lvl. Light drones have problems with too small optimal range with very high speed so tracking bonus not very useful for light drones.

FRIGATE LOGISTICS \o/

I thought that was the big reveal, then I read this, and I think you're dropping us hints :)

as bombers are quite mobile thy can easily cut down transversal and with unmodified large turret they would roflstomp everything into oblivious. similar to talos and tornado.
it was just a fast idea, not to be taken too seriously ^^

Ok I gonna bring this up here, how many gallente pilots are tired of drone/hybrid combo ships. They are the only race that doesn't get seperate weapon platform ships. Every drone ship gets a hybrid bonus (myrmidon aside) it would be nice if the drone ships were drone ships and the hybrid ships were hybrid ships. Give the drone ships drone hp bonuses, tracking bonuses, optimum range bonuses, damage bonuses, mwd speed bonuses or logistic/ewar bonuses.

Assuming for a moment frigate logistics is what we're considering, there are a couple of a pretty big problems to consider.

What exactly does a logistics frigate rep? If it's repping cruisers or larger then there's no real advantage over a logistics cruiser. So I assume they're for repping other frigates.

Even if you take locking out of the equation (for example by assuming these logistics frigs could all but insta-lock), there's usually a delay between a ship taking damage and the logistics ships stemming the bleeding. Excluding 1v1 encounters though, a frigate taking fire in PVP is usually in one of two situations: it's either evading all or most of the incoming damage, or it's dying - usually very quickly. The window available for a logistics ship to lock that frigate and begin repairing it is very slim indeed, to the point where most ships will be dead before reps land in any real fight (especially with armour reps, which land at the end of their cycle).

In addition to that, the low EHP and resists of your typical t1 frigate (potentially excluding merlins and punishers) means that reps simply aren't that effective on them. High resists are all but essential for remote repair to work, and it's really quite hard to fit a frigate in that way. Additionally, fights involving larger ships are likely to see frigates volleyed straight through their primary shield/armour buffer, meaning no amount of reps can actually keep them afloat. Assault frigs are tough enough for it to work, but inventing a new ship class purely to repair assault frigs seems a little unnecessary.

A possible alternative which would come in really handy, would be a t1 boosting frigate able to fit a single gang link, in a similar vein to the t1 battlecruisers. Right now using gang links is something that a frigate-only fleet simply can't do, unless it's willing to cut it's mobility significantly (since cruisers warp at half the speed of frigates, or slower if compared to t2 frigates) - in other words, sacrifice the main reason to use a frig fleet in the first place. Being able to receive the benefits of a gang link would allow frigate fleets to become a lot more flexible, and level the playing field between a frigate fleet and a gang of larger ships. Obviously, this would work even better if combined with a change to make warfare links on-grid only, but that's a separate conversation entirely!

Other than that, I love what you're doing with balancing so far (even if it does mean I have to rewrite half of my blog!). I like that you've moved away from giving every race a missile frig and a drone frig, that felt a little too homogeneous and I think this way you're maintaining more racial flavour while still giving new players some genuine choice. Keep it up!