Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Agreed. If you are worried about balancing because of sentries please slap a "Can not deploy sentries on it". I only recently just got T2 sentries. The only reason I did was because I had to repair my sec status and needed to shoot rats. Now if you gave us small sentries that is another story.

I was going to use Merlins, Condors, and Kestrels in my 1v1's with Fozzie. Thanks for spoling my plan! He would have lost every match!

I agree. Why brawl when you can kite?

Tiericide and the ship rebalancing initiative won't change that. It's a problem rooted in modules and weapon systems and to some extent game mechanics rather than ship hulls. It's also mostly a cruiser & battlecruiser issue.

You know, I often wonder about this same thing when it comes to games in general, not just EVE.

I remember back when arenas were introduced to WoW, and there were very obvious imbalances. Like 80% of top ranked 3v3 teams had the exact same composition - rogue, mage, priest. In 2v2, any combination of those also was quite high on the list. And in 5v5, EVERY SINGLE TEAM in top 100 had a shaman. Every. Bloody. One.

Now, there were lots of very good reasons why. Class synergy was one. The amount of control another. Independent diminishing returns timers due to ability types, which allowed them to stack. And the reason for the shaman was simple - Bloodlust - which was essentially +30% DPS team-wide buff for 60 seconds. A team without it stood no chance against a team with it. So, shaman was mandatory. No ifs, no buts.

Now, these imbalances were obvious. You had to look at the ladder, see team compositions and team representations, and you saw which classes needed work. It wasn't rocket surgery. For example, there was 1 (only 1 out of 300) feral druid in top 100 teams in 3v3 at the time. Again, you could argue a lot of things - you could say "well, maybe players who like feral druids don't like arenas, and specifically don't like 3v3 arenas, and that's why there's so few of them". Or you could pull your head out of wherever it's at for the winter and realize the class does not synergize well with anyone, takes three times as many keypresses to accomplish the same task, and in general makes it feel like you're playing chess when everyone else is playing checkers.

It's the same in EVE. You look at see all the Drakes and Tengus. The usual excuse? Well, Drakes are used in fleet blobs. Totally true. But now take it one step further and ask "WHY?" Why not a Myrmidon? Perhaps because Drake tank is passive, and Myrm tank is active? Or perhaps because Myrm is armor and Drake is shield? Or perhaps because it takes 6 clicks for Myrmidon to bring its armaments to bear, while it takes a Drake 1 click to bring 95% of its DPS online? Is it heavy missile and range issue? Or it could be any permutation of the above, including all of the above.

Bottom line, in a balanced game, there would be an equal likelihood of Drake or Myrm being chosen for a fleet doctrine. Ideally, they would be used roughly the same amount of the time. Regardless of reasons why. Sure Myrm is great for some things. But when those things happen rarely, a pilot ONLY trained for Myrm is **** out of luck, while a pilot who chose the Drake is sitting pretty. And that's not balance. And the reason for this imbalance is not the ships, it's the USABILITY of these ships, their real-life applications.

Same with Tengu and Proteus. Is Proteus bad? Heck no. It's just Tengu has a heck of a lot more applications. So most pilots training for a T3 go for a Tengu. And stats reflect that. Which means something's gotta change. Otherwise the game is an imbalanced mess.

Actually in thinking about the dev posts and what the balancing team is doing i wonder whether the problem isn't as simple as focusing balancing on 1v1 basis (and even there the recent changes fail). Eve is not a 1v1 game. You have dedicated tacklers, lachesis and huggins, immobilizing targets for drakes sitting at safe range, and other frigs for kiting frigs.

For frigs you have little ehp and thus somtimes you don't even need tackle so you can shoot from outside point range with some ships. Kite and the other guy keeps thinking I'm gaining once i catch him he's toast oops i'm losing too much hp better warp out darn waited too long . . . Or I have him pointed but not gaining fast enough to bring the blasters into range boom kited to death again.

And drones get lost in the movement of a fight. I don't think this present balancing team (like the others before it) understands the diffiulites inherent in drones. They seem to be focused on the dps potential and not the actual mechanics as they play out such as travel time to target, clumsy interface, destructibility, etc etc

THese threads make me

OMG THATS AWESOME...

I would be soo damn happy if you did this... like OMG!

think about it racalling drones back in the day was a real skill... it was the reason why people said gal were the kings of solo pvp but also the hardest to master...

it could be tricky to change the mechanics...

but what i would do is once the drone is in the drone bay it interpreted as a moduel... and all its damage gets converted to be like heat damage on a mod... that way it might be easier to for programing to actually repair them...

also you could tier the drones for repair time... even go all the way up to fighters and fighter bombers...

I understand that you guys probs cant fit this into the winter realease... but perhaps the 1.1 or even 1.2 hell i could wait untill the next summer realease... but for the love of g-d DO IT!!!!

Achieving that kind of balance would simply mean that all ships are the same, just with different names and graphics. No differences in weapon systems, fitting options or piloting styles. In other words, the worst possible game ever.

EVE has a rich and varied selection of different ships, suitable for different tasks. You can train any ship you want to fly, and it's probably best to choose them to suit the intended use.

For optimal experience, pick a thing you want to do, pick the best ships for that, max your skills and spend time learning to fly that limited selection of ships.

Take for example your Tengu vs. Proteus pair. Tengu is a great carebear boat for wormhole PVE. Proteus roflstomps it in wormhole PVP. Drake vs Myrm? Sure, Drake is way better in fleets. Myrm eats it 1vs1.

Why change this? You want to press F1 in a Drake blob? Train Drake. You want to go for a balls to the wall solo lowsec roam? Train Myrm. Or Cane. Or whatever you like so much, that you are willing to put in the hours to make it work.

Balance means that each and every ship is viable choice for something, and this is what CCP is doing with tiericide.

Uh what solo pvp are you doing? How do you catch a kiting Drake or 100MN Tengu with your Myrmidon or Proteus? Please enlighten me.

The Proteus can do it, but the Myrm can't. The best ship for the job is the Zealot, Loki, and Talos.

-Liang

Ed: I mean, for solo killing the boosted 100mn tengu. Not simply for catching it. That's easy.

It's hard, I'll give you that. But it's not impossible. And it does not require all ships to be the same.

It requires that each race has ships that can perform well in any given task with any given weapon. The problem is, such balance does not end with hulls, it includes weapons, movement and all the modules and skills.

For example, consider Minmatar artillery and Gallente rails. In theory, they should perform the same task - instant damage at long range. Only artillery is used far more than rails. Why? Simple. High alpha on artillery, steady DPS but low alpha on rails.

With artillery, the first salvo might just pop the target, which also negates any possibility of repair to the damaged ship. It goes from 100% to 0% in a second. Boom, gone. There are other considerations as well, for example artillery fires cap-free, rails require capacitor. Rails have higher ROF, which means they use more ammo. Which in turn means a ship has to both carry more ammo and will expend more ammo (and thus more ISK) for the same result. Now, rails, on paper, have the advantage of having longer range than artillery. But in practice, with probing the way it is, this advantage is nullified.

Add all of this together, and artillery is a clear winner over rails. And that is what most people use. And that is what EVEKill reflects as well.

Look, people aren't stupid. This is the same mechanic used in other games. I'll take it from the above example I made of rogue/mage/priest in WoW. Part of the reason 80% of top-rated teams had that composition is high burst. When a rogue ambushes you from stealth, it is the equivalent of the artillery salvo. When a mage pops a cooldown that makes the next cast instant, and fires a huge nuke, it is once again an equivalent of artillery salvo. These together have the potential to drop any one target in one hit, before the healer (logistics) ,if any, has a chance to react. Boom, 3v3 is now 3v2.

Now consider a warlock class, which is high damage at range, same as mage, but done with DoTs (Damage Over Time), the same issue as rails. While they do the same DPS, and from higher range, in practice range is too easy to negate (same as in EVE) and a slow steady steam of DPS (high ROF, medium damage, low alpha) is very easily countered by any healer with HoT (Heal Over Time). And once again, people are not stupid. And warlocks were one of the lesser represented classes for exactly that reason (and several others).



Problem is in training time. If I chose "wrong", like for example choosing Gallente hulls and drone skills, when the latest fleet doctrine dictates shield tank and missiles with Caldari hulls, I am **** out of luck. If Gallente had hulls that were a match for Drake - same applies DPS but via a different but BALANCED weapon system, and comparable mobility with armor tank, then perhaps. They wouldn't be same - they would be different but equal.

I mean, let's face it, even if you look at tanks alone, there's already a huge imbalance. One can be passive, the other cannot, not without logistics/repair costs. One gives the bonus at beginning of cycle, one at the end. One has major penalties (armor, rigs), the other does not (or at least not as pronounced). Shields recently got ASB, which we all know is bull****. Armor got a weak weird EANM that is in no way, shape or form comparable. It is, simply put, not balanced. And, and I know I said it before, people are NOT stupid. Which is why we see ASB used way, way, WAY more than whatever that new armor module is called. It is an unbalanced mechanic, and people are (ab)using it to their heart's content.



Pick one, but based on what? For example, when I was starting the game and doing the Gallente tutorial, I was told that Gallente are drone kings. And that drones are Gallente racial weapon, same as projectiles for Minmatar or missiles for Caldari. That was...mmm...how shall I put it nicely...not entirely accurate? At best, a Gallente drone boat is a split weapon system of hybrids/drones.There are no frigate/destroyer drone boats, despite it being a racial weapon. Etc., etc.Based on information available to me at the time, I made the right choice. The information was wrong, or at best misleading.



Isn't it obvious? Because if I trained for a Myrm, I can't participate in fleets. And if I didn't train for Tengu, I can't carebear it up in wormhole PvE (or at least not as well). There should be ships in Gallente lineup that do fleets as well as Drake, and ships in Gallente lineup that do WH PvE as well as Tengu.

Otherwise CCP has to re-do the tutorials once again, and tell you players "if you want to PvP, go Winmatar. If you want fleet blobs, go Caldari. Etc., etc." Which, let's face it, is not going to happen. Though it's not such a bad idea, close to "class choice" in other MMOs. You don't make a warrior expecting to do ranged DPS. You are given an honest up-front description of what you're getting into.