Warfare & Tactics

Off grid boostin under pos isnt fair cause you cant counter it. But i dont see why should we remove off grid t3 boosting completely. It can be countered with proper probing skills and some implants, or the blob can counter it if nobody laggs off the blob on jumps (in my corporation we say that if you dont jump with the others youre already dead), and ofcourse you can always train someone in your fleet to boosting and get a booster for yourself, thats a counter too. Ofcourse that means someone has to sacrafice his killmails and nearly half year traning in leadership and get a null tanked 600 mill isk cruiser. Yeah to me it seems whining on forums to remove the whole thing is a lot more easier than looking for ways to counter it....


NO off grid boosting under POS, agreed.
NO off grid boosting at all, totally disagree.
Off grid boosting needs to change? Maybe, but not that drastically, and change is not the same as nerf or buff.

Off-grid boosting needs to go. We didn't need those in all the years before to fight vs. the odds.

Yeah, dontcha know you need a probing alt to find the other guys boosting alt in "alts online."

Ah I see, because this mechanic is so bad you can't really defend it, you resort to name calling. Everyone who realizes this is a **** mechanic must just be a whiney carebear.

To those who are so worried about POS boosting, what is the difference if people simply sit next to the POS bubble and boost? They'll still have a level of protection because of the POS modules. You won't be able to gank them without seriously risking your ship, assuming their POS has a decent defensive setup.

Kill offgrid boosting.

And Armeggeda, since this is your thread and you bring up AlvachiUSA alot ( ) then I will say this:

AlvachiUSA was very very very successful in BWF with an ON GRID boosting cloaky Ferox (I thinkt that is what it was?). Sometimes we caught it and killed it. Sometimes we didnt. But it was at risk, and that was the point. The offgrid stuff is just silly for the amount of bonuses it gives. Put it at risk on grid where it becomes a target and I have no real issue with it.

IMHO.

I'm not twisting words around dude I'm just reading what he's writing and clearing it up for him. By the way, how do you know what he meant? I suppose you could assume whatever you want but I read the words and rebut like a proper human being does.

Make links raise your sig and make any ships running them probable, there fixed it. Move along now.

T1 bc has fitting bonus to links.

Links aren't expensive.

Speaking as someone who sunk over a year and a considerable amount of isk into making a combat booster alt, obviously I don't want to see off-grid boosting completely disappear.

Leadership skills take a decent chunk of time - the charisma attribute they use means you want to do them when you're mapped for them which means you might as well get them all done in one go. It's been suggested that perhaps instead of doing them ALL, everyone could do some. If fleet bonuses worked in a cumulative fashion - which they don't - then yes I could see that many BC/t3/CS running one or two links each, thus not completely gimping the ship for any other purpose (like defensive/offensive capabilities), would be useful and reduce the skills investment required. I haven't seen CCP suggest making boosts cumulative though.

Right now, say you had a loki with sirmish mindlink in FC, tengu with siege mindlink in WC and a bunch of folk with leadership 5 in squad command roles. The loki's skirmish bonuses would apply as would the tengu's siege bonuses and whichever of the two pilots had better skills would apply the bonuses from any armor/information links being run on those ships. This is NOT cumulative. Any seige links the loki was running or skirmish links the tengu had active would be completely superseded by the other pilot's superior bonuses, and thus not counted.

So we're back to a limited number of boosters running multiple links by pilots who've had a considerable amount of time invested in skills, and usually in fairly flimsy ships. Command ships are the least vulnerable because of t2 ship resists but they're slower than t3s and struggle to maintain pace with fleet; t3s give superior bonuses but are far pricier and far more likely to die when caught.

The other issue is one of dual-boxing. Most combat boosters are alts simply because of the time requirement on the skills - would you want to take 9 months out of your combat skillplan to train up t2 ganglinks and leadership skills? Me either. Regardless of the quality of your pc and how many monitors you have available, I would argue that dual-boxing two characters in a combat situation is extremely difficult and likely to lead to mistakes and the loss of one (or both) ships. This is where the 'off-grid' bit gets relevant.

But I do agree that boosters shouldn't be able to make such a valuable contribution in 'perfect' safety. I would fully support a change which meant you couldn't activate links inside a POS shield. And perhaps it's worth applying an effect whereby active links increased your sig radius or nerfed your speed - making you easier to probe down? Another possibility would be some form of visible effect on the ships being boosted so that anyone engaging knows they are not in fact just dealing with a solo rifter but a heavily boosted one. Thus indicating to you that there's a booster in space somewhere you might want to deal with ASAP.

There should be risk involved in providing boosts to combat fleets - but I strongly feel that taking these booster alts on-grid renders them totally unworkable. I for one, would be forced to either field my booster alt or my combat main - not both. Which begs the question of which account it's viable to keep paying for...

[If I've merely repeated what others have already said then I apologise. Wanted to throw my tuppence in but am already overloaded with info today and didn't read the entire thread. No disrespect intended. :) ]