Ships & Modules

I frankly have no idea how the heck you're having cap issues in a Tengu running L4 missions. Can you post your fit here or in another thread? Because whatever it is that you're doing: you're doing it wrong. Also, your cost estimates are terrible. It's not 500M for those rigs.

-Liang

The separation of ISK and no-ISK:

Keep in mind Liang, up until this point ... anyone who have argued against your standpoint on Tech III have done from an ISK-perspective: or should i say, based on current market values (Tech III are 500m, Tech II are 250m, Tech I is 25m, no exact figures, just to give a reference frame). People are weary of giving Tech III balance attention from a no-ISK perspective since at the moment the "overpowered" nature of Tech III is actually rather well balanced with ISK in mind. An important side of this discussion is that Tech II generally is not - that's why people usually don't fly HAC anymore.

To put it in very crude terms: a Tech III ship can survive an encounter with 20 Tech I equivalents. In some people's mind being able to fight 50-100 guys more or less "alone" is the highlight of imbalance. Others would point out that it's a 500m ISK investment facing a 500m ISK investment so it should stand a fighting chance. Obviously , a 20 man BC gang should kill a lone Tengu (even if he's pimped and boosted), but as far as mechanics go there is slight chance there which means some people will take the engagement (or at least escape it).

Let's face it, that's what 100mn Tech III (boosted, implanted, factioned) are: they are the new nano. Adressing them without adressing the concepts of ISK and numbers will lead to the same end-effect as the old nano-nerf did. Nano was "overpowered" but when some degree of agreement was reached, it was pointed out that any change should come with attention to ISK and scaling. That attention have never came. CCP never did it. Still have not. Nano kept roaming popular, it gave chance to up-engage. Up-engaging enabled scalability as small-medium-large would interact more.

Post-nano ship balance and trends have been quite positive, but scalability have been skewered since.

Tech II on the other hand, while balanced to BC fairly well from a no-ISK perspective, suffer quite alot when you apply the ISK perspective. Once again, that is the only reason HAC are out of style. It's been the main topic when i have been slugging it out with Lili in various "Drake" threads. If they cost just as much they would be very popular.

This is why the no-ISK perspective is irresponsible in my eyes, because it assumes there isn't an ISK disparity.

It assumes you adress production first. Else the ships will dwindle (as they have). 2010 is when post-nano ship trends stopped being positive, and began to stale up a bit (favouring cost-effect, buffer, mid-long range projection).

Likewise it's why i have argued for an ISK-nerf on things like Drakes rather than a stat-nerf, because i have never seen them as too good. I can kill them with Cerbs, Deimos, Vagas, Zealots, Rooks, you name it.

This is also the reason why i am very sceptical of what Ytterbium and Fozzie will bring us in the next year, because they seem convinced Drakes needed Tier 3 as a counter. They are the people who gave us things like Tier 3 and ASB. Things that actually are, from any perspective, ridiculously overpowered and malbalanced.


What's malbalanced then?

I am killing frigates with relative ease in my Tier 3 BC. I am tanking gangs relative my base buffer with ease in my ASB ships. Much like anyone else, i have been exploiting the crying shame out of these things. ASB carry an additional problem, which i usually compare to the "Falcon nerf". They have no scalability. So while they tank anything in their size-ratio with complete abundance, they will also never step out of that since the direct counter to them is their base buffer. In plain words, they are massively OP in "small" and completely pointless in "large". In "medium" you can debate them, but overall they should be considered quite pointless there too. That means the only thing they have managed to accomplish is to completely skewer the scale where active tanks overall see profile. It's not a candid whine, i'm using them myself, all the time. It's shame, because the core idea of them (slot allocation, cap-dependency; to relate shield-armor actives while keeping them unique) is actually not that bad - just the balance, you can tank like 10k DPS with some ships. Disregarding alpha-to-buffer that's like tanking 20 Drakes, HAC or whatever. Easily as OP as Tech III.

The Falcon? Well, the "nerf" preserved them as OP in "small", completely botched them in "medium" (while in "large" they were never really relevant to begin with). Quite similar to ASB, no?

Anyone who argue those things "balanced" are equally to your perspective of no-ISK Tech III, completely delusional in my book . Anyone who is half-decent will make Tier 3 BC blap anything they only need to realize transversal to sig-bloom and what the existance of some support will do in exceptional situations (i mean, alot of the time you don't even need the support, but if someone have awesome sig-speed to rattle you, even that is overcome with a little web-paint action).

So yes, in my book Ytterbium and Fozzie do not have a very reliable track-record.

In fact, they have messed up the concept of ISK-balance and no-ISK balance themselves, that's why i question them.



I think you and i can agree that we have to aruge either the one or the other. Right?

In no-ISK there was perfect balance between HAC-BS-BC. Tolerable balance at the very least. Then Ytterbium and Fozzies creations are the anomalies, along with the Tech III.

In an ISK-perspective Tech III is reasonably balanced to HAC and BS, while BC stand out along with the new creations. Then Lili is right, Tier 2 BC should be manhandled - but it's their ISK we should nerf to oblivion.

The rigs for a PVE Tengu costs 20,388,891 ISK in Dodixie right now. In total, not per rig.

-Liang

Yes.

A tech 3 ship is not some solopwnmobile. Of course a more expensive ship should beat its cheaper counterpart in a 1 vs 1 situation with equal pilots.

Tech 3 ship will fare against one and possible maybe, just maybe 2 cheaper ships. But anymore than that and the tech 3 will die like any other ship. There are simple ways to counter t3 ships such as neuting, ewar, etc. It may take longer for it to die, but it will die nonetheless.

Tech 3 are not like titans where a handful of titans can blap and defeat fleets of ships. In terms of cost balance, they are balanced. You would have to have a 10 to 1 kill/death ratio to put break even.

Why are HAC's little used, well because there are simply better ships for the cost.

Tier 2 Battlecruisers, Tier 3 Battlecruisers can do nearly the same job that HAC's can do for less isk, SP and yield better results.

The Vagabond has a ship superior to it, and its not the loki, its called the Cynabal.

The Vigilant is the Deimos done right.

The Cerberus not worth using over the cheaper and superior Drake.

The Zealot, meh long range Oracles are better or a Harbinger makes a better brawling close range ship.

The Muninn pff forget that when you have the Hurricane and Tornado.

The Eagle? Hahaha Go fly a Naga or use heavy missile platforms.

Ishtar? Meh there are the gila and dominix.

I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. Seriously?

-Liang

you got a good point and i missed this post tier 3 bc's balanced on what bassis ? 14k volley from one and something like the naga barely hiting 9k not to mention all the other advantages the minmitar tier3 has. tell yah what take any tornado and fire a volley or 2 into even an active tengu bet it gose pop

you simply get a point on them any tackling merlin should be capable of this

I believe that we're both conversant enough with the economic realities of Eve and the production pipelines of T3 ships to know that the cost of T3s is exactly what the market will bear. You can't even blame it on that many other aspects of the market since the T3 manufacturing chain is so insular from the rest of the market. This isn't a case of CCP price fixing something as they do with pirate/faction fation - players are voting with their wallet and they believe that T3s are superior enough to everything out there to pay the price and risk the SP loss.

Moving on, I would claim that the 500m investment vs 500m investment is a fundamentally flawed concept for a variety of reasons. For starters, Eve is a game about incremental rewards taking exponentially longer to attain. It's built into everything in the game from the skill system to the ship balancing. Furthermore, the concept totally neglects the fact that there's 100 people's time involved trying to kill one guy in an expensive ship. Please let me be clear here: I'm not saying that I believe the 100 people's time should be the determining factor. I'm saying that it shouldn't be ignored as this argument does.

Ultimately what I'm getting at here is that ISK should play a role, but something being expensive shouldn't grant a license to kill for invulnerability. The problem is exacerbated because anything that's seen as being overpowered will naturally rise in price. And that's exactly what CCP is trying to get at when saying that ISK is not a balancing factor when balancing the game. Bringing the argument back to full circle: T3s do both of those in a lot of ways and that's why they absolutely do need nerfed.

Regarding the T2 vs BC balance discussion: I've always said that I really like the Tier 2 balance. The Harbinger could use some fittings nudges and the Myrm could use some more bandwidth, but overall I really like it. It sounds like CCP will be taking a slightly different approach and be adjusting HML to nerf the Drake and hitting the base stats on the Cane a bit. It'll probably turn out fine - 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.

But at any rate, I don't think I agree that HAC vs Tier 2 BC balance is fine even if we ignore price. While you say that you can kill Tier 2 BCs in anything you like, I don't believe that's a particularly valid balance point. After all, I solo kill BCs in T1 frigates. Consider the case of a shield gank Myrmidon vs a Deimos. The Deimos most certainly isn't going to close up with the Myrm and it's not going to have much of a chance at range either. Its best bet is going to be Null kiting with a long point and hoping to whittle the drones down before it gets eaten alive. Even that can be kinda risky, depending on the Myrm fit in question.

You might think that I just implicitly agreed that the Deimos is so broken that why would I care if the Proteus obsoleted it. The truth is: I don't care if the Proteus obsoletes the Deimos (though make no mistake: it does). I just care that the Proteus has so many outlier points. It outright eclipses an awful lot of ships for a ship that's supposed to shine from its versatility.

You touched on ASBs, but I believe it was actually Soundwave that was driving both of those initiatives. Either way, Fozzie was not yet employed by CCP when they were announced or when the expansion finished. No matter how fast you think his ramp up time is due to prior knowledge, it's not that fast. :)

You further touched on Tier 3 BCs in a later post. While it's absolutely true that I love the new Tier 3s, I wouldn't say that I'm blinded to the imbalances that they may cause. It's just that I don't see the imbalances as being important. They're fantastic engines of destruction (a phrase you drew exception to) - but the point is that they both kill easily and die easily. You say that it's not meaningful losses, but a fit Tier 3 + fit currently runs ~180M ISK in Dodixie. If you're willing to make big sacrifices to efficiency you can probably get out the door for 140-150M.





-Liang

Only thing Astarte has an edge over the Proteus in is Raw gank potential, in which case the astarte is a 60k ehp failfit. For everything else there is the proteus... It's faster, smaller, tanks WAY WAY better, and brings scram range bonuses into the mix.