Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Looks good at a glance, the only thing that caught my eye is the Belli getting 4 bonused launchers and a full flight of meds, isnt that a bit much? 1 turret short of being the same layout as our current 'gank' cruiser the thorax

Neither cost nor SP are important balancing factors.

Anyway, the problem isn't the balance between cruisers and t3 BCs, they're sufficiently different. The problem is between cruisers and t1/2 BCs. Right now it's distressingly easy to make a t1/2 BC with not only more tank, but also better-tracking, longer-ranged and much more DPS than a cruiser, with frequently only marginal inferiority in mobility.

This makes t1/2 BCs effectively high-tier cruisers - and therefore this relationship needs to be a victim of tiericide. Increasing cruiser mobility is a good way to differentiate them, but I suspect more will be needed. Nerfing t2 BCs will be a good idea.

The Thorax still puts out far more DPS, though, due to Blasters > HAMs.

But yeah, i think it should have between 20-30 m3 of drones.

Good morning everyone. Gonna go over some of the key questions and comments I'm seeing in the thread so far.


I'm going to start by reminding everyone that all the designs posted in this forum are very much open to more changes as time goes on. What I'm proposing for the Bellicose is a bit outside the usual mold and if it turns out to be too powerful there's a lot of ways we can adjust it downwards before release.
That being said, building strawman fits optimized for EFT numbers is the oldest trick in the book for "winning" theorycrafting arguments and you shouldn't count on me not knowing the difference between the paper dps of a 4 damage mod rage ham setup and the actual value of that ship in space.
We're always open to evaluating ships with help from player feedback, but I'm going to ask everyone to make sure to keep your discussion constructive.



There have been several mentions in both this thread and the frigate thread that target painters are not disruptive in the classical sense and therefore the ships are misnamed or the minmatar ewar doesn't belong. Disruption may be a poor name for the ships for that reason, but in the end it's just a name. I expect people will generally just call them ewar cruisers and ewar frigs so renaming the threads might be a good idea.
I'm actually quite a fan of "Cruisers that have effectiveness bonuses to targeted aggressive midslot modules" but my fellow designers say it's not snappy enough.

This also brings us to a wider issue of how similar we want to make ships between the races. It's true that the gameplay for the Bellicose and the Blackbird will be extremely different, but as nice as it is to have more consistency between certain aspects of each class, my priority will always be good gameplay and giving people chances to make decisions that matter in the game. What really matters with the Bellicose isn't whether it fits a name like Disruption cruisers. In the end the most important question is whether the Bellicose is a fun and balanced ship to fly (And we're going to keep working at it until we reach that goal).



This is an excellent point and beings up a downside to putting ships out this early in features and ideas. There are going to be changes to modules and mechanics that will strongly affect the usage of all these ships, but that we're not quite ready to post about yet. The big picture will come into more focus between now and the Winter expansion, and there will be plenty of opportunities to give feedback all along the way.



It's quite possible that we may need to bump the Belli dronebay back to the 40m3 it has currently to balance it, we'll see as we go forward. As for the expansion of drones into more ships, it's a side effect of our desire to make drones a more mainstream weapon system instead of leaving Gallente pilots alone in the cold. The creation of the drone damage mod was another step in that direction and there's more we want to do. We balance ships based on their capabilities, not on making certain races specialized just for the sake of specialization.



We increased the speeds on all the ewar cruisers as part of an overall speed increase for cruisers, including giving the Arbitrator a very significant 20% bump. But the ewar cruisers are intentionally one of the slower sets of T1 cruisers and we're not going to give the class so much speed that it becomes overpowered.

I don't think there's a chance in hell that these will be overpowered even if they went 2.1km/s with mwd especially when you start plating the armour ships.
And also all cruisers should be faster than all bc's for christ sake.
I was also expecting you to reduce the mass of the cruisers to make them lighter and more mobile I mean why are bc's as agile and often more agile than smaller cruisers this makes no sense especially the bb its a massive brick that is heavier than the cane.
Unless you are planning to increase the bc's mass a lot.

If you're going to be messing with damps, you should probably look at the lock ranges of recon ships. They all have absurd range, making them mostly immune to range dampening.

can't wait for the typhoon to get rehashed.

BTW fozzie, please don't make the cyclone into a missile boat...one missile boat in the BC line is good enough

Oh, and please for the love of god keep the typhoon an armor tanker.

Only Combat Recon Ship have 180, but if TD curse will be punished with 2 SD - what will protect us from tier3 BC?
Asked this in support crusers topic:
How t1 cruisers rebalance T1 frigates rebalance will be carrying out their survival with MWD against Tier3 BC. 3 Tornadoes destroy any cruiser, not moving at right angles.

And how to treat the problem tanking crusers with BS size modules (1600mm, LSE), as medium size - 1000 shield or 2400 armor points are useless to install?

Hybrid buff, drone damage amps and Talos fooled me for a moment to think that there is actually some kind of guiding light at CCP, that would eventually lead to a balanced Gallente in the next 12 years. With babysteps, and carefully avoiding all the low hanging fruits and glaring deficiencies, but still generally in the right direction.

But yeah, why not increase dps on all other weapon systems than hybrids while you're at it, so Gallente is no longer "left alone in the cold" in that area either. I mean hell, this race does have exactly two unique and viable features that have kept it barely in the game this far. Or had.

Well, it's cool to see that drone ships no longer lose a slot because of drones... at least if they are not Gallente.

/bitter

7.5% bonus per level? Did you realize that this is dramatically better than what the T2 ships have? So even if T2 cruisers are planned to be brought in line with this later on, we will have a period of at least several months, or maybe even a year, where cheap t1 cruisers will be better at the jobs their T2 versions are supposed to be specialized in? This is ridiculous and completely unacceptable.

First you change FW so that 2-day-old alts can earn 100+ million ISK/hour in T1 frigates worth 3 million, now this. Please realize that you just can't make some changes without changing something else... at the same time, not many months later.