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I beg you not to f*ck with Typhoon.
It is ok now, turrets are ok, everything is fine. Main feature of this BS is flexibiity. It feels like a cheap Machariel.
Why should I like torpedoes? Do torpedoes have nice tracking and falloff? Can I kill frigate with it?
If you want me to use torp-phoon, just give it some more cpu and armor and (voila!) - it will be great.

I have a feeling, that some changes are made just for changes themselves.

That's great, but when? How can you balance a ship without knowing how drones will be fixed? Might as well leave it as it is, fix drones, and then re-balance all drone boats yet again to account for the drone changes.



Same as above, how can you balance the hull without knowing what the final solution will be to the whole tanking issue? Depending on how it's handled, the bonus on the hull could end up totally wrong, and powergrid/etc., could be way off, requiring a second rebalance which is coming who knows when.

Wouldn't it make much more sense to fix armor and drones FIRST, and then balance the ships using them? Instead of balancing the ships for existing (admittedly terribly outdated) state, then fixing the outdated stuff, and then being forced to re-balance yet again?

And PLEASE be careful with nerfing Megathron's hitpoints. Gallente have very few viable fleet ships as it is. If you turn a Mega into a close range blaster hull, you HAVE to do a good job on Hyperion, or do something magical about drones, to allow either Hype or Domi to be a good fleet ship.

And finally, why is Scorpion set into a separate category (EWAR), but other races get no EWAR hulls of battleship size? Grossly unbalanced, if you ask me, giving one race an EWAR BS, while others get absolutely nothing. Either give all races their own EWAR BS, or change Scorp into an Attack Battleship. Fair is fair.

There is a very easy way to read just the dev posts in threads like this: Click on "Dev Posts" at the top, enter "Back to the balancing future" into the "Topic"-field and click search. You'll get a list of only the dev posts in this thread, and reading only those should be just fine since they usually quote the stuff they're responding to. Just open them all with middle click (or your browser equivalent for 'Open new tab in background') and voilà.

I do agree that CCP should've added that information from the beginning to the blog, or at least after seeing it constantly asked even after it has been answered 4 times or so. If I recall correctly this was one of the most asked questions for the last blog where this subject was discussed, where they (or players who read all posts) also had to constantly answer it. So it was quite foreseeable that this would be a frequently asked question again.

CCP, just add it to the article, maybe in the form of CCP Fozzies line from a page or two back. That should do just fine.

Yup, exactly.

By "balancing", CCP mean make each class of ship across all the races, basically the same, they will just look different. There goes the diversity in EVE, which is what made this game unique. Welcome to WOW in space.

In theory, Gallente armor tank and have generous number of mid slots to use EWAR. They are a lot more elligible to info warfare link than Amarr who don't have any midslot to use this link. Gallente and Caldari being the EWAR races, I think it's normal for them to have these links.

These proposed command link bonuses for gallente are good IMO, or maybe reverse armored warfare and skirmish warfare between command and T3 bonus, but gallente should keep the info warfare link IMO.

I'm sorry, i had to dash off to work earlier so i kind of left the comments open. I realize the thread has taken a turn in another direction by now, but i just wanted to sum up the point i was trying to make like this:

Do you see what all these issues mentioned in the devblog have in common?

Armor vs. Shield(aka. midslot utility versus lowslot damage mods) = getting more ships do not necessarily allow you to better tackle or control your opponents. Larger gangs usually have enough ships to seed out the utility to a few pilots. Damage mods are not better than utility mods, they scale better.

Active vs. Buffer = getting a better buffer allow you to sustain the volley from more ships. The repairs from a logistics cruiser is not necessarily more than the amount from local repairs. Getting more repairs does not keep you alive if your buffer get volleyed. Buffer is not better than active, it's scales better.

LR vs. SR weapons = more ships means more damage, more ships does not mean more range. That means more ships can replace more damage but not better range. LR is not better than SR, it scales better.

SC vs. CS boosting = better bonuses to a larger and less mobile ship also mean better bonuses to ships that generally run LR weapons on buffered ships in larger gangs with less individual utility. Worse bonuses to smaller, more mobile or flexible ships mean worse bonuses to smaller ships, with other tanks in smaller gangs that rely more on the utility from their booster, that don't have more ships to draw benefit from a larger variety of links.

It's amusing when CCP write a devblog, identify a few problems but don't deconstruct them to look at their roots - only to later in the same post suggest something that further exacerbate the (non-) issues they identified to begin with.

Hmm. Overall a good devblog

I'm assuming that the Command Ships skill will have its Battlecruisers V requirement removed and that the individual command ships will have racial Battlecruisers V as requirement instead of racial Cruisers V. Also, will command processors get buffed (T2; supporting multiple links?) or will the link limits be removed entirely?

If you are redoing battleships one thing that could be looked into is allowing some battleships to field more than 5 drones at a time. The dominix would be a logical choice for this, as could the apocalypse (to get some differentiation in amarr battleships).

Making the racial carrier and dread skills depend on racial BS 4 is sure to draw howls but it does seem sort of logical. It's not as if the other requirements (Drone Interfacing, Capital Ships) don't take up time and they're just the beginning really if you're looking to fit a capital right. If you want to balance dread vs. carrier training time add another longish requirement to dreads. Please drop the carrier skillbooks' prices though.

There's one command ship that is conspicuous by its absence in this blog and that is the Rorqual. Will this get a second specialisation (siege seems most logical)?

The bit about killing off-field boosting needs careful evaluation though. As is it will make rorquals extinct because they only get their boost bonus in deployed mode which renders them immobile during cycle. Personally I've never seen a rorq boost outside a POS field due to hotdrop/gang risks. For those people who think a boosting rorq pilot is AFK, as often as not they'll be compressing ore (and quite busy) while the boost cycle is (perma)running. Being able to get ore from a corporate hangar/ship assembly array while boosting keeps them busy longer..

Giving rails and beams a better alpha does not remove artillery as the very best alpha weapon of choice - The difference atm is HUGE and I only see advantages from closing the gap. Currently rail and beam ships have NO place in alpha fleets, but their dps will be a good trade off if the alpha gap is closed... I dont want it to become the same - just make rails and beams more viable for sniping.

I rather liked my phoon until I got T2 torps and discovered I couldn't fit them with the load out that I so favored. So it got pushed to the back of my hanger where it has been more or less forgotten about. But I like the idea of finally dumping the split weapon system and making it a pure torp boat. There are already two other gun battleships for the minmatar why not let the phoon be for missiles? I would love for it to have a torp rof bonus and a TP bonus.

Had some more thoughts about the blog...

First, the splitting of Destroyers/BC skills. It's not news, we've been talking about this for a year almost, but lately I've been thinking about this from a new player's perspective. It'll realistically take 3x longer to be able to fly all BC hulls. Is it specifically CCPs intention to reduce and discourage cross-training?

I understand there's reasons for working the Dessie and BC skills into the logical ship progression chain. But look at it from a new player's perspective, point of view of someone who joins just a week before the change goes live, and finds out he just missed out on essentially 3+ months worth of "free training" with the skill split. I mean, that gotta hurt. If it were me, I'd probably just laugh and walk away from the game, just from the fundamental unfairness of it all. And this is in a game where old hands already have a humongous advantage over new players. And when I say "new" I mean characters less than a year old. Which in all other MMOs would be called "ancient", not "new".

I'm not advocating against this change, I know it's too late for that. And personally it doesn't affect me as I already have all those trained to V. The point is, think about how it'll affect newer players ( if any... ) and how much it will discourage cross-training, and how this will affect the game.

Currently, the general rule of thumb is "Train for Tengu and STFU" when it comes to many aspects of the game. When it comes to PvP, the general consensus (just search New Pilots Q&A forum) is "Winmatar or GTFO". And Gallente having few viable fleet/blob ships (see top 20 most used hulls) doesn't help. If this persists past the change, cross-training will still remain virtually mandatory, while the training time required for it will shoot up by a huge amount. This is not something I would consider good for the game.

Granted, you could actually balance the game. That is, make cross-training totally unnecessary, except as just something for a pilot to do for lack of anything else to spend time on. But this would mean making armor and shield tanks equally viable (currently they're not, each has a distinct role), making active and passive tanks equally strong and viable for all applications, making all weapons systems equally desirable, etc., etc., without losing their individuality. And meaning no offense, do you really think you could pull this off in a reasonable time?

I mean, let's just look at weapons and damage types. When two weapons systems can change their damage, while the other two cannot, how can you balance that? If you happen to specialize in a "wrong" weapon system for the area that your corp of real-life friends ends up living in, what can you do about it EXCEPT cross-train? Nothing. Or you could live with significantly reduced DPS and/or significantly weaker tank just because you chose the "wrong" weapon, "wrong" tank or "wrong" place to live?

Plus, how would you balance high alpha of Minmatar with low alpha of rails for Gallente/Caldari? You really can't. Alpha is vastly more popular, which is supported by the top 20 statistics of the killboards. You can't "balance" them without basically evening them out so that the difference is miniscule. Or, you would have to totally change how on-grid stuff works to bring sniping back as a viable option. See what I mean? It's a can of worms.

Bottom line, I just don't feel it's such a good idea to do anything that slows cross-training more. You'll end up making many new pilots very unhappy when they realize they chose "wrong". I know, because I've been in this boat myself. I chose Gallente and heavy drone skills, and essentially crippled my advancement by several months. This mistake will be a whole lot more painful when cross-training times increase.