Assembly Hall

In preparation for the coming balance changes, I want to start putting together ideas for the Heavy Assault Cruiser class of ships that the Devs can use as a rough starting line. If you have a suggestion, please let me know and I'll see if I can incorporate it. If you think the ideas are worth looking at, give this thread a thumbs-up so it can get noticed. If you have a bunch of free time, please visit my other thread(s) and take a look at them as well.

For the most part, HACs function as superiority fighters when a small group of players with a lot of ISK want to take on a large group of players in cheap ships. They are incredibly expensive to lose, and as a result are usually fitted with extreme care, meticulously practiced and refined by their owners to make sure they don't die very often. Any time a cheaper ship will do the job, a HAC tends to be left in the station. One result of having such a cautious pilot base is that we get very good feedback about which HACs are viable and which are not: you see tons of vagabonds in 0.0 but you never see a Sacrilege, or an Eagle. Hopefully I can come up with the suble reasons why these ships aren't being used and what can be done to improve them.

Caldari

First I want to look at the Cerberus, the terrible missile spammer of the Caldari. Long overshadowed by the Drake and the Tengu, this ship will hopefully be able to shine a bit now that HM range is reduced and its range bonuses are no longer pointless. However I do want to stress that nobody, NOBODY uses the 6th high power slot in PVP. The ship simply doesn't get close enough in its Heavy Missile configuration, and doesn't have any spare powergrid in its HAM configuration. And so I propose that the utility high be shifted into a medium power slot to produce the following layout:

4 low
6 medium
5 high - 5 missile

This may seem like a lot of medium slots, but remember this ship has no shield bonuses so a pure shield-tank won't be too ridiculous (not like the Tengu, which can get a ridiculous tank quite easily) Rather, I would like to see these slots used for target painters and sensor damps, the kind of electronic superiority you would expect from a missile superiority ship.

Next up is the Eagle. The very idea of a medium-turret sniper has some problems because with turret snipers, the signature resolution of your guns just doesn't matter very much and so large guns tend to completely outclass medium guns in the sniper role. A blaster conversion is probably best, although there are several different ways to do it. I actually like the optimal-range bonus combined with blasters and I don't think that's the problem that really holds this ship back. One thing that I do think should be changed is to increase the optimal range bonus of Null T2 blaster ammo from 40% to 60%, thus allowing high-level blaster ships with optimal range bonuses to reach the same ranges as their falloff-based competition.

Now, I have two example solutions for the Eagle and I think either would be viable.

Option 1: shift one high slot into a low slot, producing this layout:

5 low
5 medium
5 high - 5 turret

and keep the bonuses the same as they are now. The Eagle has two big barriers to becoming a brawler, and one is the lack of low slots for nanofibers and tracking enhancers on top of the standard damage control and damage mods. If an Eagle pilot wants to compete with a Deimos or Vagabond in speed, he will need to fit 1 more nanofiber than they do: if he wants to to compete in range or tracking he will need an extra tracking enhancer. With only 4 low slots he can do neither without giving up a lot of damage.

Option 2: keep the slots the same, and change the second range bonus granted by the HAC skill into a hybrid turret powergrid reduction bonus. The current Eagle can't fit a rack of neutrons with a MWD and LSE, so obviously the utility slot goes to waste in PVP fits. This way it would still be a bit slower than other brawlers, but its options for vamps/neuts or smartbombs would give it an edge. Also it would be able to fit a rack of 250mm railguns with a MWD, giving it a unique role among sniper ships.

Amarr

The Sacrilege layout currently looks like this:

5 low
4 medium
6 high - 5 missile, 4 turret

(note that its T1 parent, the Maller, has 6 low slots)

It is clear from this layout that the devs were afraid of overpowering the Sacrilege with any more low slots. The ship's armor resist bonus makes it incredibly tough, while its capacitor recharge bonus practically give it one armor rep for free. And at the time, this was the right decision: before Quantum Rise the nano-sac was a common sight and terribly hard to deal with, and any more low slots would clearly be overpowered. However that time has passed, and the current Sacrilege is a fossil because, despite its awesome defense and tackling abilities, it simply can't deal damage.

It is not with a small amount of bitterness that I point out a buffer drake can travel the same speed and deal the same damage with the same EHP as a buffer Sacrilege. It even aligns faster since the buffer Sacrilege uses a 1600mm plate. Of course the Sacrilege can fit a beastly active tank, but when it does this it doesn't have any low slots to spare for damage mods. The result is a ship that excels at short-range 1v1 battles but cannot contribute properly to a gang except as an oversize tackler.

Keeping that in mind, I propose that a high slot now be converted to produce this:

6 low
4 medium
5 high - 5 missile

the bonuses themselves are fine, and with the new HAM change I hope to see new life breathed into this forgotten ship.

Finally I come to the Zealot, which is a pleasing combination of brawler and sniper. Actually I think it is just fine as is, especially with the reduction in medium energy turret fitting costs.

So do you want to ask the mods to move it to the appropriate sub-forum or should I?

AH is, contrary to popular belief, not F&I.

As for content. How many slots are HACs expected to have post revision? Might be worth thinking about.
Suggestion for HAC rolebonus: Half all values (except distance) as pertains to MJD (when a cruiser variant comes around). HACs are either in your face tearing you a new one or dancing around bleeding you to death variety, faster cycle/cheaper operation and fitting MJD serves both camps.

Cerb (Caldari = Guided missiles. Amarr (Khanid) = Unguided missiles);
High to mid .. mids are a lot more valuable than highs, especially on ships like Caldari that has more CPU than God .. so hell no. Consider that TDs are likely to become godweapons and with weapon range to spare you are basically creating the ultimate coward-mobile.
Let the Cerb have the sixth launcher slot with almost nothing further done AND revisit the idea of certain eWar having options for high-slots, highslot TP was discussed a few years back for instance.
Eagle (Caldari = Rails. Gallente = Blasters);
Note: The sacrifices you mention to compete with ships specialized in other areas (range/dps/speed) all point towards a balanced ship .. that is the way all ships ought to be.
Give it the sixth gun slot and swap damage bonus for RoF. Eagle suffers from being very specialized, it should be the HAC dps sniper extraordinaire .. make it devastating in that role and force hard choices if trying to go outside the box (T2 = highly specialized according to new ship design paradigm).

Sacrilege;
Meant to be bad news to go up against in web range but suffering from anaemic dps (for a brawler HAC). Either give it more damage by adding a launcher slot, changing damage to a second RoF bonus or give it something else to use in the 0-10km bracket .. being Khanid an obvious suggestion would be +20% neut/nos effectiveness (not range!) per level and moving RoF bonus to cruiser skill.

Zealot;
Would be awesome to have either a 4th mid or something to handle frigs as laser tracking is kind of poo. Think this hull is going to be changed the most as the Omen has been morphed into a gun toting drone carrier so I am uncertain as to how/what happens here.

Caveat to all of above: We and CCP need to ask ourselves a rather fundamental question
-=- Is there any need or place for HAC snipers in Eve with t3 BCs having been introduced?
If yes, then minor tweaks is all that is needed.
If no, then a major rethink of what it means to be a HAC is in order .. would personally love for them to be something that is deployed to counter massed vanilla cruisers (now with T1 logi! ), with BCs being counters to both classes.