Player Features and Ideas Discussion

way to ruin the cane :-( it was fine before, now its utter crap.

I'll just copy most of a mail to a corpmate in here:



I didn't get around to training assault missiles and probably have to at some point in the near/medium future.

And yet that bonus is not even all that great in small fleets.

Seems to me, these ships are just getting thrown together out of a pile of parts on the floor without any thought of what people would want to do with them. Seems like everyone is trying to figure out how to use each of these ships the way it was randomly designed rather than designing the ship for a use. As it is now, most boats do have advantages but are not good at any role. And it would be nice for newer players to choose a role and train the skills for it rather than train skills for a year and still have no useful roles other than 'just bring what you got'. The recent move to ECM frigs and Logis might help.

- Battlecruisers are supposed to be the first ships of scale capable of exchanging volleys and surviving for while. They should be able to put cruisers and frigs in their place. And Eve Battleships are embarrassing. Nobody fears them or needs to.

- BCs should be decent at solo/small fleets or decent in large fleets, not bad at both. And given 2 BCs for each race, their should be one of each. i.e. one bonused for reps, one for resists.

- The options for long range, short range, drone, or ECM should be spread out/mixed across the races. It may be a good drone boat but if its bad at both fleet and solo roles so it does not get used. Gallente might get the drone boat with resists designed for fleets and Minmatar might get the drone boat with self-reps for solo but that's better than both having a drone boat that no one wants. Designing for large fleet vs small fleet/solo seems better than designing for PvP vs PvE. Good PvP designs will still work well in PvE (especially considering continued AI improvements).

- And, since missiles are already near useless and unwanted, do you have to make it worse with a bonus for Kinetic damage ONLY? Missiles may be weaker DPS but their upside was supposed to be able to switch ammo types.

- all BCs and larger ships should have 2 utility slots so that turrets don't have to be dumped for common tasks: salvage & tractor, probe and cloak, warfare links, drone mods. and I would expect frigs and cruisers to have 1. maybe 2 for the strategic cruisers would make them more useful.

- drone bays should be larger. Still have the reasonably limited bandwidth but have a few more in reserve to kick out.

- And, for the love of God, whatever the ship's intended role, the CPU and PG should be capable of fitting it !!! A low skilled character should be able to fit T1 basic modules and make it work. And as character skills progress, they should be able to progressively step up through the modules until reaching the T2 modules. And shouldn't T2 modules be better than T1 ? sometimes but many times not.

Actually people would, I mean there are Abbadon based fleet comps, prop modless BS that go rolling around trying to tank the world, and more examples that you could find if you sat and thought on it hard.

The problem is the Harby doesn't DO anything better than the other BCs, so you're looking at an on average weaker platform thats also slower...and tanks less...than everything else ....where do i sign up to buy dozens of those

Might as well throw in my two cents. Any time I'm talking numbers (dps, tank, etc) I'm assuming max skills for the sake of comparison.

Prophecy and the Myrm are the biggest winners. Both get enormous DPS buffs (Prophecy from bonused drones + support weapons, Myrm from getting to field four heavy drones), but the nature of Amarrian drone boats gives the Prophecy deeper reserves and more flexibility. While the Myrm has higher damage potential when comparing two similar fits (max tank or tank+gank), active armor tanking is a bit questionable in this age of remote reps, and the prophecy gets the bigger brick...in fact, it's brick potential even fit with three damage mods basically matches the myrmidon's full-tank brick fit.

Still, the myrm is definitely not in a bad place, and a look at active tanking in general and armor tanking specifically would make it that much better.

Other winners. I think the brutix comes off just fine - the extra low gives it more tank potential or makes it less of a glass cannon when fit for max gank, and it'll move about 75m/s faster with an MWD thanks to the mass reduction. Can only hope that idea gets extended into battleships to, well, whichever one becomes the designated blaster brawler.

Ferox isn't getting enough love in my opinion. It looks like you can get a full rack of neutron blasters onto it, plus a tracking comp, tracking enhancer, and a nice tank. Throw in the drones and you get about 570 DPS to 12+14km with Null, or 757 DPS to 6.6+5.1 with Void, all while sporting a 75k EHP buffer. Just bring support, since it can't tackle. Medium rails are still garbage, though, and while it's the rails' fault rather than the Ferox's, a blaster setup is all we're gonna see until they get some love.

Last winner is the cyclone. I know a lot of people think it needs a sixth launcher, but honestly, I disagree. Five HAM launchers with 3x BCU plus a flight of Hammerheads gets you 520 DPS. It's a bit on the low end but not too bad, and unlike every other BC, this new Cyclone gets two extra highs. They're turret slots, so you can buy another 60-80 DPS, or fill them with neuts or something. Given that a sixth launcher only gets you another 73 DPS (with 3x BCU as before), I think I actually prefer the flexibility this layout offers.

The Drake's a loser, of course, but nerfs are unsurprising. Until I've played with it, I'm going to tentatively think that people are overreacting though. The hit to the tank shouldn't be bad - the 75k EHP I cited above for the Ferox is on fewer midslots with a slightly lower base EHP, after all. I can't really say for sure until I've looked at fits and how they have to change, though - the only given is that they WILL change, seeing as most of them run very tight on CPU or grid already. Keeping the Kinetic bonus is weird, though, I thought ya'll wanted to get away from that.

And the last two, clear losers. The hurricane might have been a little too good before, but these nerfs on top of the PG nerf back in Retribution seem a bit harsh. With the Harbinger, the various tweaks cancel each other out, maybe result in a slight net nerf... but I didn't really think that a net nerf was warranted, it wasn't exactly a stellar ship before and this definitely doesn't help.

+10 sig radius and -1 utility highslot isn't really the battlecruiser nerf I had in mind. The entire game is still going to basically be about BCs if this is all you're doing. They're supposed to be an awkward between-class like destroyers.


Still waiting on a TE nerf and drone ships 2.0.

you dumb

I want to leave here a question, that nobody is raising, about the fixed bonus:

"99% reduction in the CPU need of Warfare Link modules"

I play this game for almost 5 years now, I never seen a kill, a fit posted in a forum, anyone I know ever told me they fitted a warfare link module in a battlecruiser. And in the past we had 1 free high slot and now is gone in all ships. (doesn't mean nobody do it, I just never seen it!)

I leave the question in the air: Who in going to give up 2 weapon or 1 weapon/some tank to fit 1 WL module in a battlecruiser (remember that to fit 1 of these modules you need 50 cpu/200 PWG and it consumes 25Power leaving you cap dry in a minute or two)

On top of that there is no bonus to the usage of a WL so why fit one in a BC when the t3 or t2 do it 500% better?

I'm questioning this bonus!

Lets think about it. I look the definition of battlecruiser in the navy and I found this:


so, looking to your proposal we have almost everything right except for speed, these ships are suppose to be used side by side with cruisers but they lack speed in comparison. My suggestion is: why not give them a fixed speed module related bonus instead?

A bonus that reduces the gap and put a BC just behind the speed of cruisers, doesn't need to match them, just something that allows then to barely keep up with a cruiser and transform a useless fixed bonus into something usable.

I've seen fits for warfare links, and used them personally. I've seen them used as well. The Prophecy is actually a good choice for that role.

-Liang