Player Features and Ideas Discussion

That fit uses T1 guns, and thats even worse than downgrading to Medium Pulse, they use more PG and cant use scorch. And Reactive Armor Hardeners suck. And warp scrambler with short range guns on a ship with 300m/s is hilarious. And you still could not put anything in that utility high. Cookie cutter Maller fits have ~10k less ehp, ~50 less dps and move 4x faster.

thanks for proving my point.

Out with it man. Still that at least tells me they may be trying to make active armor tanking not suck any more.

Yay at the myrmidon drone buff. Boo at the -1 turret.

Hopefully the Ferox fares well with these changes. it's a ship I've always wanted to love, but have trouble when it's uses are so limited by being tier 1

First off if you do not think that 2:30 seconds of cap life is not plenty for pvp I cannot help you. Most of the t1 cruisers are sitting at 1:20 and they work fine. Second null and void do get a tracking penalty but you will still hit cruisers and above without any problem especially with a web. Well as long as you know how to pilot your ship correctly.

I was waiting for you to notice the fitting. it is not far off and really downgrading to ions does not hurt that bad. You can also put a power diagnostic 2 in that extra low slot and it would even give you more tank and more cap that you apparently believe the ship needs. Dropping some tank for the largest guns is an acceptable tradeoff. Changing out 1 rig for an anc current router drops your EHP by about 4000.

I am not against more power grid though it is fine without it. An extra mid is a terrible idea. ~100,000 EHP 700 DPS Feroxes running around would be terrible.

I never said the current Ferox was freaking awesome both the Drake and Cane do it better. It still does work even in the current meta but being a tier 1 with its base stats and slots already giving it a disadvantage it only really truly shines in the hands of a max skilled character. Even then that same character would be better in a Drake or Cane. With the rebalancing it should fit in nicely with the other battlecruisers

Wiv

Why are you not a fan of the current BC changes? After spending some time on test server I can say that all 8 of the combat BCs are functioning rather well. Some specific changes need to be made (more grid/cpu on harbie, less mass on cane) but overall it's a MASSIVE step forward in terms of overall ship usage and general balance.

If fozzie takes this same style of balancing up the Command line we can easily assume that all commands will be getting an additional slot (except sliepnir and claymore), reworked fittings, and more base hp. We will also be receiving 4 new Combat oriented Commands as the old fleet commands will be reworked to be just as functional as the field commands.

I won't try to speak specifically about the other changes to BCs, but I am happy they are getting the 'tiercide' treatment. Some interesting things happening. I do want to speak about the changes Harbinger specifically though. I'm a little confused on your thought process here and why you made the changes you did, especially when you seemingly are aware of the actually issues of the Harbinger.

In a previous post you seemed to recognize at least one of the problems with armor tanking and maneuverability:

"What about armor tanking? The imbalances caused by the mass of plates, the speed penalty on armor rigs and the weakness of armor reps in pvp situations are a problem that becomes more pronounced for these ships than for any of the smaller classes and should be fixed as soon as possible!

(your response) I completely agree. ~Working on it~. However since we want to be very careful about what we promise and when that's all I can say at this exact moment."

You seem to understand the issues with active armor tanking rigs and mass issues. You recognize that active armor rigs shouldn't have the large mass addition to active armor tanking ships that they do now. One could see then, that the reason you added mass to the Harb, was in anticipation of the removal of the mass addition from active armor rigs. The problem here is that no one fits the Harb for active tanking, and yet you added mass to the ship anyway. Can you please discuss this? It doesn't seem to make much sense to make this already sluggish ship even slower, especially when you have taken away PWG making it even harder to fit plates/a decent fit without sacrificing rigs or getting implants. *Note - this is NOT the case with other BCs.


Seemingly, you reduced the PWG and CPU because, even though you -1 turret, you pumped up the damage bonus to 10%, making the projected damage in effect every so slightly better. However, even before with 7 turrets and the original amount of PWG and CPU it was still unreasonably hard to fit a decent tank + (edit) heavy pulses on.

Mynna explains this pretty well:

"The problem people who have with the Harbinger have is that decent fits require unreasonably large compromises. You have to jump through some pretty serious hoops to get both heavy pulse lasers and a 1600mm plate on, like "ditch two trimarks for a CPU and Grid rig and add in a CPU implant" compromises. Even if you drop to an 800mm plate, you still need an implant. It can also drop to smaller guns, but that's a ~14% loss of range and damage, and it still requires a CPU implant too. Compare that to the prophecy and myrmidon, which can fit a 1600mm plate with no problems. Or compare it to the hurricane - to fit a 1600mm plate and 425mm autos, it either uses one fitting rig, or downgrades the guns to 220mm ACs, which is a only a ~5% loss in damage/range. Or it can go all the way down to dual 180mm ACs, which is a 17% loss of range and 10% loss of damage, more similar to the price the harbinger pays...but in return, it gets to actually use its utility high, fitting a neut or something. Even a lot of Tech 1 cruisers have an easier time fitting a plate than a Harbinger does.

So no, it's not actually "fine"."

Mass addition to the prophecy doesn't even make sense either because it makes sense to go EHP over active armor tanking (given the assumed reduction in active armor tanking rigs).

Could you explain?:

- What the point of the mass addition to the Harbinger was? (because even if active armor rigs get reduced in mass addiction, people don't fit the Harb for active armor tanking)

- Why the reduction in PWG and CPU, when it was already unreasonable hard to fit a Harb? (-1 turret doesn't fix the fitting issue)

In summary, I don't understand the reduction in PWG and addition to mass. Taking away PWG from the already hard to decently fit Harb + adding mass makes your changes very confusing and wrong - unless you're trying to make this ship useless. Basically, we can either fit crappy guns along w/ trimarks and a decent tank to be an unreasonably slow, low DPS ship (even for Amarr) or sacrifice any good rigs to get an absolute crap tank (compared to other BCs and slow Amarr ships) and have good DPS.

And if anyone tries to claim that "it's like a mid-grade Armageddon" you're missing the fact that the Armageddon can fit a massive passive tank and not sacrifice DPS.

ccp's plan is to allow all command ships to be either a dps platform or a boosting platform so that the sleipnir could be used for boosting just as well as the claymore for killing ships

[Retribution 1.1] Armor Tanking 2.0

Should someone have missed it.

So... How many were complaining before, that the Harbi is too easy to fit in PG and restrictive in CPU?

Well, these aren't the patchnotes yet, and there is at least one more iteration in the works I think, so it's not too late to stress:

Why would any lineup need BOTH ships with active tank bonuses?

Heck, I'm not convinced on both being passive as well, but at least those scale for fleets (though 5 mids is a tad bit...).

No one, with a reasonable fit you go over cpu and pg. -32pg (skills and -1 turret taken into account) may not seem as much but it really did make an incredibly hard to fit ship an useless ship. Compare it to the cane, after fitting just guns on harby and cane the cane has over 100 more cpu and almost 50 more pg to fit on the same number of slots. And is also much faster, now has the same ehp, does more damage when closer than 12-15km. There is no reason to fly Harbinger over Hurricane, now more than ever. And this is a balancing patch, i really expected the gap between the two to close not grow bigger.

The Mrym still fits guns. Cause you know, more DPS is more DPS. ANd the only things that have 100% bonus to damage are faction/T2 BSs I think.