Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Welcome to the Tech 1 Battleship rebalance, fasten your seatbelts!

Some of the changes herein are significant, so I'm going to lay out our overall tiericide and balance principles at the top of each race's thread, and also provide ship-by-ship explanation. I encourage you to read both before hitting the caps lock key, you may find answers to some of your questions and concerns.

Tiericide -
Our effort to destroy ship tiers continues. With battleships, the tiers were most evident in HP amounts and price. All variations had an equal allocation of slots already (19), except drone bonused hulls or disruption hulls, which won’t change. As usual, we will be dividing battleships into roles rather than tiers. The distribution will be as follows: One 'Attack' Battleship for each race, and two 'Combat' Battleships for each race (except Caldari, who will retain the only 'Disruption' Battleship for the time being). With these new roles in mind, we will be adjusting hitpoint amounts for all combat battleships near the former tier 3 hitpoint numbers, while the attack hulls will sit closer to the former tier 2s. As with other ship classes, attack battleships will be faster, more agile, and will focus more on damage application and projection than their combat counterparts. Cost of production will be adjusted to reflect tiericide, but so far we have not settled on exact numbers.

Exciting roles for every ship and every race -
One of our main goals during this balance pass is to see that each battleship has a lot to offer, and that each race has access to all of Eve's environments. Formerly, the battleship line had strange overlaps and gaps which left certain races excluded from certain styles of play and other races with more than one option for a certain role. This new distribution should hopefully provide new options and excitement for players of all races.

I am breaking the post into four, by race, with the hope of isolating feedback. We look forward to hearing what you all have to say.

Without further ado:

AMARR

A preface for Amarr: This ship line presented a special sort of obstacle. There were three ships with a heavy amount of overlap, all focusing on armor tanks and energy weapon damage. With the prices associated with tiers being removed, that overlap would be even more obvious, and likely, the apoc and geddon would fall into further disuse. That said, both of them are among eve's most iconic ships. We have decided to make big changes to them both, while hopefully preserving access to any use an Amarr pilot had prior.

Abaddon:

The Abaddon, price aside, was clearly the most dominant of the Amarr line-up. We've left it totally in-tact as your go-to laser brawler, except for the resist bonus tweak. This change is significant, and we are going to dedicate an entire thread to discussing the power of resistance bonuses later in the day. If you want to talk about this bonus here, in relation to the Abaddon specifically, feel free. The general idea from our end is that the current bonus to resistance is one of the most powerful ship bonuses in the game. It adds to the power of local tanks (active and passive) as well as remote tanks, which has consistently positioned ships with this bonus at the center of some of the most powerful gameplay available to combat pilots. We feel that the Abaddon is strong enough to perform perfectly well with the slight loss in resist.

Amarr Battleship Skill Bonuses:
+5% to Large Energy Turret damage
+4% Armor resistances (-1% per level)

Slot layout: 8H, 4M, 7L; 8 turrets, 0 launchers
Fittings: 21000 PWG, 560 CPU
Defense (shields / armor / hull) : 7000 / 8500 / 8000
Capacitor (amount / recharge rate / recharge per second) : 6375 / 1250s / 5.1
Mobility (max velocity / agility / mass / align time): 89 / .14 / 103200000 / 20.03s
Drones (bandwidth / bay): 75 / 75
Targeting (max targeting range / Scan Resolution / Max Locked targets): 80km / 85 / 7
Sensor strength: 22 Radar Sensor Strength
Signature radius: 470

Apocalypse:

We decided to use the Apocalypse as the secondary laser platform, rather than the Armageddon for two main reasons. Firstly, one had to have drones, and the Armageddon already did. Secondly, the Apocalypse's optimal range bonus was unique and was already providing a niche (albeit small) and we didn't want to destroy that. After a few iterations we've decided to remove the cap use bonus and add a tracking bonus to the Apocalypse, making it a king for damage application. It will also be Amarr's Attack battleship, meaning it has received increased base speed, agility, lowered signature resolution, and slightly lowered hitpoints. It is also getting an increase to power grid and CPU so that beams are a more viable option in the future.

There is some concern that the new Apoc will have a significant cap weakness, which will make it too similar to the Abaddon. We've lowered the base cap, but raised the recharge rate some too compensate. We're hoping that this ship will be exciting enough to offset any cap-based difficulty, but will be paying close attention to feedback.

UPDATE: Based on feedback concerns about Apocalypse cap I've given back a bit of its total cap pool, bringing its cap recharge up to almost 7cap/sec. Its also gained just a bit of armor hp. We will keep on eye on the cap situation throughout testing.

Amarr Battleship Skill Bonuses:
+7.5% to Large Energy Turret optimal range
+7.5% Large Energy Turret tracking speed (replaced large energy turret cap use)

Slot layout: 8H, 4M, 7L; 8 turrets , 0 launchers
Fittings: 21000 PWG(+500), 540 CPU(+35)
Defense (shields / armor / hull) : 6000(-211) / 7000(-500) / 7000(+359)
Capacitor (amount / recharge rate / recharge per second) : 7000(-500) / 1002s(-152s) / 6.99 (+.49)
Mobility (max velocity / agility / mass / align time): 113(+19) / .119(-.017) / 97100000 / 16.02s (-2.29s)
Drones...

nvm. ninjaedit. with some thought.. the range bonus should combine well with sentries.

i look forward to fighting geddon fleets and probably losing.

ccp rise you're killing eve online: a bad game

Please carry changes over to faction versions.

RIP Bhaalgorn.

Edit: also keep in mind the Apoc is the only Amarr BS for cap-stable pve missions so I would make sure those are still doable after the change lest amarr pvers lose their platforms.

Goodbye mission running Apoc. RIP

Way to go CCP, nurfing resists on abandons and rohks, I guess you don't really care about skill based PvP you just want more alpha fleets, the guy with the most maelstroms will win just keeping on alphaing away the other fleet. BTW this is a terrible change and it is a joke to call this balancing in anyway.

How will this affect the Armageddon Imperial Issue?

range bonus, no amount bonus? Do not want!

I think I am going to like the new Apoc. The 'geddon makes me twitch, tho. How am I supposed to devour all the Scorch L without the rof bonus? Altho the 4th mid is rather nice. Conflicting signals, oh my.

You are insane?!

DONT TOUCH ARMAGEDDON! This changes killing armageddon!