Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Right now the caldari ECM ships are nearly always fit in a way that is contrary to caldari fleet doctrine (armor tanked). This, I imagine, makes balancing very difficult. ECM has been nerfed due to its ability to completely shut down enemy ships, but the ECM platforms have not received any increase in viability or utility. They still tend to be paper-thin, and oft-called primary. Due to the reduction in ECM strength, fitting a half-shield-tank / half-ECM fit is even less viable.

But what do we do? Do we give caldari ECM ships more low slots? What about an armor bonus? These methods only make the ECM ships stray further from the caldari design philosophy. Adding more mids is also problematic, due to the possibility of someone simply filling them all with tanking modules.

Although many may consider it ridiculous, I think the concept of ECM as a high-slot is actually quite sound. In many ways ECM fills a similar function to neuts, which are also high-slots.

I realize that this would require you to take a look at nearly every ship in the game, since ECM would become a new contender for high-slot utility, but I think this opens up some pretty interesting options.

Un-bonused ECM is not very strong, and I doubt having one ECM module on a BC or Cruiser is going to be substantially more powerful than a medium neut. After all, people don't generally fit a single ECM module on armor tanked ships with 4 or more mids. However, it would have greater range than a neut, making it much more appropriate for long range fits. It would also open up some utility to ships that don't have the PG for a medium neut, but have some CPU left over. Often times a small neut is just not that attractive, and only serves as a heat sink. In general high slot utility for combat ships is fairly lacking in variety, and this may help with that.

Where this might become a problem is on frigates, but the large CPU cost of ECM modules probably makes this a non-issue.

With ECM as a high slot module, caldari ECM ships could be balanced very similarly to their Amarr counterparts. The Scorpion could feature a robust shield tank and an ECM strength bonus, making it a viable close range ECM platform, in a similar vein to the new geddon. It would assuredly have to receive some balance changes, specifically to slot layout, but it would be functioning within the intended design, making balancing much more feasible.

The cruiser range of ECM ships will naturally need to rely on speed or utility due to their high targeting priority in any engagement, but they will be able to fit at least some tank. This is similar to the way the curse / pilgrim already function.

In addition, if appropriate, drone bonuses could be granted to some of the above ships. This solution works really well for neut dedicated platforms and, I imagine, it would work well here too for the same reasons.

It means you need to fly a Typhoon.

Raven - I have wanted a 7th mid forever, but giving up ehp for a small speed boost is silly, like many others have said it already was short on the ehp side (could use an XLshield extender) give it its ehp back and fix torps so they can reach out to 22km with decent skills, that way the range bonus on the raven will make it able to hit mid range out of point range with titles like stealth bombers.

Scorp - drop a high for a low and give it + 1 missle and turret hard point.

Ah, this must be the upcoming fix to cruise missiles - they'll launch torpedos of their own as they approach their target. With this bonus, presumably the torps will match the speed of their cruise launcher for glorious return of Cavalry Raven!

+1 vote on keeping Rokh resists the same, not all of us use rails on them, and blaster range is anemic as is, and every point of resist on that helps mitigate that. Indeed, I would like to see a Navy Faction Rokh with more resists on it. The last thing we need is to make battleships more fragile in comparison to other ship classes.

The issue here is not that resists are too good, the issue is that buffer bonuses in conjunction with resist bonuses are too good. This is much like the same way that the old nano setups were too good, you once could buff both agility and mass, and this led to ridiculous results. I would suggest making tank extenders give a marginal penalty to resists as part of their effect, as a substitute/compliment for their signal radius/mass penalty.

Edit: As for resists + remote repping, you could always make a repped ship receive a similar resist penalty for the duration of the rep + a few seconds. That would make the decision to rep more tactical, and nerf piling on 20 remote reps on the same ship a bit.

Look at the original post man.

Also, I would recommending raising the cost of all battleships, the current levels of tank are ok, but their power at max skills is a bit out of line with their base costs.

Dafuq

Where am I going to put my missiles on my rohk ?

Why 0 launchers instead of the former 4 all of the sudden, or is that a mistake? Not that Neut/Torp-setups were very common except for the random wft-moment or that I even like them, but why remove the hardpoints to negate this option?

The more I think about it the more I dislike the resistance nerf on the Rokh. I've seen many changes in the game, but this is the one that finally really pisses me off, even though it seems so small at first glance. No battleship needs a tank nerf, especially after the proliferation of Attack Battlecruisers that made battleships obsolete in far too many scenarios. If you want to hit fleet PvP please do it in a fashion that doesn't hit small-scale PvP even harder.

Cheers
Tilo R.

very disappointed with the changes to raven.Unless CCP Rise have some kind of trick up his sleeve regarding torpedoes and cruise missiles , raven remains absolutely worthless.

And again we get a nerf to some awesome ships, just because they are being used in fleet compositions. When will caldari get some love ?

The scorp shows 110 scan resolution, if this is it's scan res, it has increased from the previous 75mm, so please show that.

Also, i really hope that it wasn't a mistake...because the scorp should definitely have that kind of scanres...