Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Maelstrom is useful for fleets because of artillery alpha; if your doctrine is built around critical mass alpha, there are no viable non-Minmatar alternatives. Even so, several alliances went to great lengths to try and build alpha artillery doctrines using Abaddons and Rokhs.

Similarly, the Tempest makes for an excellent anti-capital/AHAC platform due to its cap-less guns and dual utility high slots. No other platform currently offers that combination.

When players designing doctrines for fleets have a choice, however, they will always use the ship with a resistance bonus over the ship with a repair bonus, all other things being equal. This is why we see lots of Rokh fleets, but no Megathron or Hyperion fleets. The Rokh combines the damage output of blasters or range of rails with a nice resistance bonus. There's no advantage to bringing a Megathron or a Hyperion when a Rokh provides similar damage output and is much more survivable. More broadly, a ship without resistance bonuses has to bring something special to the fleet, in order to be considered over ships that do have a resistance bonus.

That said, I'm not sure that every faction absolutely must have a battleship specifically designed for large fleet warfare. The Hyperion is a fairly decent solo/small gang gank platform. It can already fit a better local armor tank than an Abaddon; that gap will widen if the Abaddon's resistance bonus goes through.

Wouldn't it be better to make the phoon the second combat bs for matar and the tempest the attack bs since doesn't the nano tempest kinda fill the 'attack' role??

Phoon - I really like its new layout, don't listen to all the bitter vets whining about lost skillpoints and said army phoons, the extra mid should allow it to fit a to on any fit and really apply its dps. I am sad at the loss of drone bay tho, BSs need more drone bay to carry offensive and defensive drones.

Thempest - the Sig bloom makes me sad, leave it be. Also drop a high for a mid or a low, with the raven at 7 mids and the mega at 5, the tempest could stand to be a shield or armor wild card.

I'm shocked the maelstrom didn't get any attention. I understand that it's one of the more popular battleships in the game right now because it's at the center of a major 0.0 fleet concept, and also has some mission running and solo pvp'ing capabilities, but it's main and most popular role is in the alpha fleet concept.

It works very well in that concept, but think about this for a second, the maelstrom works as a ship with a heavy passive tank (and pretty high resist), large alpha via artillery, and medium range~~. However, it doesn't get any bonus's to those roles. Yes the ROF bonus does help it get more dps and fire faster, but it definitely doesn't suffer from not having a damage bonus, which is my main point. The ship is super effective in it's role despite not having any bonus's towards that role. No other battleship currently fits that description. The abaddon comes close, but generally every abaddon concept that has tried something other than being passive tanked with mega pulse lasers, has failed.

You can't run a very effective artillery tempest that can both tank and do damage. The tempest is pretty much forced into an autocannon skirmish role. Many other bs are like this.

The best example is the rokh, despite having a resist bonus, when you consider a standard fit alpha mael and a standard fit Rail rokh, with both pilots having the BS skill at level IV (pretty reasonable expectations), the rokh only has 10% more EHP and slightly higher resists, despite having a 20% resist bonus and the same EHP increasing mods that the mael has (1x LSE and 3x CDFE).

In my opinion while it's cool that the maelstrom is so versatile a hull, it doesn't match what you are trying to do with tiericide, and the changes you have planned for the rest of the battleships. You need to instead define a roll for it, rebalance some of the HP figures, and of course change the bonus's one way or another.

changes look good to me. i approve of this new typhoon

I like where it is going with typhoon. Would like to hear more details about bs sized missiles review tho

Other than that....minmatar look like fallen out of grace recently. Other races always get more sweet stuff. (cue the geddon, apoc, all of cruiser and some of bc changes)

Would probably trade 1 high on tempest for low btw

It certainly does look like CCP has decided to take a **** on minmatar.

Which genius thought it would be a good idea to turn the phoon into a second raven? All minmatar "attack" ships are turret boats. The tempest fits that role already and should keep it come the new patch. The phoon is the minmatar utility ship, like the caldari scorpion.

If it isn't a projectile boat, it certainly shouldn't be a pure torp boat. Either keep the two weapon systems or give it an ewar bonus to webs.

I'm finding myself agreeing with that comment...

Add me to the list of folks who aren't happy at all with the Phoon changes, especially the drone b/w and bay size. It's odd to see BS's losing drone flexibility given the recent NPC AI changes that impact drone us.

Also add me to the list of people who feel like a lot of the uniqueness of the various races is being lost and that a lot of ships are getting a much more generic feel to them.

When I started playing EVE, I had a clear idea of how each race played: Gallente with drones, Minmatar were fast with a small sig radius, and so on. All of that seems to be getting blurred now.

I will also say that when I was a noob and read the description of the Phoon, I knew that it was the ship I wanted to be in. And before someone goes down the "bittervet tears" path, it's not that I regret training all the skills that made it viable as my workhorse. Rather, it's that I feel the loss of what was such an important part of my first year or two of playing: skilling up to make a Phoon sing. If I were starting in the game today, that particular challenge would be missing, and with it, a lot of the enjoyment I experienced in this game.

Rise, there are quite a few typos which I recommend you corrected. Aside from that, I don't fly Minmatar, but I think the changes look ok.

The typhoon could quite easily be used to brawl if fitted with torpedos under this current proposal. The typhoon is actually looking like a nice ship if it wasn't for the blasphemy of removing its dual weapon system. Also the thing just looks as though it is meant to hold a tonne of drones to me, I think it should at least keep its drone bay even if bandwidth is reduced. Perhaps giving it its drone bay back would at least give it back a modicum of its utility. Ideally it really need dual weapon systems, but it seems CCP are fixed on sticking to these tiericide principles dogmatically.

The Tempest is my main concern though as that massive sig increase really kills it and kills the minmatar warfare philosophy. It just doens't make any sense that a Tempest can have equal sig radius to a Raven.