Player Features and Ideas Discussion

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Hey everyone, I know there's been a lot of questions raised by the Abaddon and Rokh changes, sorry for not having this thread ready earlier.

I'd like to chat with you guys a little bit about ship resistance bonuses, their place in the grand picture and what we want to do with them in Odyssey. I've talked in this forum before about our belief that 5% armor/shield resistance bonuses are one of the most powerful bonuses we give to significant numbers of ships. Resistances have the huge advantage of applying equally well as a buffer bonus, a magnifier of local reps, and a magnifier of incoming remote reps.
This imbalance was becoming more and more of a problem as we started work on battleships and command ships.

To understand why they are so powerful, we need to start with some quick math. Resistance bonuses are stronger than they first appear for the same reason that rate of fire bonuses are stronger than damage bonuses. This isn't entirely intuitive but it's something that long-time EVE theorycrafters have all gotten used to since it shows up so often in the context of our game.

The key thing to remember is that a 25% bonus that is applied by division (like resistances that divide incoming damage, or RoF which divides the duration between module activations) have a much bigger effect than a 25% bonus that applies by multiplication (like a weapon damage bonus or a bonus to raw hitpoints).

For example a 25% increase in armor hitpoints applies quite intuitively: (Base HP) * 1.25 = a 25% increase in total EHP.

In contrast a resistance bonus actually benefits your ships by decreasing incoming damage. So a ship with 25% resistance bonus takes 25% less damage from hostiles. This ends up applying to their effective hitpoints as: (Base HP) / 0.75 = a 33% increase in total EHP.

So while a 37.5% rep bonus increases effective repping by 37.5%, and a 50% armor hp bonus increases effective hitpoints by 50%, a 25% resistance bonus actually increases both by 33% (not the 25% that might be assumed at first glance).
In practice that means that for pure amount repped over time, a 25% resistance bonus is only 3% less powerful than a 37.5% rep bonus.
This is one of the main reasons that resistance bonuses completely overshadow local repair bonuses.

Resistance bonuses also have several other huge advantages over our other tanking bonuses. At the end of the day what tanking bonuses really do is keep you alive longer. Active bonuses are strongest when the damage you are taking is weaker, while passive EHP bonuses help more when incoming DPS is higher, but both serve to increase the amount of time you can remain on the battlefield under fire. Since it applies to both reps (local or remote) and to passive EHP, a resistance bonus dominates in most situations.

Ship resistance bonuses also have the huge advantage of not being stacking penalized in a bonus category that is very often a few layers deep into the stacking penalty once the ship is fully fitted.

Finally it's important to look at the value of these resistance bonuses combined with remote repair modules. Remote repair systems are extremely powerful in the current EVE meta, and I have stated in the past that we do not intend to increase the power of the highest end repair strategies (Tech Two Logistics and capital remote repairing) because they are on the edge of overpowered. Remote repair gameplay is some of the most fun gameplay we have (and is my personal favourite activity in 0.0) but is also responsible for discouraging fights and for forcing the rise of alpha-only strategies. Spidertanking strategies like Slowcat carriers are some of the post powerful tactics in the game, and it's no accident that those strategies rely entirely on resist bonused ships.


So we consider resistance bonuses to be a bit too powerful in modern EVE. The next question to answer was how exactly we should adjust them.

Making them stacking penalized with modules and rigs would deal with most of the imbalance, but this would be the only ship bonuses stacking penalized with modules and the inconstancy adds its own kind of complexity to learning the game. Not ideal.

Extending armor and shield repair bonuses to apply to remote reps would bring them much closer to balance with resist bonuses, but would also further empower the current remote rep tactics that are as strong as we feel we can allow them to be.

Converting the resist bonuses to HP buffer bonuses would be much easier to balance as it affects a smaller set of mechanics, but that also removes what I think are a very iconic set of bonuses. The fact that the resistance bonus is so versatile is something we like about it, it's just the fact that it is so good at so many things that causes it to overshadow other bonuses. We also plan to continue using straight HP bonuses in the future as a defensive bonus with its own flavour distinct from the other defensive bonus options.

So our plan for Odyssey is to remove 1% per level from all the standard ship and subsystem resistance bonuses, setting them at 4% per level.

At 4% I believe these bonuses are still very powerful, and this may not actually go all the way we need it to. However I think it's an area we can make the small adjustment and then tweak further as necessary.
The fact that this is a very moderate shave off the top of the bonus instead of a more significant change is intentional, as we plan to watch the effects of this tweak on the ecosystem and learn from our observations.

This affects 44 ships total.

Shield:
Ibis, Taipan, Merlin, Worm, Harpy, Cambion, Moa,...

Alright, sounds reasonable.

Good change.

How about 3% instead. 4% is still loads.

I would consider leaving the bonus on the heavy interdictors. Other than that I'm fine with this change.

Resistance bonuses will always be better as they will help you survive high alpha, where no matter how high your active rep bonus is, if you cannot take the alpha you are dead.

First the terribad Amarr BS changes, now the Archon and the rest too?

RIP Amarr

I'm going to throw this here since I have a feeling a lot of questions coming up will be along this line:

Why nerf things when you could buff things instead?

This is a question that comes up often in any thread where we are discussing decreasing the power of an item or ship. I can completely understand where it's coming from. Buffing things makes people happy in much larger numbers, it simply feels good to see the effectiveness of your equipment increase. Many other games rely on constantly improving gear to drive engagement in their content and that method of development can work very well for those games.

I'm going to start by quoting my answer to this question from the Heavy Missile thread before Retribution, because what I said there still applies.

I would be lying if I said that we never allow power creep in EVE. It's quite simply much much easier to balance upwards and considering how powerful of a tool it is for creating short term customer satisfaction, some power creep is very hard to avoid. However we do need to be very mindful of how much we let ourselves indulge. There are cases where for the long term health of the game ecosystem we simply have to reduce the power of certain items and ships. We believe this is one of those times. I can promise you that we're committed to eating our vegetables and making adjustments either up or down based on our best estimation of what the game needs. We won't decrease the power of items and ships unless we deem it necessary but we also won't forget that our job is to manage the health of the game over the long term.

Cool, so when are the big nerfs to overpowered things coming?

Ground Floor. Hard to argue with the math. Supported.

None of the listed ships that aren't good are bad because they don't have good enough resists. If anything the resist bonuses just overshadow the actual problems with the ships.