EVE General Discussion

Yes, but as far I can see you didn't suggest anything and just summarized (mostly debatable) points that have been made. If you have suggestions for making the T3 "interesting" and "fun" in its pending re-balance, I, for one, am all ears.

In other words, incredibly expensive sub-par ships, if you have to refit to be sorta OK at something but not as good as T2, you may as well just buy several T2 ships and be done with it.

This is the point of the Tier 3 Exactly, it is 10 ships or the price of 2, My Tengu is the last ship I will ever need to train for. It is the best hull available, do I still have millions and millions of SP to train specialty roles? I sure do, but I can reliably know that I am flying the best hull in the game for all circumstances while doing so.

At it's core Tech 3s offer us a Battleship tank, battleship DPS and the ability to move expensive mods in/out that let us perform any single role at a time. The Tengu I am currently building is 9.7 billion ISK, thats the price of a capital so shouldn't it deliver performance on par with a capital?

The Tech 3s offer EVE players a shortcut on their skill traning plan, rather than spending years to train for a bunch of specialized hulls you can get them all at once, if you ignore the "specialization T2 garbage" you can easily cut 7 or maybe 8 years off your total skill training.

EVE is about skillpoints, and Tech 3s offer us a Doorway to getting SP capped within 2 or 3 years.

All right, then here's my take on this.

As suggested by the chart, cruisers need to be looked at on 3 separate progression paths: T1 is baseline, while Navy is a straight up improvement on T1, and Pirate being an improvement on Navy. This makes sense as a progression, because their roles remain generally the same. What's improved is numbers (and with it, cost goes up).

The T2 path (which is due for rebalances all on their own) should give a pilot a ship that does one thing very very well. Better, in fact, than the T1 equivalent, and better than any other T2 ship outside of that role. They're already broken up into specific roles in the first place, so they need to be certain that they're really the absolute best in that role, while performing extremely poorly in any other role.

The T3 path should be, in my mind, a whiteboard. That if you were to take a look at the ship's stats without subsystems, it'd be the perfect balance of everything. The true jack-of-all-trade ship, master of none. Of course, you can't really fly it without subsystems. What I want to see happen is that the subsystems themselves become vastly overhauled so that you can customize it to really be what you want it to be.

T3 should be a multi-role ship, able to effectively substitute for a particular role in a fleet, while not being good enough to completely overshadow the T2 (since the T2's dedicated, after all). I imagine it like a stat diagram (offense, defense, propulsion, electronics, and engineering), where improving on one aspect necessarily detracts from another aspect. As an example, investing into tank might increase the mass of the ship, slowing it down; increasing the ship's electronics capability (ECM, ECCM, targeting, etc) might reduce it's ability to active tank. Etc, etc. (Just examples, don't look into those too seriously). And there'd be varying degrees to this, as well.

To facilitate fitting a ship to meet the capsuleer's needs, fitting should be made easier by the subsystems actually replacing rigs all together for those particular ships, something that would also make T3's unique. Maybe even have a sort of calibration score for subsystems, just like rigs, so as to put an emphasis on making trade-offs on your ship's fitting. Make them easy to cart around, as well; give the T3s a built in bonus that reduces the volume of subsystems that match the Hull by 99%, so that a T3 pilot can carry around a full array of subsystems for easy on-the-go changes.

Hell, if you wanted to get REALLY crazy, change the hardpoints for Rigs into saved configurations that a T3 could swap to while in space, allowing up to 3 configs of modules and subsystems. Make it take a good 30 seconds or so to change along with a steep capacitor cost, so that it isn't something they can do in combat. But if they're flying with a fleet and a sudden need opens up, bamf, different config. Even while exploring, go from probing cloaky mode to a more combat-ready mode. The risk being that you're vulnerable while you're ship is changing, and that you need to be carrying the equipment with you (not too bad if the biggest difference between your configs is 4-5 modules at most). That might be going a little far, but we're discussing ideas.

Bringing the T3s we have now back in line with other Cruiser hulls as far as numbers goes will also lead to more interesting gameplay in the future. Why? Because it opens the door for CCP to make T3 Frigates and Battleships, as well, which would go by the exact same philosophy: Jack-of-all-trades, master of none, able to be fit to meet a pilot's image of what they want for their ship, but making T2s as the go-to if they want to fill a single, specific role really really well.

That was long-winded, I apologize. But I'm kind of liking the idea of subsystem calibration points, and may expand on that later. Again, the subsystems would need to be overhauled to fit a system like that, but it presents an interesting idea on how to balance a jack-of-all-trades ship.

EDIT: Oh, and remove the whole losing a level of subsystem training thing. That seems like a screwed up thing, both gameplay or lore-wise.

There's the TL;DR for you! Essentially, "yes".

My pleasure. I actually have a blast thinking about this kind of stuff, so I enjoyed putting it to paper.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go get myself blown up so as to gain some real world experience and offer better input.

Need Mining sub systems

Not really, no. I'm simply doing a correct price comparison.

Do a price check on buying a HAC, one of each Recon, a Logi, a HIC, and a Field Command Ship. When I did, it came out as roughly a billion ISK. At half a billion, a T3 with the corresponding subs is only a fraction of that cost, not to mention far easier to carry around and hellalot easier (and less costly) to train for.

The same thing I put on a T3, which is why the fittings are not a factor in the price.

Nobody wants Tech IIIs to be crap CCP. Nor do they want to consider buying a 500 mil hull when the Tech II variant is about the same.

I like that thinking. Make them cheaper and weaker and more flexible (perhaps even shapeshifters). They are relatively easy to train for and would be top priority for a new player but if you want to maximize your tank and dps you should train for and bring a specialised ship. And remove the SP loss on death it is not a very good mechanic to begin with.