Player Features and Ideas Discussion

good read... still hoping like the bs balance we will see hac mrk II witht that wow factor you talked about. like a diemos with a tracking bonus and 6 high 4 mid 6 low slots. or the ishtar loosing the silly 50m3 bonus and replaced with a electronic/utility drone effectiveness bonus of 20%
Though marlona came up with the mjd idea...
i am still partial to mwd scram immunity as the role bonus. think about a bunch of hacs that dont have to worry about scrams turning off thier mwd...

cant say i support that idea... even as cool as it sounds... bombs are essential anti blob weapons... they are critical.

i like the idea... though i would prefer more in this direction... IMO ab setups are fine... its the mwd that needs the cool bonus and a warp scram immunity would do the trick. though just my opinion... still like your ideas too.

Currently AHACs are essentially bomb immune (tiny sig). MWDing AHACs, however, even with the 50% sig reduction from MWD would still have battleship sized signature, but with really thin tanks (comparatively)

To put things in perspective, a post-patch MWD Zealot would die to 9 bombs (assuming both loki links and legion links). Currently the standard AB Zealot needs 47 bombs to die.

That said, most of my balance ideas are ****** so bomb immunity may not be cool. But that doesn't mean something new and fancy that I never thought of can't be added

Drop the mwd sig bonus role ... it is crappy.

Like many others in the soon to be threadnaught, I'm not overwhelmed by these proposed changes for a few reasons.

The first reason is cost. As CCP has made it abundantly clear, we should pay hundreds of millions for 2% gains; however, people aren't happy with that after the success of T1 and faction cruisers' rebalancing. If I have a fully fit thorax for 50mil vs a fully fit deimos for 250mil when the differences in their ability is marginal, I would rather fly 5 thoraxes over 1 Deimos. These price tags have to be worth it or people still won't fly them.

The second reason is that some of the ships glaring problems haven't been addressed or have actually been made worse. For example, the CPU issues on the Ishtar, the fitting and tank requirements on a Deimos, Cerberus, and Eagle, and viability outside of large fleet engagments for the Munin. These are very specialized ships that should be easy to fit once you get lvl 5 skills, I.e force recons at Recon Lvl 5 . These fitting issues need to be addressed or people will just continue to fly T1 and navy faction.

The third reason deals with the idea behind niche roles. With the advent of ABCs into Eve, HACs seem to have lost their place. However, CCP's catch all role bonus isn't good enough. As some have mentioned , this role bonus only truly benefits a few HACs, and it's also very lazy of CCP. These cruisers are T2 and need to be specialized in some way to make them viable again.


Here are some ideas on how to make them fill those niche roles and become specialized again:
As the name implies, Heavy Assault Cruisers should be rolling beast in terms of their tanks. The first step should be increasing their base resist to make them more resilient. Not a large change, but buffing a Deimos's explosive hole to a base 30% as opposed to the current 10%. Also buffing their electronics and sensor strengths to make them more resilient to Ewar might be another viable option.

The next step is that replacing that sweeping role bonus. None of these ships have the same role even though they're all the same ship class. This is good, it's call diversity and makes the game more fun. That being said, instead of a broad, useless role bonus these HACs should receive individual role bonuses that build on their native strengths. For example, the Ishtar is subject to follow the VNI and Dominix and become a pure drone boat (yawn....very boring btw) and relies only on drone DPS. Bring a few smart bombs and your Ishtars are dead in the water. So the new Ishtar would receive a role bonus similar to something like this: 25% bonus to drone HP. Now the Ishtar can focus on doing what it's meant to do. Now on the other hand, if we look at the Deimos which is notorious for being the "Diemost blaster brawler" where one neut will ruin its day, we can add a role bonus that helps the Deimos brawl at scram/web ranges. New role bonus: 25% reduction of incoming energy neut amounts.
TL:DR these HACs should have individual role bonuses that should support their niche role.

I really dont think the Vaga needs a 5th mid as a lot of people are suggesting, its slot layout is currently fine it just needs a buff in the DPS and Projection areas.

At the moment AC kiting ships are pretty terrible as is, even the Cyna is relatively terrible, they need better applied DPS at range and need a general DPS buff.

I like the idea of individual roam bonuses but before any of that they need to fix the (currently terrible) balance pass for the Vaga, no improvement to its DPS and projection a slight speed loss and a **** bonus which nobody can or will use for anything other than heavy tackling for gangs.

Well I don't. "Waiste" a role or bonus because it might be important for big battles ? It's the same like that idea of the Lock breker bonus. Only suits a very specific situtation when most of the times Hacs will be (hopefully) used in day to day fights.

Assuming we manage to cause the wanted snowstorm in hell and convince Rise to discard the idea of "one bonus for all", what would work (staying within racial flavour of course)?

Amarr: 2x all benefits gained from batteries.
Caldari: Half cap use of all eWar?
Gallente: Sig bloom free MWD use (ie. -100%)
Minmatar: Double artillery tracking (and tweaking hull bonuses (not fittings) towards AC)?

The MWD sig bonus sort of made sense on AFs as they have poor weapon ranges and they survive by not being hit at all due to relatively low EHP, but it makes no sense on HACs.

Read through the last pages. Agree with the vast majority of comments. No-one is going to fly these when they hit TQ. T1 cruisers are faster, massively cheaper, have the same damage application and bar the resist profiles - only a slightly worse tank.

Roll on pass 2...