Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Yeah the HAM changes (and bonus changes) did GREAT things for the HAM drake......you have NO idea the deaths of my hated for the pre HML nerf fleet drake, none. That being said its a matter of application, in small gangs the drake is fine, where they there are 400 combat hulls on field its damage projection is ****. So when you come out low sec the value to the hull nose dives. When HMLs go knocked back down into the realm of all of the other medium long range weapon I was thrilled.

As it relates there there is no application where you really want to use a Cerb over that HAM drake. The range is cool and all with the cerb, but if you fart at the Cerb it goes boom.......for another 100 million, for that matter you can do near the same thing with a caracal for 50mil.


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lol you just fail at fitting cerbs then[/quote]

Please then show me a cerb build you would take again an equal number of drakes.
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disclosing my fit would be as silly as saying a caracal is a better buy then a cerb.

So, question.

Based on the ideology of tiericide, tech II is supposed to be very specific to a role.

What exactly is the role of a Heavy Assault Cruiser? Or at least intended role.

Are both ships for each race supposed to fill the same or similar role?
How will you balance Tech III ships agaisnt Tech II in this specific role?
Should the HACs be divided up into Fleet ship vs Solo/small gang?

For me it sounds like HACs should be a big damage big tank ship. Or in otherwords a brawler. That to me means not good with ewar. I would think their weakness would be small fast ships and ewar. So they shouldn't be too fast or have room for webs.

Maybe the shield HACs could get a reduction to shield module signature penalty.
Maybe the Armor HACs could get a reduction to speed and mass penalties from plates.

Maybe instead of directly bonusing the weapons, you could bonus the weapon upgrade modules such as heat sinks and TE/TCs. That way you could build the bonuses into your ship at different levels and give a lot more power to specific fits instead of a blanket hull bonus. This would mean people could designate their own interpretation about a HAC (attack vs tank vs balance) and there would be a specific area where a Tech III couldn't overshadow them.

You would have to bonus opposing modules though. Like shiled vs TC vs maybe capacitor module?
Or armor vs TE vs damage upgrade. This would allow you to build your own unique ship while sill falling under the catagory of HAC.

Currently all of the bonuses are based on your hull. So the difference between 1 heat sink and 3 is pretty small. If you put the bonuses on the heat sink the differences could be pretty huge. Meaning equipping a ship for all damage will do very heavy damage but easy to kill or conversely equipping a ship for all tank (and let's be real, they don't need additional tank buffing, especially if there's the sig/mass bonus) will bring the damage down considerably but have a very heavy tank.

Let's be frank here. Tech I ships are designed to be hard to fail with. All of their bonuses tell you what to do with your ship. If you're flying a Tech II ship, you should at least do it with confidence in your abilty to fit. Bonusing modules will give more power to your fit and it would become easier to fail fit again. If the bonused modules compete for the same slots then you don't worry about losing a bonus, you decide which bonus you want to use.

Give us personality! Give us unique flavor! Do something different! Give us choices!

this, and its not only true for the Eagle, other HACs have this problem. with the only exception being the Cerberus, where it is understood that it must have a tradeoff to use that insane range, the other HACs just lack targeting range and resolution.

or better yet, how about we just give them a 50% resist to ewar effects such as damps, jams, etc. instead of the 50% lower sig on a bloom that you either don't care about because you are shield tanked (it could be -90% and your sig would still make large guns have no penalty...), or you expect to have it if you pulse MWD on any aHAC.

Sadly, I don't see that the changes made really bring out anything special in the HACs, though I do like the general changes done on many of the ships. As mentioned by others, even with the role bonus, the ships don't really set themselves apart from their main competitor, the Battlecruiser. Personally, I think two things are in order:

First: Change the MWD sig bloom reduction bonus to an AB speed bonus. Even with a 50% reduction in MWD "bloom", the HACs will still be the size of a large battlecruiser, small battleship, so there isn't much of a bonus there. Switching them to AB would allow them some added protection in speed and MWDs would still be viable on HACs in several common situations.

Second: In order to really seperate the battlecruiser from the HACs, in a way that really is honestly different, is to make all Tech 2 cruisers/Command Ships have a 4.5 AU warp speed, instead of a 3.75 AU warp speed. The Warp Speed change would essentially make HACs the equivlent of Fast Battlecruisers, but with less tanking ability than Battlecruisers have currently. Plus, this would seperate them from Pirate faction ships and thus give them their own "niche" as it were, one that is real and can't be effectively glossed over by something else.

Unless they have MWD-like speed, ships like the Vagabond wouldn't see much of an advantage, whereas the Zealot would potentially benefit greatly.

I think that half should be brawling ships and have an AB bonus, and half should be kiters and have an MWD sig bonus.

The general idea is not bad.
I cannot speak for Deimos pilots though.

Would have really loved to see that hull tanking stuff on Industrial Ship combat hulls too (if they existed :P)

Don't like making the sacrilege a missile boat, but looks semi-fine overall. Problem is, T2 seems on-level with navy variants, which, in the long term, might mean the navy stuff will cost more, and t2 profits will go down. Point is, it's easy grinding missions for the LP, and it gives direct ISK as well, while t2 production requires a lot of time, effort and different materials. This change seems too little of a boost, and the decline of the t2 era. I sincerely hope you're not going to change t3 as well.

Other long term effects I see are more mission grinders, which will increase the mission ISK faucet driving the inflation even higher (who remembers the golden days when plex were 300M and battleships 120M for tier3?)

Ever think the issue with all cruisers and battlecruisers were the fitting of oversized modules? Which became possible due to the rigs (giving more grid to allow these fittings).

It would be easier to "properly" balance all these ships by restricting the battleship modules from being used on cruisers. A 100mn afterburner on a cruiser? That's a battleship engine. 1600mm plates, those are battleship plates, xlarge ancillary shield boosters, battleship (heck technically capital ship) mods on a non battleship hull... Heck I think there are ships that can fit two of those.

You can actually get the full effects of the changes as a whole by going through the typical fits, which always involve in someway shape or form, fitting the largest tank mods in the game, on a ship they should have Never been able to fit them.

i agree 100%
altho i have a 1600mm plate on my sac, it shouldnt be able to fit. it IS a bs module.
if u look at it tho, if we only fit 800's or 400's even, cruisers would be SO damn weak we wouldnt undock anywhere.

xlarge asb on a cruiser? no way...but we couldnt survive any other way. imagine a sac against a autocannon nado with only 1 400 plate...
it would be over before it started.
give the mods a boost, but limit them to a certain ship size might fix it, but what if i want to be bait? 3x 1600's on my damnation etc.

if we had speed, if we had tank, or something else all together, we might survive with 400 plate or medium shield xtenders.
i personally dont want to waste the cash trying to make it work...

welcome to the decline of t2.
looks like i wasted hac 5 on 2 toons, and marauder 5 on 2 toons. i dont even wanna see whats in the works for them. 6-7 years i have been waiting for them to fix marauders...if this is the blueprint...
ugg.
my devoter puts out more dps than my sac...or close to it.

Still a little shocking that you haven't even talked about lowering the HAC build cost to make it a more competitive choice with the other options around its weight class.


I honestly hope you're considering that or else all 70 pages of this will end up being for nothing as people keep ignoring HACs for the ships that give a similar performance for a fraction of the cost (something that you the balance team caused).