Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I really wouldn't have a problem with this.

You are correct, some people view CS as only being used for large fleet engagements and want the huge buffer.

Others want them to be a viable alternative for more modest engagements, or even solo work.

... and then there are others (like our friend who posted above) view a little 20vs20 engagement as a fleet battle.

There are those who only think a CS is useful if it can stand in the middle of the fleet and absorb everything that's thrown at it, while others would prefer something that stays to the rear of the fight (using it's combat ability to deal primarily with anything slipping back to take it out).

People have wildly different expectations and definitions of how the vessels will be used, and that is causing a great deal of confusion.

FFS active tanking bonuses? Still? Really?

Could we maybe fix the "small" bug of wing commanders not receiving fleet commander's bonuses before we start to try to put the ships on grid? This should be the main priority' before ANY changes to the boosters.

Why is the command processor module still in the game? It serves no other purpose than to be a big **** you to all shield fleets for even considering putting t3 boosters on grid. Armor t3 booster can be tanked, shield one can't. Armor can put on extra links without sacrificing tank, shield can't. By the time this year is done there will not be many, if any, shield doctrines left in 0.0 anyway.

Why don't any of the skirmish boosting ships receive resist bonus per skill level? You clearly do want to put them on the field but what do you think will happen when you have 5 claymores on grid (without FC bonuses because they don't ******* work for wing commanders) with low EHP to begin with? Even if you don't have enough DPS to headshot the FC Damnation at the beginning, it's quite likely that the logistics don't have all of the wing commanders pre-locked (that would take 6 out of 8 max targets for a t1 logi for example) so you can just kill all the wing commanders. I mean just look at the EHP difference between an FC slot damnation (that gets its own bonus) to a wing commander skirmish boosting ship (that doesn't get the FC bonus). What's the difference? 2 or 3 times more EHP. I mean jesus ******* christ what the **** is going on.

Active tank bonuses on command ships? Really? I get that you want to give them some damage role even if I strongly disagree with that (since you know.. They will be using the highslots for links>probe launcher>other utility) but why would you want these ships to do every single thing? These are fleet ships, designed to be flown with fleets and while them being able to be flown solo as well that doesn't mean they need that kind of bonuses for it. That's like putting damage bonuses to logistics ships so that they can shoot something when they are flying solo and do you see that happening?

Why is the Damnation - any other command ship EHP difference not fixed? I get that your goal for the past year has been to get rid of all shield doctrines but isn't it going a bit too far already? And BTW you fix this by giving more EHP to the other command ships, not nerfing the Damnation. Just making this point clear since you clearly need some guidance on the issues with these ships.

The only thing these changes do for a 0.0 pilot is making flying boosters even more annoying than it already is. In serious business fleet all wing commanders will still be t3 boosters but now you have to scan for probes all the time. Yes it makes them vulnerable but it sure as hell is less vulnerable than flying a (relatively) paper thin wing booster on grid. Is that fun? No it ******* isn't. Yes you balanced some stuff and gave them shiny new stats but you clearly are not understanding the big picture here. You want to put fleet boosters on grid and have an effect? Then make them be able to do that, not be the best plex tank or a mission runner. You have absolutely the wrong problems in mind when you designed these ships.

Overall nerfs to effectiveness of links is great though so job well done on that at least.

Let's futher talk about the Resistance gaps in Command ships.

The resistance bonus system to command ships really doesn't make much sense
Let me explain this clearly before people chime in:

A ship with a 50% natural resistance taking 100 damage will receive 50 damage

A ship with 50% natural resistance taking 100 damage with a 20% resistance bonus will have 55% resistance, and therefore take 45 damage.

That means you really only take a 10% reduction in damage. This goes back to bad development where devs think % resistance works in some magical fashion rather than realistically. Hence the nerf to 4% per level recently as a compromise to active boosters. Proof the Devs don't know **** about mechanics

The only time a resist bonus actually matters the way the Devs run numbers is when you start at 0% resist across the board. This hardly ever happens as a matter of base statistics on all ships.

Furthering the problem is Tech 2 resistances. A Tech 2 ship with a 20% resist bonus does not actually receive 20% less damage than a comparable tech 1 ship. Instead, it receives 20% less damage than a comparable ship with the same base resistances. 2 totally different mechanics at play.

How is this bad for Tech 2 balance. Well lets further examine the claymore / nighthawk conundrum I posted about earlier.

Claymore without any bonuses has 220 total resist for an average of 55
Nighthawk with bonuses has a 240 total resist for an average of 60% damage reduction

Lets use really lazy math since it provides easy to work with numbers

100 damage applied on the claymore nets 45 damage
100 damage applied on the nighthawk nets 40 damage.

2 ways of looking at this:

Offensively, I have 12.5% more projected damage versus the claymore.*

Defensively, the nighthawk is receiving 8.9% less damage than the claymore.*

*this is a ratio mechanic that causes 2 different values. It seems weird at first until you realize how the wording plays.
One is how much more damage is the claymore taking compared to the NH (ratio of C:NH). The other is how much less damage is the Nighthawk taking compared to the Claymore (ratio of NH:C)

Both ways show that in no way do you approach 20% reduced damage, and certainly not higher than 20% reduced damage. However the Developers will try to convince you that this is not true because in Imagination land, they are allowed to assume all resistances are 0 to start with and there's no such thing as diminished returns in EVE.

Fact is, the gaps that Caldari and Gallente have are far inferior to the more spread, resist gap fills of the Amarr and Matar. When you make 2 similar ships with other drastically severe balance problems like the NH and Claymore, this resist gap really shows how bad the balance is.

So glad our developers can post on here how smart they are about their mechanics and how closely they sit to each other in the office to assure us they know what they're doing. Maybe you should learn core mechanics and fundamentals of the game first.

This is just another in a long line of failures.

please do me a favor and go buy a drake or nighthawk and and just sit down in it with BC 5 . . . ill wait . . . now look at your shield explosive resists . . . now tell me, whose a good girl who needs to learn how to math . . . (hint you end up with 60% resists not 55%)

seriously, though, the bonus works exactly the same way that you would expect, if you would take 100 explosive damage with a 50% base resistance, you end up taking 50 damage, increase that resistance to 60% and you end up taking 40 damage 40/50 = .8 or 80% which means you're taking 20% less damage; just like you would expect from a 20% bonus.

Same thing with a base resist of 0% 100 damage with 0% resist = 100 damage; 100 damage with a 20% resist bonus = 80 damage so 20% less.


the above is only true if you continue along the idiotic line of thinking that you fit both ships the same way. All you did was point out that there is an EM hole that needs to be plugged by a hardener in the NH. I was also going to point out that a single EM hardener on the NH has a much better effect at raising the "average resists" than does a kinetic hardener on the claymore, but it doesnt matter because this argument is moot.

Not to mention that the NH has 17% more shields than the claymore but you know, that fact doesnt fit your pre conceived idea, so i guess you chose to exclude it.

TL;DR
there is more to a ship than its bonuses, perhaps you should check out the other stats.

That line literally only exist because I had to use a saved draft rather than an edited draft when the post failed to post first time.

I'll be the first to tell you it was a mistake and has absolutely no weight on the entire rest of a very long post.

Consider this:

If I had hypothetically 90% base resists, and a 20% bonus to those resists, I would have 92% resists.

True, this is only a 2% increase at that level.

However, if I were taking 1000dps with 90% resists I'd be taking 100dps... with 92% resists I'd be taking 80dsp... a difference of 20% less damage relative to the damage that would actually be getting thorough.

Those bonuses do matter to the end damage that you actually receive, no matter how you slice it.

This is excellent stuff. Command/boosting needs durability, or its no good. But the flipside is that a ship with that kind of durability shouldn't be able to throw out lots of damage, or else it's just *better,* which we know is bad. Maybe the answer is differentiating T2 fighty BC's away from command BCs.