Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I disagree with people saying everything is okay with Rifter. It is not.
While the point of the Tiericide was to buff the other frigates, Rifter specifically is not up-to-date.

Seriously. Slasher has four meds and the same bonuses. Naked fittings already show that the Rifter has just some 200ehp or so more. That's nothing - just another stone to throw before it blows up.

Others hoped Tiericide would make the Rifter more of a brawler sort, leaving all the tackling more to Slasher and other frigs. Personally, I had the impression the Rifter could be more of a "heavy frigate", but is too dificult for the most to imagine.

Tracking Speed is a good ship bonus as well as the Damage bonus.
But somewhere, if Rifter is to be different, than it would be best to swap those for other bonuses that would make it unique.

This is however why I suggested there should be a seperate branch of frigates, one be frigates, the other "corvettes" (And don't even start on arguing with me about the terms vs ship sizes - there are a lot more Eve ships that don't fit into their terms either).
Why? Because we have the same problem over and again:
People want fast frigates, but then the other half says can't tank.
People want the tanky variant, but then other half says whatsoever.

So why not just have both, a tank/brawler type and the classic Rifter (same would apply for other factions).

I agree, the Rifter needs the tracking bonus replaced by ROF.

Edit: Off topic part was removed, CCP Phantom

Please note that bumping threads is not allowed in this forum. Off topic posts and posts not relevant to the discussions were removed.

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Just thought I'd chime in on this thread as the Rifter is definitely not much use any more.

Sure there's plenty of people still flying them but there's plenty of people do all kinds of stupid things.

Aside from armour tanking there is no fit on a rifter that wouldn't be better on a slasher, and armour tanking means no damage mods which for an attack frigate seems bad.

The Rifter would be a significantly better ship with Randy (the OP)'s modifications, or the ones suggested by Anabaric. The only other suggestion I have is to give the rifter fitting bonuses for projectile weapons. This is more in keeping with it's role but effectively achieves the same as a pg/cpu increase but only if you fit projectiles. This doesn't seem too rediculous given the role bonus on the slasher.

Having said that Assault Frigates have a role bonus of mwd sig bloom reduction. This would be of more use on a rifter if it had enough pg/cpu to easily fit one.

Personally I hope CCP drag their heels on this for a while as then the price of the rifter should crash and I can start using them as disposable shuttle gank boats.

Logic? What kinda alternative universe do you live in? The only thing that put the rifter (and other minmatar ships like the cane and rupture) ahead of it's counterparts was the utility high. If you argue against this you've not done your homework. I spent countless hours EFTing and flying most of the frigates pre-rebalance (same with cruisers and battlecruisers) and they got fairly similar stats and alot of ships were actually superior to the rifter in performance. The cookie cutter rifter was so common because:

1. It required less skillpoints to fly effectively than other races frigates since it didn't need as many support skills like capacitor and fitting skills. Because of this stuff like rifter swarms became popular, because there was no other ship that a 3 day old noob could get as much performance out of as the rifter.
2. It was versatile, the cookie cutter NOS/SAR rifter fit is good at punching above its weight class, something that wasn't often seen among the rest of the frigates. However with this particular loadout you were most of the time worse off fighting other frigates. The rifter could also support both shield and armor tank loadouts.

Many of these problems were addressed before the frigate rebalance. Hybrid turrets got a reduction in fitting reqs and cap use and the explosion velocity of rockets were buffed making them a viable weapon system which made the kestrel super popular.

I'll say it again, there was no reason for the rifter to be left behind so badly. What you consider as logic is basically that the rifter should be left behind as some sort of punishment for being overly popular in the past? I didn't think that was how rebalancing was supposed to work.

dude, the most common ship is 99% of the time the most powerful ship.

Obviously others excel in specialized area's, however in general, the rifter was the best....by far.

Now it's the best at nothing, all the other frigs are the best at something.

It was faster than other t1 frigates. It did more damage than other t1 frigates save for a few specialized cases in which case it only did slightly less. It had a very strong tank compared to other t1 frigates. It had very high range projection for a t1 frigate. It did all of these things at the same time

There were a couple of other t1 frigates that could potentially beat the Rifter in one of these things, but it would be far worse at everything else.

-A blaster Merlin or incursus would be kited with barrage.
-A rail merlin or incursus would just get facehugged and murdered because they were significantly slower than the riftger
-Punisher had 2 mids, fitting problems, and exceptionally mediocre damage. The Rifter could just fly up, orbit at 500, and kill it easily. Or, the Rifter could just leave at will, because..you know...no webs. and slow.

I like the Rifter (my corp is named for it). The Rifter is in fact underpowered and needs some buffs, but I can't imagine what kind of warped thought process led you to thinking that the Rifter was even remotely balanced before tiericide.

The reason I asked him to explain was the only thing he's been posting in this thread was essentially "rifter op nerf pls". I was trying to make him post a more comprehensive explanation of his opinions in the matter.

I was considering this as a solution. Both null (or do I mean void?) & scorch seriously outperform barrage which is why a blaster or laser rifter outperforms the AC type. That this is true despite the projectile hull bonus surely means barrage needs a buff.