Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The EOS would tank gurista sanctums with one arm tied behind it's back, while singing Bohemian Rhapsody and performing a pole dance.

If I saw it there though, I'd feel compelled to put it out of its misery...

I think you are forgetting the sandbox aspect of Eve which it seems the devs continually like to poop on. Regardless, comparing like fits there are some deficiencies in these boats CPU output.

Kind of surprised that CCP are actually intending for people to fit XLASBs on things that aren't battleships. I thought them being able to fit at all was just an unfortunate oversight. Being able to put the equivalent of about 5 LSEs in a single slot, without even the lol sig penalty, kind of crazy. WTB capless large armour repairer for my myrmidon.

Nerf plx, ASBs are stupid.

I'm quite sure if you tried doing some magic to switch one of those optimal bonuses on the Vulture to a damage bonus you would find that if you equalize ranges through ammo the damage bonus one outperforms the other one at all ranges.

Because of ammo and most fights being in a sub 100km range damage bonuses are simply a LOT better then an optimal bonus. Should give the vulture a 12,5% optimal bonus and a 5% damage bonus imo.

The Nighthawk needs a low dropped in favor of a mid. A two-slot shield tank after prop/web/scram is laughable. Combine that with only two rig slots, and its tank is only marginally better than a Drake's.

The Claymore can afford to drop a mid in favor of a low, especially since it needs to lose a low slot to a Co-Processor II in order to fit an XLASB.

With the current slot setup, the Claymore can fit a stronger buffer than the Nighthawk without even making use of its booster tanking bonus. That's just stupid. If you think of an XLASB as buffer, the Claymore can beat the Nighthawk by >25%.

It's also faster than the Nighthawk and has a smaller signature.

Honestly, there's no reason at all to use a Nighthawk over a Claymore. Hell, even the Damnation ends up looking mighty good as a missile boat by comparison.

I'd agree that the absolution needs some sort of damage application bonus to stay competitive, especially now that it's losing one turret (and thus 16% less cap use) and getting an extra utility high that can be used on a nosferatu, which would mostly negate the lack of cap use bonus. The Amarr's ships are already low on dps relative to the others, with the absolution at 10 effective turrets, compared to nighthawk's 11 launchers, astarte's 11 turrets, and sleipner's 11.25 turrets, with each of those ships also getting a damage application bonus, and astarte's hybrids still using less capacitor than absolution's lasers even after the 50% reduction. To remain significantly competitive at damage (and especially applied damage) to the other races, the absolution either needs it's RoF bonus bumped up to 7.5% like all the rest are getting (for 12 effective turrets but still no application bonus) or the cap use switched out to 7.5% optimal and 5% tracking (while still at 1 less effective turret dps than the rest).



EDIT: also, imo, lasers in general need to have either their cap use brought down, or the hull bonuses that decrease cap use need to be stronger. I'm fine with the range/tracking tradeoffs as they are but it's not acceptable that my ship that is sacrificing a hull bonus slot to have its guns still require 50% more capacitor than a hybrid who's ship is still receiving a dps/application/tanking/whatever bonus. And our highest dps ammo having an additional 25% cap use penalty on top of that for what's otherwise the exact same stats? And even in perfect conditions, latency causing ammo switching to still take 2-3 seconds or more, pretty much negating half of the "instant ammo swap" that's supposed to be what makes lasers so godly enough to receive such harsh problems in every other aspect of their life? Weapons already fire at the very start of their cycle, how seriously hard can it be to program things so that if you right click and select a new ammo type during the "cooldown", it will start the next cycle with that ammo, instead of requiring 3 separate inputs from the player that all require a back-and-forth to the server which are all plagued by everyday latency as well as the server's 1-second update rate. Hell, it's not like the ammo swapping system isn't already in place, just instead of having each command handled by a separate player input, only have the initial player input start the process that has the "stop guns firing" code sequence end by starting the "remove ammo" which already leads into "load ammo" followed by the 0, 5, or 10 second delay as per weapon type, and finally have that go to the "start guns firing", all being handled automatically and by the server from just the one click by the player while guns were still in the "cooling down" phase of their cycle. You guys can even put in a 0.1 second delay between each command to give the server some breathing room and it will still feel instant enough to the player, and significantly better than having to wait for your gun to stop with the extra half cycle your client started it doing while the server was derping, navigate right click menus as fast as possible, wait for the client to recognize that the server has loaded the guns properly before it lets you start firing, and then finally hitting F1 again, during which time the target you were firing at has gone out of the range where standard is best for dps and is now in xray optimal range, but y'know what, it's ******* okay because you accidentally input one of your commands to your instant ammo swap turret TOO fast so none of it got recognized and you're actually still firing the microwave you had fitted before, so you'd have to go through the entire process AGAIN this time slowly drawing out every step just to make sure the game recognizes what you are doing, and this time going into multifrequency even though it would still be in laser's pitiful falloff just because you don't want to go through the whole damn process again when you know the frig will probably keep getting closer, all the while asking yourself why you don't just use autocannons that let you choose your damage type while their falloff curve naturally and automatically adjusts your damage to range and you can just leave in the short range/high damage ammo because it's only reducing their already nonexistent optimal range while leaving their actually significant range completely untouched and all the while using 0 capacitor on ships that have the exact same recharge rate. Yes, a nerve has been touched. /rant

OH MY GOD MY EYES IT BURNS!!!!!!

I’m basically going to analyze the Command ships for everything they’re worth in this lengthy post by explaining how the balance is non-exisitant, and how you’ve basically screwed yourselves over with this patch by overreaching and not defining roles for ship classes. I’m going to do this by starting with the 2 winners for command from what I consider the FC perspective. By this I mean, I’ve chatted with multiple FC’s from Multiple alliances and the same conclusions are basically always met.

The Winners:

Absolution for large fleet concepts
Claymore for small fleet concepts

Why the Absolution wins in large fleet doctrines hands down:

Most people in EVE fail to realize how much DPS beams put out pre 1.1 buff. Beams were actually a small falloff in DPS using the closer range ammunitions over pulses from the git go. When you introduced a 25% damage boost for 1.1, you basically put Beams at or in some cases surpassing pulses in DPS projection, basically nullifying any reason for medium pulse use.

Beam Absolution now does 700-800 DPS out to 19km optimal, and 400 dps out to 71km optimal. Mix that with a 185k ehp tank, cruiser tracking abilities and the free mids and close range tech 2 ammo to boost tracking a **** ton, and you have a mammoth beast that will be hard to match at any class of ship in game. It’s range is basically enough, hp run in the top tier of needs, it’s dps is more than enough, and it’s resist are stellar, making the logistics network awesome… It’s also one of the few ships that can easily hide it’s bonuses within the fleet doctrine itself providing a distinct advantage.

Beam Abso has become so good, and the price is reasonable enough with the reduced cost of rigs compared to BS and the lower general cost of fittings that it can basically match most BS fleets in efficiency and HP while dominating the Logistics battle.

I’m going into more detail as it compare it to the other 6 losers in a minute.

Why the Claymore wins in small fleet doctrines.

The Claymore has become one of the only ships in game that can put a reasonable investment into it’s fittings/implants and develop grossly OP local tank equal to anywhere from 2-8 logistics worth of repairs in burst outrageously high for small fleet warfare.

It offers up capacitor free offensive firepower, uniform damage application across all 4 types of damage, a high capacity drone bay, 2 utility high slots that are easy to fit… and on top of all that, another easy to hide bonus platform within the group.

Again, I’m going to analyze this ship further in the loser section:

And the losers….

Nighthawk:
This guy loses for so many reasons that you were warned about back with the heavy missile nerf, and far more.
As a close range brawler, it gets outmatched by the Claymore in every way… agility, damage applications, mid slot options, vastly inferior local tank, no speed or agility, no real sense of itself, smaller drone bay/projection, and horrid resist layout.

As a long range platform, it gets outmatched by the Absolution because it has hardly any speed advantage, get’s matched pretty well at distance for DPS application… assuming no firewall, get’s horrifically beaten on DPS if the Absolutions land closer than max range, has less tank than the Absolutions, and an inferior resist layout.

Sure, it could hide it’s bonuses you dedicated a fleet doctrine to it, but with all the above, why in gods name would you. And before you state that missiles always hit…. You don’t get firewalls or what webs and competence do for turrets since you refuse to do anything about the tracking formula.

Sleipnir:
Only thing this guy has left to offer is alpha…. And WTF. If I wanted an alpha fleet, I would much rather chose a shield or armor loki doctrine, a Tempest or Maelstrom fleet, or a Tornado fleet. All of those options beat it defensively, offensively, and in most cases, based on cost as well.

As for Autocannon platforms, with the nerfs incoming to Tracking enhancers and the other options for far less price, again, why would you chose this role. For similar range projection, you have the Claymore offering up so much more.

Vulture:
The Vulture dies out simply because of the Abso. The Vulture vs Abso tanking gap is diminishing quite a bit with the changes, the Vulture gets easily matched by the Abso for DPS projection from 40-70, gets dominated inside that range, has a much higher sig bloom, hardly any advantage on speed, and no real reason for use.

The range projection is silly to match to the Eagle when the small DPS drop does not account for the Eagle’s huge defensive advantage in an AB shield HAC platform, nor does the general use of a Vulture fleet make sense when compared to Rohks or Naga’s.

Because you basically have to use this as a boosting platform only, you can’t really hide the ship in a fleet of many.
And as a solo platform, let’s just not even bother discussing how bad it fails.

Astarte:
You’d think this guy was pretty awesome mix of DPS and tank until you realize just how drastic the difference is between it and the Claymore:

The Claymore can exceed almost any Astarte fit by about 20k EHP, while out tanking it with an XLASB by anywhere from 2 to 8 times higher local tank. Based on current market price, I overheated a Claymore to get it to 15,000 DPS local rep for 880ish million ISK while still projecting ~700 DPS. Best I could do on an Astarte was about 2000-2500 leaving room for only 1 Mag stab.

Sure you could argue that the Astarte has a few free mid slots, but again, that only really matters in 1v1, and really not enough to gain it any more than a novelty advantage since it’s slower, fatter, and dumber than the claymore.

As for long range rail Astarte can’t even begin to match the Abso or a Rail Talos either. So again, while it seems good on paper, when you start to look at the big picture, it really doesn’t.

.... continued

Eos:

You’ve heard so many complaints already about it, but the general summation is, if everyone can tell you why it’s inferior to the Astarte, then do you really need me to pile on more.

Damnation:

It just doesn’t do anything good other than tank compared to the others… and when you can hide an absolution in an abso fleet concept, it really doesn’t matter.

Here’s a list or reasons why these ships and a lot of your other changes are going to fail and why you’ve seen so much negative backlash, especially for HACs and Commands:

Your tracking formula/mechanics suck (I’ve offered up the solution to this with much positive feedback already)

Webs at range are severely OP (again, tracking formula issue more than anything)

Logistics are way OP and high resist ships only escalate this problem more.

Probing and warping on grid.

And most importantly, You are not grasping the concept of what a ROLE means for ship classes.


You have far too many TECH 3s, HACS, BS, BC’s, Commands, Carriers for Christ sake, and even a few Faction Cruisers overlapping so much that it really comes down to which ship of all those litter can do it the best, obsoleeting anything and everything else by default. The only reason to use the others is not because they are better at something… they’re not… it’s just a novelty role play move…. Or we’re out trolling.

*snipped needless abuse* - CCP Eterne

For god sake, Fix the tracking formula, fix webs, Fix ECCM, Fix drones, and Develop real roles with new and unique ideas rather than this idiocy.

But we all know this won’t happen… so meh

~I’m Down (ironically, the account just ended renewal because of disgust)

Just want to point out that this is less of a ship-specific issue and more of how huge of a gap there is in general between shield tank and armor tank active mods that gets compounded on by many different aspects.
A) Shields can actually fit oversized reppers
B) The non-oversized shield mod already gives more hp/sec (large shield booster II gives 60 hp/sec compared to armor's 53/sec, or XL shield's 120/sec, which can fit on a medium ship and easily beats medium armor repper's 26/sec)
C) higher resists from their adaptive resist mod which can also be overheated for even more, without requiring a month of (aptly named) compensation skills
D) boost amplifiers as a way to further increase ehp gain on a different stacking penalty
E) ancillery module requires no capacitor, and gist-type modules have drastically lower cap/hp ratio than anything else.
F) crystal implants

edit: fixed some number

edit2: even just making an exact copy of the ASBs but in low slot and for armor would bridge that gap by a lot, make it more like a 10k rep/second instead of shield's 15k, but still better than that 2k.