Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With the greatest respect, until you give the devs numbers you are not in a position to tell them how to improve the design.

They're just not going to listen to "it's ****" claims.

Give a concrete example.

Here is a concrete example:


The numbers are with a siege warfare implant, bad drone skills, and no other implants for drugs - but include the siege boosts.

Nighthawk:
high slots: 3 siege boosters, 4 heavy missiles, navy scourge
med slots: EM ward II, infvuln II, LSB II x 2, 10mn MWD (meta-3)
low slots: DC II, ballistic control II x 2, nanofiber II, PDU II
rigs: T1 field extenders (I dont have the skills for T2)

Stats:
EHP: 122,395 (unheated)
Resists: 81/93/89/81 (unheated)
shield recharge: 55hp/s = approx 250dps peak (unheated)

damage output (for me): 300dps to 54km. This will increase with better skills to about 400 i think (unheated).

122k ehp does not suggest to me that this ship will die immediately - it's the same as a battleship.

I'd be happy to take this in a moderately-sized shield fleet. No, it's not going to survive massive alpha from 2000 ships.
I guess it's designed for durability in a smaller fleet with some logi.
If that is the design goal, then it has met its targets. If the design goal is "massive fleet alpha" then it has probably not.

So, some questions:

Q1: what are your design goals? What size alpha do you need to counter?
Q2: Does the ship meet the criteria while providing link boosts?


Incidentally, Sisi seems to have a bug that prevents the nighthawk from activating more than one siege module at a time. Since I'm the first to mention it, I presume I'm the first to actually fit up a ship before complaining?

I've reported it to the ISD Help fella since the bug reporting system is itself bugged

Only one thing will save links from alpha when they come on grid, adopting a pragmatic approach by having enough baskets for ones eggs. Look at the command redundancy built into modern armies, order givers start appearing all the way down at a squad level whereas in Eve we have gotten accustomed to having one big cheese.

Of course that paradigm change that is necessitated by eventual on-grid change will force CCP to cook up a more fluid way of assigning boosters as they should be expected to be near top of primary lists, if only to test tanks and having to manually assign boosters throughout a fight will drive people mad(der).
Another thing that might help on the extreme end of the scale is the Spectrum Breaker, a novel idea when they introed it but it kind of fizzled. Redesign/fix it and add a bonus to its use on CC's, effectively making them immune to pure alpha headshots.

The self same paradigm change is the reason why ALL the CC's should be on roughly equal footing when it comes to damage/application/tanking which is simply not the case with Damnation being the odd one out with even less output than its HAC counterpart but being able to brick itself.

In other words: It is impossible to balance anything to function on the large scale without unbalancing it on all other scales, so paradigms (read: fleet compositions) must be reevaluated and CCP must develop ways/means to ease that shift.

Luckily for CCP the heavy load won't come until links actually are to come on-grid so they have oodles of time to do the napkin dance and sketch out a solution .. but unless we are all willing to go through another CC balance pass when that glorious day arrives the fact that they are coming on-grid should be included in any and all deliberations this time around (all comes down to Dev time as with most things )

Regarding the EHP issue of command ships especially in massive battles, I would suggest the following:

- Squad commanders should get 1-2% HP bonus (shield, armor, hull) for every pilot within his squad
- Wing commanders should get the same for every pilot within his wing
- Fleet commanders should get the same for every pilot within his fleet

So for a 200+ sized fleet this would be quite substantial to the top dog. But since it scales with fleet size it would not be too powerful in small fleets. And this bonus should be tied to the fleet structure, and apply to any ship in a commanding position, not just CS.

I guess it might be a bit tricky to code, especially if you only are to receive bonuses from fleet members on grid and preferrably in a ship (not pod), so that the bonus gets weaker when the fleet gets weaker.

Isn't that the reverse of what you want for balance, I mean the big fleet already has the advantage of being a big fleet making them nearly invincible seems the reverse of what we are wanting here.

Not a jab, just asking for edification.

I am assuming that 200+ sized fleets in most cases would fight other fleets of similar sizes. And when such big fleets are focus firing the CS, it would buy him a few extra seconds at best.

I also proposed extra HP for a reason, as all it does is buy you some time. It doesnt improve your Active tanking capabilities much.

That's nice.

Now do basically the same thing for the Claymore, and you'll end up with a significantly better ship.

Server must be keeping track of who/how many are receiving boosts at any given time for it to assign said bonuses .. just add 0.25-0.50% primary EHP buffer (shield/armour) per ship being boosted ... run a survey every five minutes or whichever is prudent to conserve hamster lives.

Basically use the scaling which is responsible for breaking EHP bonuses when applied "raw" to prevent same.

NB: That is contingent on the way boosters are assigned remaining relatively as is, ie. only one per 'level'.

I love how Fozzie just keeps skirting the issue we bring up.

Really Fozzie

TALK TO US!

I guess you guys just hate boosting so much you dont want anyone to actually use links, despite all the happy posting you guys did about large fleet fights in the past now you are doing everything you can to make command ships into.. I dont know what.

Give us a shield damnation (as in give us a damnation level tank on a shield ship as well)

DONT take away the one command ship that can actually survive in large fleet fights. The more I read about your command ship changes makes me VERY unhappy about my 15.8 million SP in leadership. Whats the point of all that training when I will get headshotted instantly and spend the rest of the fight in station.. every single time.

as to any.. you mad bro?

Yes. I am mad, but I am a girl so not a bro.. so shove it :P

Really, there is no need for both command ships of each race to be a dps monster. A role I think is odd for a command ship but it seems many want it. Fine, let the old field command ships do that, fleet command ships should be.. COMMAND ships.. for fleets. and the only one we can use now is the damnation.. (until you nerf it).. and really.. is that good balance? ONE viable ship.. and no the answer isnt to nerf the damnation, normally I would say.. yes nerfing one ship is better then boosting 3. but in this case if you nerf the damnation it does become useless. Give us the tools to have large fun fleet fights. If you nerf the damnation all you will see is more offgrid stuff (Until you totally remove that then we have to find other ways around the fact that a nerfed damnation is useless).

Really why cant you actually come out here and discuss it with us Fozzie? Explain to us why you feel the damnation should be the only usabable fleet ship (something you said before that you where happy it was the only one) andnow you want to nerf it. Explain yourself or you will see us still being mad at you. Come on Fozzie!! Be a human being and talk to us. We really aren't unreasonable, we WANT to be on field and have fun. But not if we got a HUGE target on our head AND no means to survive it.

We understand boosting is good, too good atm. Which is why it is being toned down, and I dont think anyone has any issues with this. Boosting needs to be fixed. But for the love of the Amarr empire we need some tools to survive more then 2 seconds on grid.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3438123#post3438123

Just leaving this here. Though a few points get some love now it's still my current point of few how they should balance Command Ships.