Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is becoming a real problem. Right now it's very apparent that for almost every role in large-scale fleet PvP, Gallente ships are vastly superior to any other racial option to an almost ridiculous extent.

First, you have the sentry drone doctrine with assigned drones. Whether this is overpowered or not has been done to death, so I won't talk about it other than mentioning that if this does turn out to be the "best" option, it still locks you into pure Gallente ships.

Now, when you're talking about what you're going to use as the "line" battleship that comprises the majority of your fleet, the Megathron is so much better than any other option it's frankly ridiculous. There's a huge list of reasons why:

1. Fits a full rack of 425mm rails, MWD, injector, and an 8-slot plated EHP tank without a single fitting mod. You can't do this with artillery, and you sure as hell can't do it with lasers. It also can fire all its guns indefinitely without touching the injector, again unlike lasers. These factors combine to give the Mega the best tank of any fleet BS, even the ones with resist bonuses.

2. Since the probe changes have made sniping at extreme range non-viable, it outdamages and out-tracks the optimal range-bonused BSes at all relevant ranges. The only existing BS that outdamages it is the Abaddon and it can't fire its guns for more than two minutes.

3. Is by far the most bomb-resistant BS. In addition to its 8-slot tank, it has a signature radius of 380m. With skirmish links, that means it's taking less than 75% normal damage from bombs. The Abaddon, Maelstrom, and Rokh, by comparison, have 500m (460m for Mael) sigs and take full bomb damage even with skirmish links. This advantage is huge, bombs are absurdly effective in dismantling BS fleets and the Mega is by far the best at surviving these attacks.

The Apoc and Rokh do less damage than the Megathron at all relevant ranges. In addition, the Apoc and Rokh both have vastly inferior tanks, because the Apoc needs fitting mods to fit a full rack of guns and the Rokh combines a 500m sig with the inability to fit more than a 5-slot tank after MWD and injector. The Apoc also needs to run the injector just to fire its guns for more than two minutes.

The Abaddon and Maelstrom compare more favorably, but are still very inferior. They both have huge sigs like the Rokh and get eaten up by bombs.

The Maelstrom has worse DPS than the Mega and an absolutely crap tank in comparison due to its slot layout and needing fitting mods for artillery. It does have alpha, but in a 100+ size fleet a fleet of Maelstroms will just massively overkill their targets, and then have to wait for the huge cycle time to shoot again. A 100+ size fleet of Megas can alpha four times as many targets in the same timeframe. The Abaddon seems OK, it has more DPS and a tank that's not that much worse because of the resist bonus, but as mentioned before it can only fire its guns for two minutes before having to inject. After 5 minutes on the field, it can't do anything. Less if it needs to run the MWD.

Ok, so Gallente has the best BS. Lets look at the next-most common ship used, the Logistics. And well, the Oneiros is again vastly superior to the Guardian. The Oneiros can fit a 1600mm plate and still cap-stably run four large remote reppers with no help from any other ship and with logistics IV. The Guardian needs to cap-chain to run four large remote reppers and it needs Logistics V to do it, a Logistics IV Guardian cap-chain of one large projector on each Guardian can't even cap-stably run three large remote reps, let alone four. Remember you need to fit an ECCM to a Guardian in the second mid or any ECM just completely destroys the viability of your whole chaining setup. The Oneiros doesn't need ECCM because jamming 1 Oneiros only disables that one ship, rather than threatening the viability of the whole cap chain.

What about anti-support? Oh right, sentry drones make the best anti-support and that means you're locked into pure Gallente here too. Seriously the only role where Gallente doesn't totally dominate is the off-grid boosters, it's absurd.

Do thou remember ye olde days where Tachy-Apocs ruled the endless skies?

In fairness to him, that IS tribe. >_>

So 7 425mm rails is a "full rack"?



Well if this is true then you don't need 100+size fleet of Maels to be effective. Maybe instead of having 1 giant fleet of Maels overkilling 1 target at a time you could have 4 fleets of maels with enough ships to alpha 1 target each. Or maybe even a hit and run mael fleet that warps in, alphas a target and warps out during it's cycle down time. I dunno if that'd be any fun though. Might be too much for F1 pushers to handle. And might be just a bit too slow at killing too. But if the number of ships required to alpha something is low enough it might make a great support fleet.

Since I started eve in early 2009 the dominant battleship fleet doctrines have been:

- Sentry domis and 170km DDD tanked rail megas and beam apocs
- alpha arty tempests
- alpha arty maelstroms
- hellcat baddons/geddons
- rail rokhs
- Sentry domis and rail megas

Its the ciiiiiircle of life!

Also, lol at thinking sig is even a factor at the typical ranges and velocities these ships engage at, maybe check an eft dps graph once in a while.

did he just say that the oneiros was better than the guardian? I almost fell off my chair!

Alpha arty Tempests.

Sails and cannons!

Arrrrr!

Minmatar wants to see your math on that.

Not that the OP is true at all anyway, the post is based primarily on speculation and thinking that large-scale necessarily is pure BS-v-BS fleets.

Balancing solely on large scale battles is a fail to start. Balancing should take into more parts of EVE than just null sex players in huge fights.

this....


gallente has a liked fleet bs now.....the circle of eve has finally come back to them finally. The circle will move on again at some point.


1.1 may change things.

If not that...1.2 or the winter expansion.

Then next summers expansion.

then next summers 1.1 patch


Welcome to eve. Give gallente their 15 minutes.....nice to see them out and about. Something will give amarr their 15 minutes again at some point. Then minmatar....etc.