Player Features and Ideas Discussion

No, this is still power-creep, and it's crowding the battleship space which is already pretty crowded.

Not an innate boost to the rep amount, no, but the resists are improving, which works out to an effective bonus to rep amount (by reducing the incoming damage).

Except that that's not the case for PvE. Two of the Marauders are getting a massive boost to tanking most missions, two others are SOL in that respect.

This is not particularly balanced nor does it make current Marauder owners very happy.

I am glad to here you are looking into our feedback, I just want to emphasize the fact that taking away the rep bonus on the marauders to give them a web bonus is really not helping the in the style you want the ship to take.

You seem to want the marauder to go into the direction of applying damage at farther ranges and having a very large burst active tank, but adding a web velocity bonus is not, in my humble opinion, helping that direction. realistically you'd fit a T2 or faction web which would give you 10-15km of range without boosts. how does that help the marauder with applying damage farther?

Granted Kronos and Paladin players love their webs, but i have never understood why you would need the webs...what was the gameplay factor for them in PvE?

Whatever you do, please be very explicit about the purpose behind the ships' next iteration bonuses... that is to say, what roles it will play and why its huge isk and sp cost is warranted.

Having it applicable for a wide range of applications.... does lead to balance concerns. If it has wide enough range to be readily compared to pirate, then the marauders sp requirement is not being taken into account. Personally, i would be happy with marauders being generally, if not always, slightly better than pirate. (it seems to me that sp should be more important than isk, this coming from someone who has enough isk)

Otherwise they need to be REALLY good at something. We need to have a reason to use a marauder over using a pirate ship as it seems the pirate will still be generally better for most applications....

Theres quite a few T2 ships that can be defined by modules
Stealth Bomber, HIC, Interdictor, BLOPS for example

I'm not suggesting that people who already trained for current Marauders would have their SP re-allocated to my proposed Marauders. I'm merely suggesting that the name and class description that Marauders currently have be applied to a new kind of T2 battleship. The current Marauders would then be re-named / described, and all skillpoints currently invested in Marauders would be transferred to the re-named PvE battleships during the patch (IE if you currently have Marauders V, you would end up with Whatever-the-new-BS-class-is V and would continue flying the same ships under a new class name).

So, really all I'm proposing is that the current Marauders (which are not terribly good at their PvE niche-role anyway) be re-named and made to fit their existing role better. As for "what Marauders have historically been," who cares? Historically, what they've been is bad ships. It's time to move on from that and begin a bold new chapter of useful PvE battleshipping.

With regard to "waiting" to add a new class of T2 ship, my question is, "why?" If the current crop of ships doesn't adequately address the kinds of usage models the players want catered to, then the selection of ships should be changed. Qualms like this haven't stopped CCP from re-vamping other ship lines from scratch during the tiericide-- noone suggested that CCP rebalance the Hurricane first and then focus on the Tornado and Cyclone, for example. Trying to cater to all the usage models people want catered to with two T2 battleship hulls would require abominations such as the current blackops ships or Ytterbium's initial proposal here (IE ships that try to specialize in too many things and end up being bad at all of them), while only really addressing one usage model (by making Marauders into a good PvE ship and leaving things at that) just leaves current blackops BS users out in the cold for another development cycle regardless of how they use their ships (since the current blops aren't especially good at combat or gang logistics). Addressing all usage models in one, well-considered pass is clearly the superior approach here, provided CCP have got the man-hours to do so by winter-time (which I think they do, since it's really not all that difficult to tweak ship stats and the required art assets for the PvE ships have apparently already been delivered).

Regardless, I think that given what my proposed new ships would do, it makes perfect sense to put the new battleships into their new classes (Yet-to-be-named "PvE" class, Marauder, Blackops) rather than putting my proposed "new Marauders" and blackops battleships under the same heading, since they would be specialized in very different roles with the only common denominator being that they both have jump drives and are fairly mobile. Blackops with their covops cloaks and logistical focus should form one category, while Marauders with their inability to warp cloaked and perform logistical tasks (and DPS-oriented bonuses) should fall into their own category.

you said it yourself that 2 would be good for rats, while 2 would not...those other 2 are better at omni tanking, which is good for other things. And yes going from one race to another causes a huge problem with weapons training, that there is no doubt.

Except that Ytterbium's initial point, that having a forced pure PvE ship class is contrary to Eve's emergent nature, is correct. There is absolutely no reason why we can't have tanky T2 battleships that deal a bit less damage but good projection, and the Bastion skill and have them have at least some PvP use even if they're built for PvE.

As for why wait? How about because we have three ship classes to balance and we shouldn't be shoving more ships into an already crowded space until we've determined that there's already room for them in that space. This won't be accomplished until the existing ships have been rebalanced.

For reference here's Ytterbium on where the re-balancing effort stands.

New ships should at the least come after Pirate Battleships and Black-Ops, and for preference after Capitals and T3s as well. If there's space in the meta at that point then it would be a good idea to look at filling it, but not in the middle of re-balancing all the other ships in the same class, that just leads to "but I want MY favorite class to be like that one!!!" which is already what we're seeing a bit of here. Everyone wants Marauders to fit *their* purposes rather than saying "okay, these can be good at Y if something else is good at X".

Plus if I'm reading you correctly your entire argument is that you don't like that these ships are called Marauders... I'm sorry, argue for a renaming *after* they're done balancing things. Personally I'd rather this stay as a thread about the Marauders, not one about you pushing for a new ship class that you want to use the name.

Except that you can still tank the other two for omni-damage fairly easily, they're just even better at most missions, which is historically what the Marauders have been great at.

I wouldn't mind so much if they weren't also losing the local repair bonus on the hull. At that point you're flat nerfing the mission tank of two of these hulls while giving the other two a massive buff.

The full T2 resists are great for Incursions and Wormholes, but the loss of local repair capacity hurts the other two for missions massively.

I want to be clear here, I am not arguing for the full T2 resists to go away. If CCP thinks those are balanced then by all means, I'll love flying a Kronos in Incursions, but I also think they need to keep the local repair bonus so the Paladin and Vargur don't get screwed over for regular missioning since that's most of what these hulls are already doing.