Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'm about 20 days away from finishing my training for the Golem and you dumb b@$tards are trying to change the role of the damn ship? I mean seriously? Make a new class of BS for this ridiculous bull$h1t. A$$h013s

What made me worry the most is CCP's wild swing between bonuses and roles in the matter of days. CCP do you know what you are doing?

They also keep the resistances they have right now instead of gaining full Tech2 resists, otherwise the combination with the bastion module would be quite over the top.

They also are receiving full Tech2 resists.

Crimminy still with the "waah waah Marauders will suck at level 4's with Bastion and MJD".

Here's the thing: MJD + Bastion might not suit your style of doing level 4's as you do them now (slowly motor to out gate while blam-blam) and you may need to adjust your play style to utilise them propelry...but how is that 'ruining' the ship class for its supposed 'intended role'?

The idea with designing a ship class should be to give it capabilities and let it loose and see where it ends up. People thought the Tengu was so-so for level 4's, and then they discovered the 100MN fits, and the price of CNR's dipped because you could get equal performance and way too much tank from a Tengu. This shows that what you may think a ship is intended for gets warped and twisted around by the players who find novel and unique ways to use them.

I thought the MJD was a fairly pointless module. Suddenly, there's people mumbling the 3 minute cooldown timer hurts them because they have to jump away from Level 4 mission rats twice which takes them 6 minutes to get back to gate.

Oh, hey, you can do it in 1/3rd the time with a Marauder with the Bastion mode! zomg!

The problem with the line of thinking that marauders are intended for PVE in level 4s (or as now, warped by Incursion bear whining) is that this leads to revisions and rebalances that further force the ship into what "the community' sees as an intended role.

Sure, this may be true of HICs and Dictors and Logi of all kinds, as these are very specialised ships. However, all other T2 combat ships have ship bonuses which give them special abilities and people automagically come up with interesting uses. Sentry ishtar ratting? Check. Blops running 8/10's? Check. Stealth bombers doing level 4 FW missions? Check. Soloing level 4's in Retributions? Check. Oh. My. God. CCP better buff these ships so they are more effective at their intended role of missioning!

Sarcasm in case you missed it.

The iteration 1 marauder changes gave us a niche PVP ship which would solo small POSs (yeah baby), Dickstars (hahaha), totally ruin the lamest "PVP" in EVE (being docking games), allow donut punching of lowsec gate camps (huehuehue). The problem? You can't run incursions. But you CAN destroy Level 4's. Well, shucks.

iteration 2 is a compromise which barely reduces the Marauder's use in PVE, assuming you can figure out MJD missioning style and aren't prone to ridiculously overtanking your ships for missions because you want your AFK Rattler back. It really only increases their use back to slightly worse than pirate BS for incursions. not that anyone uses them in incursions now, nor will they afterwards.

What it does do is destroys its use in PVP in any conceivable fashion. Docking games are back on because if you are going to undock a marauder, you may as well undock a Vindicator. Yay, thumbs up!

Lowsec gate camps won't have to worry about these things permatanking them while their gangmates destroy the pirates. Your sniper mode Marauder is gone, the 80% web being about as useful as bulls with DD boobs.

Whereas before i was looking forward to dropping one into harms way, assured that if I calculated right I'd have a good 10-15 minutes of fun and get a few kills baiting people, now its just a more expensive and less useful navy Faction BS equivalent with a "kill me now" module and no utility.

Be brave, CCP Ytterbium. Maybe fiddle the Bastion resist bonus to being a free DCU, or 5% across the board non-penalised. Keep the active rep bonus so you can actually tank outside Bastion mode (while, eg, hoofing it to gate), and tank in the 2-3K range while in it. You will then have a small gang or even solo boat able to punch hard, tank stronk and be a PITA.

Structure the other bonuses to actually work together to make a formidable long range platform which can protect itself from numpty ceptor pilots, idiots who blow their sig and can't tank 1000-1200 DPS and can't rid themselves of tackle. Leave the web bonus out, it will then be the achilles heel and force marauder pilots to work hard on their fits to counter the inevitable hero tackle Incursus of doom.

Iteration 1 Marauders, piloted by smart people with good gangs who pick their fights were going to be a handful. Well, guess what, an 850 DPS 280K EHP rail Proteus is a handful right now and you don't have any "kill me now" module on T3's like you do with iteration 2.

If you get your local active tanking improvement via resists, that also makes the ship more proficient at receiving remote reps (yes, I know that the current proposal has them un-RR-able in Bastion mode, but personally I think the Bastion module is a mistake, and resists will still apply to receiving RRs outside the mode anyway). If the goal is to avoid making the ship overpowered for fleet scenarios while still having a very strong tank for solo PvE, a baller resist profile is not the way to go.

I do agree with you though that T1 BS handle Incursions etc just fine and should the the optimal ship for that purpose.

Poor example: Attack BCs are actually an ideal example of a very flexible skirmish ship because their combination of excellent agility, speed, scan-resolution, and damage projection allows them to quickly lock up targets of all sizes and apply damage to them while leveraging their excellent mobility to dictate range and mitigate tracking problems. While attack BCs technically aren't T2 hulls, they might as well be-- they're definitely a role-specialized ship that excels at one thing (small-scale PvP) while being fairly useless for PvE (now that anoms have been rebalanced to include smaller NPCs) and having only a very limited niche role in fleet operations (as parts of small sniper wings). I would be pretty comfortable applying this level of specialization to T2 battleships.

Well, I suppose we'll never know which dev was responsible for which aspects of things, but at the end of the day it's Ytterbium's posts that I tend to find poorly thought out. Don't get me wrong-- it's not like I have a massive hadron for all of Fozzie or Rise's ideas, but at least theirs are hit-or-miss rather than miss-or-miss.

Sneaky relative to T1, yes. My idea is to have Marauders have bonuses to the use of normal cloaks in much the same way that Blackops currently do, while transitioning Blackops hulls over to covert ops cloaks (making them the last word in BS-class sneakiness as opposed to "somewhat sneaky").

Um, I'd just like to point out that CCP have a track-record of hiring non-game designers as game designers for EVE. I believe that seven years of experience playing this terrible game counts at least as much as a professional background when it comes to devising solutions to EVE-specific problems. IIRC Fozzie or Rise (I can't remember which) has a degree in political science-- apparently this doesn't stop you from taking them seriously. They were hired because of their extensive EVE experience and general loveability!

If CCP would hire me, I'd accept in a second-- and then you could take me seriously too!

70k?
scorch on a pulse apoc gets 90km. then add the bastion 25% to optimal/fall off and u have a 135km pulse paladin.

yer lookin at like 200km tachyon paly.

Ships are designed to perform a task, or execute a tactic. Kiter, brawler, logistics, tackler, booster are roles. Marauder is a role, and it's a new role with no existing meta in game- there are no functional T2 general combat battleships in game currently. This is what CCP is trying to do, and if they succeed, people will adopt it, metas emerge and then also EVE happens- ship finds other uses.

I'm mostly unconcerned with high base resists as long as they have lower damage. If a T1 Battleship hull can do more raw damage for less SP then Null will still be stocking their fleets with those rather than Marauders. It also helps if the overall base EHP is lower to make up for it too. As I said though, that's up to CCP. Personally I'm a little wary of T2 resist Battleships in PvP but at least as long as they don't have innate resist bonuses it can't go as ridiculous as the Vulture and Damnation but on a Battleship scale.

I should also rephrase a bit. I don't think these should do *better* than current incursion ships. I would like to be able to use them personally since I can't fly any of the Pirate Battleships.

That's more focused then flexible. It's just a very good combination of attributes that make for powerful and cost-effective ships when used right. In other environments though they get taken apart in seconds with the right counter. They basically trade HP for damage and the ability to shoot smaller things for mobility. It's a very good but focused combo with some interesting trade-offs.

Ideas like these aren't created in a vacuum. They don't lock Fozzie, Rise, or Ytterbium in a box and tell them they can't come out until the ships are balanced. All three of these people and several more we don't get to interact with are working together on these bouncing ideas and testing things. If you don't like Ytterbium's posts then... oh well? Could be just bad luck that he's adjusted things in ways you don't like (I'm rather fond of the Navy Battlecruisers though, which was one of his). Overall though I was rather fond of his first iteration on Marauders. These are PvE focused ships and the original idea was something new and interesting that deviated from old established bonuses.

Again, still a Black-Ops ship, not a Marauder. Marauders at present have absolutely nothing to do with cloaking, Black-Ops do. Plus CCP stated way back that they were thinking of splitting the class into support and combat ships. Personally I don't think that's likely to still happen but I do think your concept fits better there than it does under some new ship class. A Covert/Improve cloaking split on Black-Ops hulls could have interesting implications.

Either way it's a new ship class and has very little to do with rebalancing the existing ship class. If you want to push for re-naming them then by all means go ahead, if only to get rid of people arguing that balance should match the definition of a word.

"PVP" and "PVE" are not roles and "PVE ship" or "PVP ship" doesn't mean anything.
And on top of that, designing a ship for PVE would just end up in the state marauders currently are- **** ships that nobody flies, because pirate BS, ships not designed for a ********, non-existing arbitrary misconception of a role are better in PVE activities

there are no functional T2 general combat battleships in game currently