Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Here's a very simple take on pirate ships. "What you would expect them to be." Possibly a reasonable starting point for a rebalancing, or at least one that should be considered?


Premises

• Pirate ships are supposed to be better than faction ships
• NPC pirate rats can be described as "equivalent to their nemesis faction ships that use ewar along conventional weapons".

Solution, TL;DR
Make pirate ships better faction ships that incentivize the use of ewar along conventional weapons.
(end of TL;DR)

This would simply make pirate ships in player hands what you see in NPC hands, and what you could, in a lot of sense, expect. However, the specific solution I propose here is a bit more refined: incentivizing the use of ewar and making the ships better can be done in one simple step by adding an utility midslot and ewar bonus on the hull of a bog standard faction ship.

The extra midslot can be used for all sorts of things including tank, ewar, sensors, damage projection, you name it. This adds variety: where the current pirate BS are beelined towards an identifiable niche by design, the new pirate ships would be just faction ships with more fitting options, including strong ewar.

What I mean by the current niche being identifiable is: you now know that the rattlesnake is tanky with drones, the machariel is fast with autocannons/artillery, the vindicator hurts and webs, the blood ships neut, the sansha ships are laserboats with shield. This proposal would bring variety and true fitting options: you can either expect the new pirate ship to have ewar capability OR he could have fitted extra tank OR a dualprop OR sniping computers OR... with the utility midslot. He could be an EWAR tanking mofo with severe dps, severe ewar but a noticeable lack of balls in not tanking conventionally for a fair hull punch contest.


The proposed ship lineup draft
"Take a faction ship stats core, add utility slot and ewar"

Angel: (fast with lots of utility, TP or web bonus)

Machariel is a tempest fleet issue with an extra midslot and TP bonus (TeFI needs a buff to agility while at it)

Cynabal is a stabber fleet issue with an extra midslot and TP bonus

Dramiel is a firetail with an extra midslot and web bonus

Serpentis: (notice that web bonus is gone, but you can fit another web in the utility mid)

Vindicator is a megathron navy issue with an extra midslot and damp bonus

Vigilant is a thorax navy issue with an extra midslot and damp bonus

Daredevil is a comet with an extra midslot and damp bonus

Gurista: (suppressive ECM, missile range)

Rattlesnake is a scorpion navy issue with an extra midslot rolled into stronger hull stats and an ECM bonus

Gila is a caracal navy issue with an extra midslot and an ECM bonus

Worm is a hookbill with an extra midslot and an ECM bonus

Sansha: (wins sniper/kiter wars by range and TD)

Nightmare is an apocalypse navy issue with an extra midslot and TD bonus

Phantasm is an omen navy issue with an extra midslot and TD bonus

Succubus is a slicer with an extra midslot and TD bonus

Blood: These fit the intended role, neutralizing ships with decent turret dps.


Bonus strenghts could scale by ship class to make ewar appealing even for battleships. Example follows, numbers drafted off the top of my head and arbitrary:
Frigates have 50%, cruisers 75%, battleships 100% efficiency bonus to their ewar in the sense of "how many unbonused modules does one bonused module replace". Thus, a machariel would have 200% efficiency target painters meaning a whopping 2 TP's in the slot of one, or 4 TP's in the slot of two. Similiarly, Nightmare TD's would shut down gunboats single handedly, being the equivalent of 2 unbonused ones.

"every boat is a base faction BS, every boat gets a racial ewar bonus +1 mid"

base faction BS listed

Edit: clarified OP

Some individual ships in that group look interesting but on the whole I would say it is a net loss for diversity.

Au natural????? Like, no shaving/waxing? I don't think I can get behind that at all.

edited for clarity

OH god...oh god...oh god...please, don't **** the nightmare this way =(

I argue it would be a net gain for diversity, as you would replace the current predictable, streamlined niche pirate "roles" with an utility slot and even a strong fitting branch in ewar.

You could for example take the new nightmare and just fit more tank on it to make it a better fleet ship in general, OR to fit a tracking computer along the napoc core range bonus to make it a 245km sniper, OR to fit TD to make it disrupt enemy fleet while dishing out the damage. You could even armor tank it with a rack of TD's along decent damage basis.

Now the nightmare has pretty much two options for fleet stuff: mid range projector or sniper range specialist.

Nightmare would be rather good at fleet stuff like this. The napoc doctrine has been around for a while, now imagine napocs that cost more but bring bonused TD's or even more tracking computer damage projection to the field.

Note that the new nightmare would be armor tank oriented by this category.

90% webs have not been suggested for marauders by CCP
82% webs, yes. Difference is almost double the efficiency.
The post specifically explains that 90% webs are considered over the top by CCP.

Blood lineup is well arguable to put the web bonus into good use, and IMHO the ships are pretty fine as they are. They are the only pirate faction doing the expected thing in the context of the proposal. As is, I've left them untouched in the OP.

Angels should lore wise and gameplay wise have a good use for the strong web bonus and/or the TP bonus. TP allows better artillery kiting by painting the target bigger for long range guns, web allows closing in and orbiting fast (as the angel NPC's like to do). Both bonuses would best suit angels.

For the purpose of the OP, I provide the very strict general guidelines for making pirate faction ships and the reasons to consider these as a possible starting point. Details can be further iterated, for example serpentis would definitely need some work.

An 8% difference isn't necessarily huge, depending on the speed of the webbed hull, as for angels that would a very appropriate bonus because of their bonuses pushing them towards a kiting role, however most people would be unwilling to lose damage or range for application, especially in cases where application isn't an issue, as for serpentis, the ships are geared towards brawling, which is why falloff is bonused instead of optimal, and why the rats try to get so close.