Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So I've noticed that in the recent "balance" passes, a central theme seems to be giving small, fast, cheap / disposable ships the many of the same offensive attributes as T2 and T3 cruisers. This is a horrible idea that's going to further degrade the ability of solo / small gang PvPers to play this game.

Interceptors are gaining bubble immunity alongside their tackle bonuses. From an EWAR perspective, EAFs are becoming recon ships (but with way better speed / agility / locktime etc). In theory the "tradeoff" you make for getting the point range / bubble immunity / jam strength / whatever of a much larger, slower, more expensive ship is the sacrifice of tanking ability. In practice though, this isn't going to be nearly as relevant of a tradeoff as it appears at first glance.

Here's the problem: say I'm putting together a 5-man gang to go roaming through hostile space. We're going to be far away from friendly stations etc and need to choose a gang format that can handle a great variety of possible encounters. We can consider bringing EAFs to a fight, but in reality it's probably not going to be practical, since EAFs have no tank and will be killed pretty easily by a defending gang. As a small group that needs flexibility, we're forced to take a recon ship instead so our EWAR will actually survive an encounter with hostile resistance.

Now say we're the irritated people on the other end of the gang we just described. We're in our own space and want to kill the little group of HACs and recons that's cruising through our space. We pull EAFs for our EWAR support because we have bigger numbers of people who are playing on a more casual basis that don't want to spend a bunch of money on things like recon ships. We take our 20-40 dudes and roll out to find the roaming gang.

A fight ensues. Guess what happens? Our roaming gang safes up and logs out because they can't skirmish against a considerably bigger gang whose disposable ships do their EWAR jobs better than the roaming gang's recon ships (they have similar EWAR capabilities but are faster and more maneuverable with better locktimes!). The presence of a gaggle of overpowered frigates have made the defense gang just as "sticky" as a gang supported by recon ships, without incurring any of the ISK or SP costs of flying recons. Basically, bringing 3 Hyenas is better than bringing a Huginn-- they're a little more likely to die, but the loss is much more easily absorbed by the unfortunate pilot and your gang ends up with 3x the number of webs and has an easier job getting those webs onto targets. Groups that can easily field large gangs of players are going to love these things! Unfortunately this comes at the expense of people who enjoyed trying to PvP alone or in small groups: they're forced to rely on the same old T2 cruiser hulls while facing the proliferation of new tackling / EWAR ships that they can't outmaneuver or even keep from warping on top of them by using defensive bubbles (in the case of inties).

Recon ships were powerful force multipliers that gave gangs willing to deal with the ISK and skillpoint costs of fielding them a significant advantage on the field. Handing the same advantages to people on a smaller platform with a fraction of those costs is only going to further advantage defenders in player-sov space: the people for whom survivability of individual ships in a fight is not a concern. Historically, the recon ship has been the enemy of the solo / small gang PvPer, but at least they were relatively uncommon. With 30m ISK frigates now filling the same roles, I'm sure it will be rare to see a gang without range-boosted EWAR. So long, skirmish gangs: it's been real.

If I'm fighting your 5 man roaming gang with my 20 man defense gang, then I have every reason to use a recon over an EAF.

Recons haven't been rebalanced yet.

So you are opposed to giving Tech II / Tech III style bonuses to a set of Tech II ships?

I have mixed thoughts....

My original thought was nullified inties is too much... they are getting amazing warp speed changes, and don't need to be nullified to boot.

My original thought on EAF rebalance was pretty much akin to your suggestion...

Now, I'm wonder where the role of Recons will end up, and await to see their balancing plans for these ships. Making EAF's capable of long-range EWAR, but still very weak tank-wise makes these kind of unique, especially if they improve recon surviveability and/or functional range.

As such, I curiously await to see what comes of Recons, and while I agree EAF and Inty changes are too much, they might fit well within the grand picture (that I can't see yet).

As for your suggestion about Recons on a roaming gang.... I don't think the EAF changes will alter much. Not unless they change the average gate spawning radius!

First of all I think you're being a little bit dramatic about this. The EAFs will be given much limited slot layouts compared to the Recon ships, which are still yet to be Tiericided if they even need it. (maybe they could make them all immune to Jam and sensor damp)

Personally, i much prefer DictNull on an Interceptor than a Tech III ship. In fact i think that Only Interceptors should have DictNull.

It is an extremely specific ability that is not shared with any other ship and it fits the Interceptor's role perfectly.

Tech III ships are too powerful, tanky, mobile and versatile to also be granted DictNull. And not only that but they can also fit a covert cloak and covert cyno and use a Blop bridge. Tech III ships really need to be balanced(nerfed). They should be able to decently fill multiple roles simultaneously. Not be the best ship to fill a multitude of roles and then have some unique roles of it's own as well.

And before you go on about the price, there's 2 things you should know. You cannot balance a ship based on cost. And the cost of a Tech III ship is arbitrary. It costs what it costs because people will pay that much for it. There is a never ending demand for Tech III ships because they are the end all be all of ships currently. If they get nerfed the price will go down based on their demand.

Personally I don't think interdiction nullification should be a thing on any ship at any price point. I think T3s would be pretty well balanced if you took the nullifiers away, though. Covert fits are basically useless for direct combat and have smaller tackle bonuses than recon ships in exchange for more tank. If you took the nullifiers away they'd pretty much be a wash compared to recons IMHO: more tank, less range, way more expensive. Nullifiers are BS.

Lastly, what is with people constantly asserting that ships that don't get flown much "will be cheap due to lack of demand"? Before the blackops buffs, blops BS were flown by something like 0.8% of EVE players. There was essentially no demand for them at all. Did prices ever go below ~550m? No, because nobody is going to systematically produce ships and sell them at a loss. I keep telling people that a ship that is expensive to make and highly unpopular will never be "cheap": you'll just see very few people producing them. They'll still sell for above what they cost to make, and demand for T2 components is not going to go anywhere because one kind of T2 ship is unpopular, so there's your price floor.

@Gizznitt: I agree with you on inties (they already warp stupidly fast under the proposed changes, and they are in the best position in the game to burn out of a field of anchorable bubbles covering a gate. I'm sure that the time it takes to burn out of some anchored bubbles is less than the amount of time it takes most people to d-scan a target down, so I'm not sure why people think inties "need" to be able to warp through bubbles.

I realize we don't have CCP's plans for recons sitting in front of us, but based on CCP's balancing history I think it's pretty safe to conclude that the changes to recons will be minimal. Their usual line is "this ship seemed to be doing just fine already, so we basically didn't touch it." As it stands, the only recon I forsee them making a meaningful change to is the Pilgrim, and that will probably just consist of giving it the neut range bonus from the Curse that it should have had all along. I'd be shocked if we saw CCP do anything significant to recons as a whole. I bet they'll change even less than HACs did.

Re: roaming gangs, think of the kinds of ships you would typically see in a kitchen sink homeland defense fleet... battlecruisers, cruisers, and T1 + T2 frigates is what I'm pretty used to seeing. EAFs haven't been used much in the past because they're awful (they're really easy to kill and don't offer much over a fleet interceptor in terms of tackling ability), but it's not uncommon at all to see a casual defense fleet with a couple of dictors, some inties, and some assault frigates. Recon ships are a much less regular occurrence in these sorts of gangs (which makes sense, since they're usually sort of haphazard groups and people probably don't want to risk expensive ships that may not qualify for reimbursements from their corps when used outside fleet operations). This meant that cheap, casual gangs often didn't have long-range tackle.

Inties, AFs, and the like are somewhat manageable obstacles for a roaming gang composed of a handful of T2 cruiser hulls: they prevent you from diving in close and trying to kill big targets (since going close would result in you being held down by the tacklers while the big ships rip you apart), but you could at least come in at range and attempt to kite frigate hulls off the main group and dispose of them separately. If EAFs get the kind of changes CCP are proposing, what are you going to do with your post-tracking-enhancer-nerf cruiser hulls? I've got an account open on SiSi that only has EAFs trained to level 4, and it's still telling me I'm gonna get a 48km unheated, pre-link T2 point on a Keres and 35km webs on a Hyena-- not to mention the 200+ km jams possible on the Kitsune now... (my shoddy-skills character with no range rigs or augmentations of any kind-- just EAF IV and a T2 jammer manages a 78km ECM optimal... wtc!). You know how much damage your Vagabond is going to do to a frigate pointing you from 50km away (while probably being repped by a Scythe or two)? I have a phrase that provides the correct answer to this question, but it's not repeatable on these polite forums.

Basically, given the adoption rates for other kinds of T2 frigates, I think EAFs in their proposed flavor are going to give every casual gang the tackling capabilities of a recon-supported gang, and I don't think that's going to be good for the game.