Player Features and Ideas Discussion

After reading some comments and testing the Vargur especially (because eff hybrids and missiles), here is a small recollection of what people is asking.

1. Make the ship more mobile - the speed, mass and align time nerfs are making marauders a bit too slow and stationary, making sites slower.
2. Increase the usability of the ship outside of Bastion - buffer, resists, coupled with the low mobility, makes the ship rather weak outside of Bastion.
3. Bastion combat buff - have bastion apply extra tracking or any other buff that would allow better applied dps.
4. More drones - larger drone bay and extra bandwidth, or just the first one, as the ships have very limited drone capabilities.
5. Marauders are useless in PVP - hitting Bastion and then using MJD to escape is effectively 70 seconds of complete vulnerability to other ships
6. Paladin and Kronos are too vulnerable to neuts - so true, you get dried extremely fast and reps/guns and escape all rely heavily on the cap. Make marauders less vulnerable or immune to neuts while in Bastion.
7. Bonus to hull reppers as well as shield and armor reppers - this is actually not a bad idea. I tried a hull repping Kronos, foolishly thinking it would work. Long story short, it didn't.
8. The hull should not be useless outside of Bastion - have proper T2 resists and no resist bonus on Bastion or at least the prior T2 resists that command ships used to have and a buffer bonus. Other solution is to give marauders extra buffer (they have none basically) and let Bastion handle the bonus resists.

Honestly I see all marauders more like sniper platforms. Web bonuses make no sense on such a ship to be quite honest. However, as sniper platforms, they are extremely vulnerable to tacklers without a proper compliment of drones (at the very least 75m3 of drone bay). A smartbomb bonus would not fit on a PVE ship, as you'd get massively CONCORD'ed every time you use it lol.

As for PVP, I'm not much of a PVP'er, but this ship works well on a small gang or gate camp. Sit out of gate guns on low, or at your optimal in null, and just blast stuff away. However, the 70 seconds it takes to reposition the ship is a extremely long window of opportunity to take it down. While in Bastion, marauders tank awesomely well, but Bastion cycles, resists drop, and the slowness, little buffer and rather mediocre "T2" resists make it a prime target for others. 60 seconds of burning/jumping to it and positioning, and 10 second window to lock and scram so it doesn't go away. This either forces another 60 seconds of Bastion and stationary or slowboating away, which won't happen. RR immunity also doesn't help, the 1bill sniper platform is stuck there to die if caught.

As I said on other post, it feels like the marauders are now incredibly unforgiving for a bad position or piloting. Nothing bad with punishing bad decisions, but they get easily killed if caught out of position, no matter how many reps you have. The lack of buffer makes them melt pretty quickly out of bastion. On that note, I tried MWD+MJD on the Vargur, and although it worked well, I'm using 2 mids to achieve actually escape, on a shield ship.

These ships are mostly PVE oriented, and that;s fine, but not all sites are designed with 100km ranges for the MJD to actually work well. So options are either constant refit (loss of time), reshipping (expensive, wasteful) or slowboating based on each mission (loss of time). This basically means, slowboat to location, Bastion-up, and hit targets, wait for end of cycle, hit gate, rinse and repeat.

I feel like Bastion should not be a requirement on an already skill intensive ship (AWU5, battleship 5, T2 guns, marauders 5, high energy thingy 5, etc). Bastion should play more like a dive-into-role button. Forcing the ship to be immune to ewar, stationary and improving on the reps and range is all fine, but don't force Bastion to be the be-all-end-all solution to a rather weak ship. Marauders should be able to stand up on their own, alone, as decent ships without the aid of a dedicated module that either makes or breaks the ship.

Good one!

why do people want to make marauder OP? its not like ccp is making the marauder useless. chances are if you didnt like the marauder before, you wouldnt like it after bastion either. people who complaint about pvp well i doubt you were using a marauder in pvp before the bastion . So how can you say pvp will be useless when no one hardly ever use it for pvp to begin with?

I don't think players necessarily want it OP, just more functional without Bastion.

I personally would like to see the paladin get something like

200% tractor beam range/speed
7.5% range
5% capacitor/ Level
10% rate of fire/Level
10% repair effectiveness

along with the MJD bonus and T2 resists and more HP would make it far more useful and more of a threat. and then modify bastion to make it not overpowered.

this is just an idea im throwing out there, exact bonus % could be modified to balance. i just want to see the Marauders become Large HACs and become a threat on the battlefield instead of a " oh free lunch" or an uber brick that cant kill crap.

This.

Tested Kronos and Golem on lvl 5 missions and the energy towers sucked me dry no time flat. Bit pointless for the bastion at that point. This also leads to it being even more useless in PvP. Bastion up, get nueted, no more tank, die.

Neuts need to be reworked to be under EWar as opposed to it being categorized under engineering, but at the same time, wouldn't remote cap transfer work as well in theory? If not, then what's the damn point? I'll do some testing and post back.

There needs to be a way to shut these things down for smaller gangs remember

All you have to do is get under their guns.
Hence the removal of web bonus....

Their weakness is weak tracking...
You can get a pirate bs under their guns and orbit to reduce tracking and tank the all day long..


Edit...
Not to mention they're immobile...
If you can't take them down, just leave... they're not going anywhere...

As this was brought up in another thread... since we're nerfing the warp speed of battleships in Rubicon, can we give them some kind of inherent warp strength so people will actually fly them out of high-sec? Give the T1s +1, Faction +2 and Marauders +3. I'd put a warp core on it but since CCP saw fit to give Marauders another high-slot instead...

I agree with what's said. If we're not allowing ANY assistance, why should we allow neuting? These ships have an extremely high reliance on their caps. When Bastion'ed, one is too vulnerable to neuts, tank requires cap to work, and in the case of the paladin and kronos, to shoot. Since we're immobile, it's quite a flaw that we can get capped out entirely and become sitting target practice...

After some more tessting with the Vargur, I like it, quite a bit. I'd just add some extra shield HP on it and -forcebly have to rely on bastion- or give me proper T2 resists. Most T2 hulls have good resistances, but low HP. Why do Marauders get ever-so-slightly extra resists and no HP? We're getting the worst of both worlds and compensating with yet another "gimmick", the Bastion module.

EDIT: Also, if Bastion is here to stay on it's current iteration, might as well give us a T2 version of it too, like Siege Modules! 40% resists accross, 40% to optimal and falloff, and 150% to shield boosting, while also giving the ship added tracking 15%? (other option is to make the hull usable standalone and Bastion as an added thing)