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You have to hand it to the devs responsible on this current attack on PvE.

It is quite insidious, and most people have not clued in how bad it is.

So let's examine the nerfs:

1. Drone damage a shell of what it was. With the NPC AI, introduced by the same Pandemic Legion dev who is working on wrecking Marauders, all small drones are insta-popped. By shrinking the drone bandwidth 67%, sentry drones, which you could pull in instantly, are a thing of the past. Thanks CCP, now I have a bay that holds 10 small drones, so when I lose 4 or 5, it only costs me a couple million every site, and I only have to dock for more every couple sites. And yeah, I ran sites on TQ and watched my drones evaporate 10 km from my ship when going after frigs. And lets not even talk about how a sentry drone applies damage 4 seconds after a target is selected, while a small drone has to enter MwD, move, then decelerate, before applying damage.

2. The warp speed nerf to BS's adds 33% to T2 BS's, and 46% to T1 BS's, when traversing 50 AU, according to the dev blog charts. Newsflash, it is far worse than that. It took me 28 minutes to move 16 jumps in a Paladin 2 days ago on Sisi. That won't affect PvE income...no, not at all, because every mission or incursion always occurs in the system you are in currently.

3. The removal of the web bonus..what can I say....wow, just wow. See CCP, sometimes, contrary to what you and your fanboi army espouse, NPC frigs WILL get under your guns, and you will be in the middle of the wonderful bastion mode, and not jumping anywhere. So now you have an elite frig scramming you, and you completely ******, because you can't slow it down enough to shoot it with your guns, and the NPC AI quickly realizes that your drones are doing more damage than your guns, and well...see point #1.

4. And now, let's discuss that awesome timer on a bastion mode.
Let's pretend you know a site , be it an incursion site, or an anom, or a L4 mission, totally cold. You know precisely how long, to the second, it will take to kill the last rat, so you can turn it of exactly 60 seconds before you finish.

But wait, when you try to warp to a gate, or dock up, you STILL have to wait another 60 seconds before you can dock.

Now, let's not even talk about the potential gankers you have to avoid, by being parked in the site while the aggression timer winds down for 60 seconds AFTER you turn off the Bastion module , but lets talk about that additional 60 seconds where you can't do anything to move out of a system, but just sit there, completely useless time, if you wanted to move systems or dock. Yeah, that won't affect overall PvE income AT ALL.

Like I said, kudo's to the null sec dev's who dreamed up all these hits to PvE income, with no doubt the well-meaning help of certain CSM members.

The last time you instituted a quadruple nerf, it was on incursions, and you had to back out some of the changes, but only after the expense of wrecking some incursion communities. You remember those communities, the type pf players who were quite happy to participate in an MMO setting, as opposed to null sec solo ratting?

So bravvo CCP devs, bravo. I am certain one where you will ignore points like this, because you guys have had to grind oh so many sites while being in PL or making so many Youtube vids of solo/small gang work in Null, which gives you unique insight into how PvE works.

*Getting into Warp :D

I've never used Marauders before testing them on SiSi, as a new-ish player to this battleship platform I'd say it's fairly good. Coming into it from my standpoint, a marauder seems like a decent PvE investment and I'll probably eventually get one solely for ratting/incursions. On a PvP standpoint... I suck so not much to say if I got a Marauder for PvP, I'd save time throwing plex at the gankers from inside a shuttle, instead of expensive ships. I also would probably end up using Salvage drones and Tractor Beams for ratting (Gotta find use for those high slots :P). As for tank and speeds It's pretty good.

stop cryng no one hates pve. Mauraders are broken and need nerfbat big time. these things godtank everything that isnt a dread. so lets get real stop the crying and let these things get corrected. u want to pve do it in a raven

Rest assured that they don't.



So let's examine your points:

1. Please do enlighten me on how a dev originating from Pandemic Legion or Band of Brothers or Goonswarm or Red Frog has any bearing on anything.

While it's true that the Paladin and Golem saw their drone bandwidth reduced by two-thirds, the Kronos and Vargur only lost 25Mbit. You don't really need drones on the Golem and you shouldn't really need them on such a long-range platform as a Paladin. As far as pulling drones back in, I tend to pull in my light drones pretty quickly. It helps to keep them close to the ship. Your last complaint is false too - drones begin attacking as soon as they're in range; they just apply it more poorly before the MWD cycles off.

By the way, you make hundreds of millions of ISK an hour and you're whining about replacing four or five million ISK per site? Really?

Learn to fly your ship. Learn to fly in a fleet. Learn how tracking works and modify your tactics accordingly.


2. The warp acceleration is pretty lousy, granted. However, I think you're being a little bit overdramatic. When I say "a little bit" I really mean "incredibly and overwhelmingly, to the point of comedy". It will affect Incursion income for sure, but mission income won't be affected all that noticeably.

3. You see, contrary to what you experience in your hyper-specialized and super-narrow armor incursion fleet, there are tons of fat, slow ships out there with no web bonus at all who handle elite frigs getting under their guns every single day. You're basically saying you can't do the same thing they do while having the same tools available to you that they have.

While it doesn't directly address anything you've said so far, I just want to point out that in the natural world, overspecialization of a species tends to lead directly to its extinction. Feel free to chew on that for a little bit.


4. Do you even have any idea what kind of senseless sperg you are typing? First you complain that it takes so long to get into warp and so long to travel but then you talk about how you're going to be sitting at a gate or station waiting for the Weapons Timer to expire. Are they adding Incursion Sites right on top of gates and stations now? Having a weapons timer does not force you to remain in a site. It does not restrict acceleration gates.

There aren't even that many gankers in highsec unless your Marauder is fully deadspace/officer-fitted. Even if it is and they do appear, just put Bastion back on and tank them until CONCORD arrives.

Every time I go into Bastion on SiSi to kill belt rats (mostly because I feel like it rather than for any practical reason) my weapons timer has always expired by the time I finish warping back to the station.

If you happen to be the type who drops Bastion to salvage a room before moving on to the next, you'll be salvaging the final room of the mission while your Weapons Timer counts down. A minute is a lot shorter than what you make it out to be with your antics.

You're right though, it will have an effect on PvE income - it will increase it. The time you shave off of each mission or site by having more DPS fitted on account of needing fewer tanking modules will translate into higher ISK/hr.



Personal attacks and tinfoil, because that's the way to get listened to around here.

Perhaps instead of making butthurt flame-rants because your precious ISK/hr has been touched, you can be a contributor to the solution of how Marauders should be rebalanced. All you're accomplishing right now is making yourself into a justification for all the insults and resentment the Incursion communities receive.

Then again, I'm not surprised. I think I can count on one hand the number of times an incursion pilot has come on the forums and not made a spectacle of themselves.

You do more to make CCP look good than their PR dept. does.

(No offense to the PR dept., it's hard to top a good Dinsdale panic attack.)

I've been against a lot of decisions certain devs have been involved in lately, but to be fair this isn't one of them. In my playing around with the Paladin on Sisi I can honestly say it's one of the best changes in a long time for a ship class that really needed a change of some sort, especially after the tier 1 buffs.

1. I don't understand (or really agree with) the drone bay/bandwidth nerf, but I can live with it. I've always used light drones in my Paladin for PvE anyway since the annoying NPC AI changes made it pointless to deploy medium drones (my experience being that everything on grid targets and nukes them as soon as they're launched). On the other hand, I don't feel that heavy and sentry drones have any real place in a Marauder hull (or any other non-drone specialised hull for that matter), but that's just my opinion. Either way, it's not a ship-breaking change.

2. Until someone pointed the speed change out to me, I didn't even realise it had been. Even then I only noticed a significant change after entering a long warp (72AU+), but it wasn't ridiculously slow at all. In honesty, I don't understand how it took you 28 minutes to travel 16 jumps unless you had a lot of long warps in succession, were heavily plated or were being held up by warp bubbles. 28m/16=1m 45s per jump on average... I've been travelling lot on Sisi and only in a tiny handful of systems with extremely long warps had anywhere near this duration; most jumps have been under a minute and not even noticeably different from my travels on TQ.

3. The web bonus was always a niche bonus and tended to contradict the way a lot of people used the Paladin. I always used Tachyons or Mega Pulses with Scorch and let the drones kill things close-range. The only time I ever used the web bonus was when I first got it and tried a few fits out and on Sisi for similar reasons, and found it pretty worthless for my (PvE) purposes. If anything this is probably more of a loss for PvP, but then again who uses Paladins for PvP even with a 90% web bonus when the Vindicator is far better? I could see it being useful for Incursions, but again that's more of a niche role also and not what the hull was really designed for.

4. I'm not a fan of the weapons timer either, but I recognise that there are other people who don't play the same way I do, and it needs to be implemented in order to prevent exploiting of the Bastion module in PvP situations. In all fairness, this is really a non-issue. 60 seconds isn't very long, and all you have to do is turn it off when you don't need it as the DPS tapers off toward the end of a mission and the timer will be long gone before you leave system. In fact, according to your second point regarding the speed nerf, the timer will have worn off long before you reach the system gate wouldn't it?

You need to realise that ships aren't balanced around PvE income (or even PvE at all), so anything you or I might have complaints about regarding our ISK/hour (or in my case ISK/month heh) ratio are always going to fall on deaf ears. Since EVE was created ship metas have changed and people have had to adapt - if you don't like Marauders for missions or Incursions now, then don't use them; there are newly-buffed tier 1 battleships out there more than capable of the task, not to mention T3s. If they don't work with your current tactics, change your tactics. Like Marauders but don't like the Bastion module? Well, it isn't built into the hull so just don't fit it.

Honestly, I'm one of the whiniest people in EVE when it comes to changes I get angry about (heck I haven't even played on TQ since Odyssey), but I fail to see any game-breaking changes with the new Marauder rebalancing or the Bastion module. If I go back to TQ I'll have to change how I do certain things, but that's part of what makes EVE interesting from a mechanics point of view.

/rant

ps. screw you forum, I copied to clipboard before submitting this time hahahaha. I hate this forum software.

"With Null ammo...."

Please stop fitting Kronos's with blasters.... Anti Matter Rails beat them out DPS wise at 15km... seriously... Blaster Boating is slow boating...

Hey, Fozzie is the Insane and Ebil Pandemic Legion Saboteur™, not my Rise! Don't you tarnish the reputation of my darling CCP Rise!

Right...so this post by Rise, where he discusses the changes to Marauders, using the pronoun "we", doesn't exist.
I am not going to go through 270 pages to find one by the PL guy.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3546984#post3546984

And to all of you saying that I am overstating the effects of these nerfs to Paladin's...sorry, I have tested them on Sisi.
It is bad bad news.

And also, about me suggesting changes, I have done that too.
Just increase the scan res, and leave the rest of the ship alone.
You want to give it a higher sensor strength and T2 resists? Wonderful, a nice touch but not needed.

I get so tired of people getting onto the forums and stating stuff that is entirely untrue, like saying that wiping out drone bays and webbing is countered by an effective increase to optimal, or falloff, which is only fully usable when the ship is trapped for a minute, followed by another minute of not being able to dock or jump.

You know what the real proof will be?
Watching the sales of the Marauders slowly sink even further than it is today, once the suckers rush to buy some in the days immediately after Nov 19th.

Ship rebalancing isn't a single-person endeavour, I imagine they all discuss potential changes in order to bring to light issues the individual in charge of the changes might not have initially considered him/herself. That doesn't mean everyone involved is in charge of the changes.


I've tested them too, as have many many other people, and I can honestly say I love them. In fact, most of the people I've tested them with also love them. The only person I've heard complain about them being nerfed so far is you, and that's only for your niche Incursion mini-gang that very few people actually use. Keeping an underused and now obsolete web bonus on what is now a long-ranged and highly durable weapon platform? Um, no. Please, EVE gods, no.


A minute is nothing and the timer is easily counterable by turning the module off toward the end of the mission/site/whatever. You aren't forced to fit one and you even get an extra high for whatever you like, NOS/Neut/Cap/Armour transfer/SB... Drone bays aren't being 'wiped out', they're just being reduced to emphasise the fact that the ship class has changed role from close-range brawler to long-ranged sniper/MJD kiter. So we can't fit a substantial fleet of sentry drones anymore. Big deal - with the range, tracking bonus and Ewar immunity we don't actually need them now. Honestly I don't understand your viewpoint at all, and I've tried.


To be honest, I fully expect the opposite to happen - now Marauders are insanely good for mission running and anomalies (Ewar immunity? Hell yes, no more Gurista jamming, Sansha TD, Serpentis damping... higher ISK/hour ratio and easier fitting to boot!). Whoever came up with the idea for the Bastion module is rapidly becoming my favourite dev.