Player Features and Ideas Discussion

IF you want to fit a cloak and weapons. IMO if you're setup to cloak, you should not also be engaging, and vice-a-versa. (It gets a little tight with tank regardless, but you can fit a DC II easily enough with the new stats (remember, of course, that the new fitting restrictions will not allow dual-bubble fits, so there's 100 CPU freed up = P).

I still want my 42km Javelin Rocket Flycatcher back!

After doing some fiddling in EFT, I'd say that most of the dictors could use more CPU. The Heretic and the Eris in particular could use a LOT of CPU: neither of them is really capable of doing a respectable cloaking dictor fit: the Heretic has to use autocannons because launchers suck too many resources, and the Eris can't fit any serious armor mods (only adaptive nano platings) if you fit even the smallest blasters to it. Kind of disappointing since the Sabre and Flycatcher can both run these sorts of fits with minimal drama-- just downsize the guns on the Sabre to free up resources and add an overclocking rig on the Flycatcher. The Heretic and Eris are way, way, way worse on fitting.

I think you guys have done a great job making the Sabre more playable and have really made the Flycatcher a viable alternative to the Sabre-- they have different strengths now, but each is superior to the other at something and both make compelling ships; good job-- but I feel like the Heretic could use a little more CPU and the Eris just kind of struggles generally.

Here's my issue with the Eris:

- it has an inflexible slot layout (armor tank or nothing)
- it has no resist bonus, so it will never be very tanky
- when you armor tank it, it starts getting too slow to speedtank well or do it's job well (you need to put a nano or two on it to get it to handle well enough)
- it suffers from poor fitting just like before: you get another low slot over a Heretic, but you don't have the CPU to do anything useful with it (the Eris has the same problem on TQ currently-- it supposedly offers a superior slot layout for armor tanking, but since the fourth low needs to be a co-processor in order for the ship to mount the same fits the Heretic can, the slot is effectively nulled out)

So far, the only thing I can find that the Eris does better than the other 3 dictors is an all-gank fit: if you fit it like a big Taranis (no cloak, best-named damage control for a tank, neutrons, scram, mwd, 1 MFS, 2 nanos... and 2 CPU rigs :\ ) then it gets a slightly higher combat rating than the other dictors in EFT (just over 400 dps with faction antimatter, ~4,900 EHP). If you want to do things like fit a cloak or fit any kind of respectable tank while still being fast enough to decloak things, this ship is pretty lame.

Bottom line: I would fitting stats on the Heretic and Eris. IMHO the ships should have enough CPU / grid to mount a fit that consists of a cloak, bubble launcher, rack of their bonused weapons (preferably downsized, although I guess there's no way for you to do this with the Heretic since there are no "smaller" rocket launchers-- maybe make it so it can fit rockets but not lights? IDK), and a basic tank of the type the ship is biased towards (armor and armor here). The Eris could use a little more mobility as well (ideally in the form of a bonus that reduces the negative impacts of armor plates, which would let you be fast with a buffer tank while not making DC / AAR tanked variants stupidly fast and agile).

This reminds me of another paradigm I noticed when theorycrafting TQ dictors a while back: you guys should find a way to offset the speed disadvantages of armor-tanked ships IMHO, especially at this ship size. What I found looking at armor / afterburner vs shield / MWD fits a while back was that at the end of the day nothing did appreciably better than a Sabre in terms of sig/speed tanking because the decreased sig of amor-based ships was always offset by their lower speeds. Shield tanking has a lot of innate advantages (passive recharge when out of combat, further damage mitigation through passive recharge on buffer fits while IN combat, etc), and front-loaded reps are especially advantageous for small ships. There should be compelling reasons to consider an armor dictor over a shield dictor other than "well, we're running an armor fleet and all our reps will be armor reps, so we'll bring an armor dictor in this specific case even though shield ones are better."

I feel like I'm getting off topic and my thoughts are very disorganized today, so I'll stop now, but yeah: great job on the Sabre / Flycatcher, and more CPU on the Eris and Heretic please!

I love how the Sabre has the best speed, agility, a sub-300 signature, full rack of guns, and a tank only slightly worse than the Flycatcher, while all the other Interdictors have to use Co-Processors and CPU/PG rigs to fit everything, and end up nowhere near the Sabre =P

And a sig the size of some battleships, 353m. If the Heretic and its 263m sig had a 4th low slot it would be OP.

Black Ops drops are already powerful enough IMO.

I disagree, I think the Heretic will be an excellent armor fleet interdictor with these changes. How about we let people actually use them on TQ with the new bonuses before we start declaring AB to be totally superior to MWD in every situation despite the wasted hull bonus?

A 400mm plated Heretic should go 2150m/s vs your Flycatcher's 2389m/s with a 90m smaller sig and roughly equivalent resists. It will have a smaller buffer and a bit less agility but it also gets to fit a full rack of T2 rocket launchers to kill drones and other small stuff. I think that sounds pretty well balanced. Oh and it also still has a couple of mids for ewar or normal tackle.

If it really does need more tank then should get some more raw EHP. Not a fourth low slot.

Seriously, though. Interdictors are going to render AFs functionally obsolete and crap all over the small ship meta. People will still use AFs because they're a significantly shorter train and a bit cheaper, but interdictors are going to go faster, hit harder, and tank more. Assault frigates' only notional advantage, sig radius, doesn't actually count for as much as you might think due to how the tracking formula works.

It does matter quite a lot under the right circumstances, but they're not particularly relevant to most of the situations where you'd be choosing between a dictor and AF.

I agree

CCP Fozzie, I wouldn't mind you not giving so many Caldari ships, like the flycatch a resistance bonus, when their Amarr equivalent do, if you fixed the blatant issue of a faction invul costing 350m. The reason shield faction parts are so expensive -typically twice that of armor modules, is that the number of factions dropping shield tanking parts are quite literally - half that of factions dropping armor modules, thus the costs. In the next expansion as part of the rebalancing, can we have more factions dropping shield tanking modules please?

Traditionally speaking, Caldari have been to shields tanking, what amarr are to armor tanking. You can't ignore that to get similar buffer numbers a flycatchers signature will be far larger than the heretics, and therefore as a fleet fit support ship, it is far poorer, its not like mass from plates makes quite the same difference anymore.