Assembly Hall

Fantasyland Interlude:

I'm not suggesting that this is a good solution, but let's imagine an EVE where stealth bombers don't exist.

Small ships are relatively safer from being ganked (because you need to bring a non-cloaky ship that can be d-scanned or a cloaky ship that can only bump you during its decloak delay).

You need to bring big, expensive ships to fight big, expensive ships.

You need to bring battleships or better to siege POSes (and they can't cloak up and run away). If you really don't want to fight, you could bring cloaky T3's, but that's a slow POS bash and you can always get pointed by some kind of weird, covops ship that has no decloak delay and the scan resolution of a frigate.

Lowsec missions would actually be dangerous. Yes, they'd be a waste of time, but that's just because the risk/reward ratio of those missions is way too high - again, a separate problem.

Also, all the SP my corp sunk into stealth bombers would go to waste unless we want to fly covops (oh wait we live in w-space) or torpedoes (ew).


Back to reality:

OK, so stealth bombers have a lot of balance problems. As a very versatile ship, they're used by a lot of people for a lot of things. This is probably not a problem that can be solved by a single change.

But wait, T3's are really versatile. People use them for a lot of things. As a w-space corp, we use and see a lot of T3's. I have a lot of words about them, but I'll leave them out of this. The point is I'm much more OK with them because they're really expensive and take a long time to train into. Also, their logistics subsystem sucks which reduces their overpowered-ness (I know I said I wouldn't bring T3 balance issues into this, but it's relevant, I swear).

What if stealth bomber hulls were 100 million? That would make them at least more expensive than the battlecruisers we gank in them. That would make them closer to what I think a combined tackle+damage role should cost (similar specialized tackle ships, interdictors and interceptors, cost more than or as much as stealth bombers and don't provide damage).

What if they took longer to train into? That would be weird because they're just a T2 frigate... but what if you needed T2 torpedoes and T2 bomb launchers to fly them well? I actually had to go look up what those modules do because we don't use them. They don't fit well on stealth bombers.

T2 torpedoes deal a little more damage to shield battleships, but way worse damage to armor battlecruisers. You also lose range. Javelin is pointless on stealth bombers. T2 torpedoes are just too hard to justify bringing unless you're using them for a siegefleet or something. Maybe if T1 torpedoes did very poor damage and T2 torpedoes did fantastic damage, people would feel the need to train for T2 launchers.

T2 bomb launchers reduce the cycle time to 135 seconds (before skills) which is cool... if you're in a siegefleet. Even then, the extra fitting cost is hard to bear. There are no T2 bombs. There are a lot of directions to run with this, but my personal favorite is making T1 bombs die to a single T1 bomb explosion. T2 bombs would have the HP of current bombs so you could actually do bombing runs in large fleets; T1 bombs would only be useful in solo/small gangs (keep in mind I live in w-space, so "large fleet" means "more than 9").

Increasing the cost of a stealth bomber seems like a fairly low-risk change. Making T1 torpedoes worse and T2 torpedoes better would affect battleships, but in a good way, I think. (Then again, I don't use missiles much, I don't fly battleships, and I don't run highsec missions, so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about.) Making T1 bombs worse and either introducing T2 bombs or giving the T2 bomb launcher a damage modifier would only affect stealth bombers.

T3's can be good at a lot of things, but not all at once. If T3's had a decent logistics defensive subsystem, nobody would use logistics ships. A stealth bomber can tackle small ships, provide damage for big ships, and do all this while cloaked. Since "one less role than CCP intended" seems to be not too overpowered, let's try that on stealth bombers.

1. They can tackle small ships and cloak, but can't engage big targets. That means covops and no decloak delay, but no bomb launcher and maybe no torpedoes.
2. They can cloak and engage big targets, but can't tackle small ships. That means covops and bomb launcher + torpedoes, but a decloak delay.
3. They can tackle small ships and engage big targets, but can't cloak. Unfortunately, in order to instapoint small ships they need the cloak, so this doesn't make any sense.

It's hard for me to pick a favorite here because they both hurt our playstyle too much.

TL;DR: The Phantasm is way better at impaling things than the Incursus.

Me too, but that's not what I'm talking about. Please read my explanation where I elaborate on #1.


Or PvE-fit.


There's also a price floor based on the cost of production.

It doesn't need to survive the fight right now, they're cheap as **** and can hold tackle long enough for friends to get on field. With basically no way to stop that from happening.

Malcanis 2014

Yea, be totally happy with a ship that a cost analysis has shown out performs BS and t3's for grinding sov as far as cost and DPS goes, can fling wave after wave after wave of bombs with bomb code that frequently goes on the frittz and forgets its supposed to blow up the wrong bomb type and now we have people ISboxing groups of bombers.

Sounds perfectly balanced to me.


Let me help, if the Goon only uses one thing and one thing only to grind sov with, theres something broken about it, regardless of your 'opinion'

sup bob

I got that consignment of attention you said you needed.

While it certainly is always good to get newbros involved, not every instance of a low-SP ship having an effect is a good thing. If T3's were cheap and low-SP we could get newbros into those and have some fun and interesting PvP. Taken to an extreme, why not get rid of SP and let them fly supercapitals?

First, let's think about why we have SP. SP is actually a resource. Every character, corporation, alliance, and coalition has a limited amount of SP and chooses to allocate that SP income every month towards flying certain ships (or doing whatever else people do). I can spend 61d 1h 42m 50s training for an Arazu *or* I can spend 59d 17h 0m 52s training for a Loki. There is a decision to be made there.

A pilot can spend a few months training for a T3 and run lowsec missions. A corp can spend a few months training for a battleship doctrine and siege a POS. Or you can spend one month, 1/5 - 1/10 the ISK, and do both in a stealth bomber. And get initial tackle on every gank. And bomb battleships.

My complaint about stealth bombers' low-SP cost is that the utility/SP ratio is too high. My entire corp has trained for it because they're just too useful to skip. They seem "insanely important" because nullsec alliances/coalitions fill fleets of them for the same reason.

If stealth bombers stay low-SP (no T2 torpedo/bomb changes), they should probably lose some of their utility. Consider one of my 2 proposals at the bottom of the second post.

Did you even read the OP at all? If so how can you think that bombers are in a "healthy place" as you put it. Why is a T2 frigate, (which is basically free, 50m is nothing) a better choice in so many situations over ships that should be more specialized for those roles.

Also siege fleets work well because massive immobile structures mean you can overlook pretty much all of the torpedos drawbacks as a weapon system, so it simply becomes a game of what way is the cheapest to bring the most guns.