Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I was thinking for sometime now, the only possible alternative to Tier 3 Battlecruisers (Naga, Oracle, Tornado, Talos) taking into account the adjacent classes seems to be the "Destroyers", so basically destroyers with frigate hulls and medium size cruiser weapons, these things will have lots of application in both PVP and PVE.
What do you guys think?

it's not like thrashers are not good enough already.

But i would love to see more dessies. It's just 3 dessies per faction now , needless to say no pirate or navy variants aswell. Could use some more love to dessie class.

I don't really like the idea. As much as I like the idea of more dessies in game I think that adding something like this, or an "assault destroyer" as suggested previously, would completely overshadow current destroyers uses in game, and it would tread on the toes of cruisers a bit as well. Eventually CCP is going to push boosts on grid, and for that I think we should get, yes, a new "command destroyer" to provide boosts to small gangs. That's a role that currently wouldn't be provided for in a game of on grid boosts so I think it is reasonable. And as much as I would LOVE to see faction destroyers, I think they would have the same problem overstepping roles. I would be particularly concerned about their overlap with faction frigs.

Tiericide is a thing. You should expect less power-based differentiation in ships of a given category, not more... that's true of old ships as the rebalance rolls around, and will certainly be true of new ones as they get introduced.

As such, you shouldn't be thinking about 'Tier 3' anything. Instead, think "What new roles might be appropriate for a Destroyer-sized hull?" I've seen a few floating around, reposting for consideration:

-Heavy Destroyer (Destroyer w/ Medium Weapons): Possible, but ugly. It's been done before (with Battlecruisers), and so it's not really very creative... and besides, it'd step on a lot of toes. I suspect that implementing them would make Cruisers a lot less viable, and suicide ganking a lot easier... neither of these being especially healthy or needed changes.
-Command Destroyer (Destroyer w/ Command Links): Possible, and somewhat more plausible, assuming fleets and boosting get dramatically reworked at some point (which is probably a safe assumption, though the 'when' is an open question). Tricky to get them to be useful in that role without them being instantly primaried and vollied off the field, though.
-Fleet Escort (Destroyer w/ Defensive Modules): Basically, a destroyer that does something to protect other ships in the fleet. Suggestions have included remote resist boosters (reasonable, if dubiously useful in most cases due to stacking penalty), sacrificial bodyguards (taking hits for allied ships; an interesting role for normally paper-thin destroyers), or specialized anti-drone platforms (this last is probably most appropriate for the hull; I'd like to, for instance, see FOF missiles that could specifically and usefully be instructed to murder enemy drones, though that kind of thing would require a bit of work).
-Hunter-Killer (Destroyer w/Probing Bonuses): Personally, the kind of thing I'd rather see; a ship that can provide intelligence to a small gang on the move while still being useful in combat. Destroyers tend to have the free hislots to handle such utility tasks... so destroyer hulls dedicated to the task of finding targets, with the potential to actually tackle something or otherwise be useful on the scene after doing so, would be useful.

I would LOVE a hunter killer dessy. Even more so if they were given advanced ship probing equipment that allowed them two things.

1. To be the only ship capable of scouting out cloaked ships via new probes (only locates the grid of the cloaker)
2. A new bubble launcher that pulses every dozen ticks or so and decloaks all ships in range. Bubble range 25km T1 30km T2 The bubble also boosters sig radius of everyone inside by an amount as a drawback.

I don't support anti-cloaking systems... largely, because it's really difficult to balance an anti-"AFK Cloaking" fix that doesn't stomp on the legitimate use of cloaking. For instance, you wouldn't want your bubbled gatecamps to be able to perfectly spot and kill Blockade Runners, just because they've got a Hunter-Killer orbiting the gate AFK with his decloaker on; manual decloaking is a real skill requiring effort, and any fix shouldn't trivialize that... or make it too easy for a gatecamp to murder everyone that arrives.

Corvettes would and should be the next in line ships. In between cruiser size hulls and dessies making them nibble fast hard hitting, troop transporting ships.

That's where dust comes into play

I was just going to say... corvettes are smaller than destroyers.

I was thinking more like corelian corvettes from star wars. A ship similar could be used to drop dust players off at contested factional warfare stations to fight for dominance of the system.