Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I feel like this didn’t get enough attention.

The thing about the Gnosis is that it’s a great ship for low-SP players. It gets bonuses to any kind of weapon you want, plus probe strength, and it does it all in flat, convenient role bonuses. It requires no skills for the hull itself, and until you get a given racial BC skill trained up it’ll outperform the t1 combat battlecruisers. For higher-SP players, there’s not much of a draw: sure it can use any medium turret or launcher, and sure it can be either shield or armor tanked, but any t1 combat battlecruiser will beat the Gnosis in any given metric (excluding only scanning), and it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where you would need a ship that can be either shield or armor tanked or can change weapons on the fly where you couldn’t just as easily reship (though I would bet that scenario has something to do with mobile depots).

Even so, the Gnosis is fun to fly every now and then—but at least for my part, when I fly a Gnosis, I do so secure in the knowledge that if I should lose it, I have half a dozen more in my hangar(s); and even if I lost all those, I could replace it at only 20-40% more cost than a t1 combat BC (which are not expensive to begin with).

The Nestor, though—the Nestor is clearly not intended, at least in any way that’s obvious to me, for low-SP players, nor would it really make sense for that to be the target base. Moreover, we’re not looking at a 20-40% increase over the competition (conservatively, it’ll be more like 1000% of a comparable t1 BS, e.g. Dominix). The Gnosis “jack of all trade, master of none” model doesn’t work nearly as well on a pirate battleship. There’s nothing wrong with versatility by itself (the Dominix is pretty damn versatile), but there needs to be a compelling reason to use this ship instead of something cheaper. Sure, the current version will rep better than any battleship, but a logi will outperform it in that capacity by a hefty margin for a tenth of the cost; it will be the easiest battleship to get into a wormhole, but t3 cruisers can do everything the Nestor can do (and a lot it can’t) with a tenth of the mass.

I’m all for a versatile Nestor, but it needs to be better than other ships at something—not just other battleships, because that’s not the only competition this ship has right now. There needs to be a compelling reason to use it over a t3 cruiser, a t2 logi, or a t1 BS.

(On an unrelated note, I personally think the design looks amazing. It really is a matter of taste. At any rate, I think it’d be hard to justify spending another several months overhauling a brand new design when there’s so much legacy ugliness still hanging around.)

I have to agree here, this ship is stupid, its super expensive, not really good at anything.

I can't think of any use for this ship for my high sec mission/scanning alt. And taking a ship this anemic, and this expensive into low/null, seems like you might as well self destruct it, since it won't last long at all.

Well, it was the same with the Bastion module which left the base hull basicly untouched even though there were many people in that Marauder thread that had prefererred an actual rebalance (and leaving PVP off the table for that matter). And the only thing the Bastion module really accomplished was to make fittings cheaper and PVE even easier (read boring) than before. The only real reason to use Bastion is to solo Vanguard sites, but who would ever do that? My point is: I should not be surprised.

I like the idea of the drone-dps-making BS with very good spider tank abilities. It is like Armageddon with spider tank bonuses. Please don't nerf its armor resists - 4% are good. The 7th low slot instead of 7th high slot would be greate. I think that there no reason in creating "flat bonused" ships good for both armor and shield tank. It is better to create 2 different SOE BS with different resist bonuses: the 1st one for armor spider-tank and the 2nd one for shield spider tank (like Rattlesnake with remote assist bonuses).

This ship is very-very needed in the 4 class wormholes because in such systems there are a lot of troubles with capital ship building and the sleepers are tough already.

Please make SOE BS as it is in Your first proposal but add the ability to use Covert Ops cloacking device and jump on cynos as its super feature. It coubd be used like BO in low and null secs and as farming BS in WH.

P.S. May be it is not right but as main feature of SOE BS could be the ability to use 2-3 (maybe 5) subsystems like on T3 ships so the number of slots of each type and the resists/bonuses could be set by players as we like.

Morning!

A small update for you guys - going to adjust the warp Nestor's warp speed to match Battlecruiser warp speed rather than Battleship. That is a warp speed multiplier of 2.5 rather than 2.0.

This suggestion has come up a few times and it matches well with the extremely low mass and should be something that everyone is happy to have.

Appreciate your post XvXTeacherVxV, on the two topics you asked about: I think a jump drive would mean redesigning the entire ship. It's such a powerful capability and we decided earlier on that we would rather do something else than add more fast travel (whether through covert bridging or jump drive) and so we designed the ship with that in mind. I would expect that Black Ops can fill this need when they are rebalance since they are more explicitly meant for that kind of gameplay. Hopefully we can get to them soon. I feel a lot less strongly about the cloaked velocity bonus, it seems kind of awkward to me but I'll bring it up with the other balance guys to be sure.

I'm still not convinced this ship will be useful.

The base price for this hull (minimum) is going to be 1.2 billion. That's maybe 400mill too much.

The role for this ship is weird and undefined. It feels like it's trying to achieve too much at once and only doing everything hap hazardly.

Remote repair modules should get their range doubled and all hulls with range bonuses get their bonuses halved. This way you can drop the 100% range bonus.

The argument of Cov Ops jumpdrive/portal capability being overpowered for a T1 hull in my veiw point is a little moot. The fact the Astero and Stratios are Cov Ops cloak capable and are T1 hulls says a lot here. Also, the Nestor just doesn't seem to fit into the ship line. Also, saying it's too powerful for a T1 ship that requires two Racial BS skills to fly and then it will need all the BLOPs support skills to fly means it will still require a lot of SP. It will also be more expensive than a true BLops

Personally, I'd prefer the Nestor to drop it's remote repair bonuses and be a straight up T1 Blops.

Secondly, Design a battlecruiser with the support remote rep ability with Blops cloak abilities. This will be the support ship for the SoE line and the Nestor will be the bridger. It makes more sense.

Another point: Where is the shield version of this style of ships? Are we going to see more T2 BS's that have the same abilities as Marauders but have a "Triage" style bastion module. If so, looking forward to it. If not, consider that people would like to spider tank shield fleets too.

I think you should also consider postponing release of the Nestor until BLOPs are rebalanced.

Being as this is a drone ship, I feel I can ask this question in a on-topic style.

The state of heavy drones.
There mostly garbage, everyone generally knows why.
I have been thinking on how to fix them, and see one option that could be considered a quick fix but will help them become viable.

Increasing there optimal range to 10km, which with skills would bring it to 12.5km, on a Dominix would bring there range to about 17km, with a Dominix and 2 omnidirectional tracking links about 26km.
It would allow heavy drone to begin dealing damage earlier.
With how drone mechanics work they will continue to travel toward there target till they begin to orbit a 1km. So smart bombing will still be a viable defense against them.

why 1.2 bil is too much? Its not far from OTher pirate ships. Also with tiem more and more people will go run missions for SOE and price will likely settle around 1 bil.

I'm not sure how everyone else is going to take it, but I appreciate the warp speed change Rise.

It gives the Nestor a little bit of a 'quick response rescue ship' feel, rather than the strange 'I can do EVERYTHING (but nothing well)' focus from before.

Are you still planning on keeping the relic/data analyzer bonuses? Although they may be useful occasionally, between the low interest in a hacking BS and the minor changes, it feels like the Nestor's role has shifted away from the exploration side. I honestly wouldn't mind if it lost those bonuses, even if there wasn't another role bonus to replace them.

Oh yes, black ops rebalance, pleeeaaaaasssseeee ♥♥♥♥♥
I'll give you internet virtual cookies if you do that.