Ships & Modules

You're seeing the Thanatos used? I thought it was Archons all the way down...

The use of the Nid is not due to a prejudice against shield tankers as it can be armour tanked - it's that when the Nid is tanked in shield it's very difficult to fit shield transfers to it, and when tanked in armour it is similarly difficult to load with Remote Armour Reps - it therefore rarely has an effective synergy with its fleetmates and is therefore not particularly valuable.

I don't know of anyone using chimera-centric shield doctrines but there was talk some time ago of adding additional pirate implant sets, in particular a Crystal "Slave" set which would boost Shield HP rather than rep and would therefore go some way towards countering the trend towards armour fleets.


I would debate your assertion that capitals are the the most significant milestone in the transition from newbie to veteran - let alone the pinnacle of that transition however.

We're getting there.

During the Tiericide project, we first wanted to go through the most common classes first, by starting with Tech 1 and Tech 2, then moving into more advanced hulls.

There are some ships left to tackle on the Tech 2 category that need love. When done with that and pirate ships, our next step is to start looking at Tech 3 ships, then capitals.

timeline?

pirates summer when is summer exactly? will T2 ships be done before or after pirates?

Let's not mistake pixel politics for game balance. And forgive me for saying that but caps are hardly ever necessary to field outside of sov matters. The fact that some people notoriously drop them everywhere doesn't exactly mean they are in dire need of taking higher place on tiercide waiting list.

In what world is the Thanatos good? The fighter damage bonus only applies to fighters, and fighters are... well there's a reason people use sentry drones instead.

The Chimera has fitting issues as well as cap issues.
The Nidhoggur has really good RR bonuses, but can't use them without excessive usage of fitting mods, or self-tanking what you aren't repping.
The Archon does everything well and doesn't have any glaring issues.


If you aren't flying an Archon, you're doing it wrong.

Nighoggur (and Thanatos) are not used because of fitting problems, but becuase of the massive HP/resist advantage that the archon provides. As an example, a standard t2 hardener/t1 trimark archon compared against a similarly fit nidhoggur has 44% more total ehp (with more of that in useable armor rather than wasted in shield), and 55% more resists, which makes the nidhoggur completely unusable. The thanatos is in pretty much the same place with the same slot layout and lack of resist bonus, but with a meager bump in armor EHP.

If supercarriers were as easy to replace as carriers, I can pretty much guarantee that you would see the extinction of Nyxes in favor of Aeons as well, at least in nullsec where the extra mid and DPS is largely irrelevant. There's a reason it's actually somewhat difficult to find aeons on the sell order forum.

The amarr (and caldari) capital advantage of a resist bonus AND an extra tank slot AND the most base HP in their respective tank compounds to make it very hard to justify flying the odd ships out, at least outside very specific use cases (thanatos gets the short end of the stick here since you cant even use it's extra bonus for anything useful anymore)

Regarding shield capital fleets, Darkness of Despair has built up a chimera/wyvern centric fleet. NC. and PL (as well as other allieances I'm sure) also maintain chimeras among at least part of their members in order to defend shield timers. The actual stats of the chimera/naglfar/wyvern/ragnorak are actually pretty impressive, especially when you consider that the ships dont get any help from slave-like implants, but while the major players still have hundreds of nearly entirely armor supercapitals, there is never going to be a big paradigm shift over to shield due to the inability to support these ships.

The rampant problem with Thanatos and Nid is cap and remote transfer range. The comedy of Archon wars in eve for this amount of time illustrates just how unbalanced it is - RR bonus pointless if you cant RR due to cap.

As for the Nid itself - give me a Dev that can justify the turd that it really is. Give a reason why fitting on an Archon is so easy compared to the Chimera, why there are no shield implants. Why the overbonus of resists per level.

Its so far out of whack with Caps that its the one statement you can say in eve without any argument. Train Archon. Forget the rest.

Soon™

Oh god the list so long and we are going to complete second year in only balancing ships. we are still missing:

1- Black Ops
2- DST
3- Bombers
4- capitals (especially caldari line)

Can we have all these tackled in one expansion and be done with ship balancing ?

Capitals are such a mess that I'd have them as higher priority than T3s. I think they'd be easier to balance than T3s too.

For carriers, the Thanatos is worthless and the Archon is the best choice for any armour situation. For dreads, the Phoenix is worthless unless you're doing mental stuff like dreadbowling or nanodreads, while the Revelation is simply obsolete.