Ships & Modules

As a wormhole cap pilot, these are the issues I've seen:

Thanny:
Fitting- Fitted for armour tank and full triage armour reps, it's short on grid enough to need implants.
Defenses- Too weak in comparison to an Archon.
Hull bonus : Pretty much useless as fighters suck. No energy transfer range bonus, so of limited use in a fleet.

Archon:
No real downsides to this one other than it is boring to look at. However, nerfing it significantly will hurt in wormholes. Archons being the only armour carrier capable of standing up to 3 full waves of escalation sleeper battleships for long enough to run sites.

Chimera:
Used similarly to the Archon in shield bonused wormholes, but extremely tight on CPU, and like the thanny, needs implants to work right.

Nidhoggur:
Slot layout: Terrible. Not enough mids to run a good shield tank.
Fitting: Not enough of anything
Capacitor: Runs out about 30 picoseconds after you get in the thing. (may be a slight exaggeration, but not by much)
Hull bonus: Pointless as it will run out of cap if you use any of your lows/mids for any kind of a tank worthy of the name. No energy transfer range bonus, so of limited use in a fleet. (Plus - did I mention capacitor issues?)

In short, the Archon is pretty much the perfect carrier for anything you'd want an armour carrier for, except repping a large POS shield. Every other carrier is second rate by comparison, and the poor niddy didn't even make it to be rated because it ran out of cap on the way and couldn't make the last jump.

Yes, something needs to be done to lower the Archon infestation of Nullsec, but not at the expense of the other uses.
Could I suggest the re-balance be centred around the triage module? If that were made more effective, then a significant change to the base carrier stats could be made without hurting the wormholers.

So - make the archon impossible to fit, have half the tank, make it impossible to fit armour reppers while having a local armour tank. Get rid of its cap range bonus .. should bring it inline.

... let imagine thats not how it will happen.

Chimera - more CPU should fix it.
Thanatos - local rep bonus should be good.
Archon - lets leave it alone more or less.
Nid - give it an insane cap recharge rate bonus. Fix the fitting issues, fix the flipped tank fitting issues.

Add implants for shield akin to slaves, or remove slaves from caps - it unbalances all tiers.

Basically would make the Thanatos and Nid more 'solo' logistic. The Chimera and Archon gang.

No mention of the rorqual, the only ship in the game that you have to sit in a POS bubble to use.

And no one here sees that the armor tanked ships need the slaves to keep up with shield caps, not to get ahead.

Compare the EHP with proper fits. The Wyvern exceeds a slaved Aeon by a lot. And even the Hel will win a 1on1 against a slaved Nyx due to passive shield recharge.

A Slave like set for shields is neither needed nor anywhere close to fair.

Edit: OK checked the numbers again, Leviathan with 46M EHP(without its own bonus) is best in game, followed by Wyvern Wirth 41M (both with CA1-4).
A slaved Avatar reaches mere 40M. 27M without slaves.

And significantly helps with the fitting issues.

Some remarks:

- A slaved armor cap has less hp than an equally expensive shield cap.
- Genolutions are a shield caps best friend. With them, the Chimera is a better triage and a better slowcat than the Archon.
- The Nighoddur flip tank + genos works in solo triage situations that do not escalate which is way to rare.
- The Thanatos would be balanced the instant fighters would be used again. Fighters need fixing, not the Thanatos.
- Once you scale up tot dozens upon dozens of carriers, the Archon does the pantheon thing better than the Chimera due to cap use
- There is a huge amount of inertia in cap warfare due to experience of pilots and their skills. Same reason why Jita is the trade capital of New Eden: inertia.
- The Archons biggest advantage is that it can do each and every role well with just the basic T2 fit. It is also the only carrier that can scale from small engagements up to the largest with a simple refitting of T2 modules a.k.a no-one ever got fired for bringing an Archon.

Didn't realize passive shield regent of a few hundred can add 5+ million ehp in supers good to know

Pic or gtfo.

And if you consider actually reading, above is pointed out that armor caps need the slaves to keep up with shield ones.
And dont get ahead of them.
Without slaves no one would even consider armor caps. And even with slaves they are inferior to shield caps.

Most Supers are armor because most alliances fly armor, caps, its kind a kind of self sustaining thingy.

The reason caps are supers started to be armor is that along long time ago at teh start of the Super Era,is that: Links and other skills that increased armor were applied immeadiatle to both maximum armor HP and current armor HP while shield skills and links only applied to the maximum.


the effect was that an armor cap jumping in a system was immediately at max health while a shield cap, needed to be repped or needed its passiev shield recharge to get to maximum shields first .

Beat me to it. But yeah. It's gonna be a while unfortunately.

As James Amril-Kesh put it, we still have a ways to go. Recons, HICs, Logi, and Blops to rebalance for T2, all T3s (nerf them), and pirates yet remain for subcaps. Pirate frigs are announced if you haven't seen it yet. But I don't see why CCP couldn't hit caps at the same time as a lesser project like Logi and HICs. I agree that those two categories are generally well-balanced and shouldn't require a lot of effort.