Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Alright, I'm back from a busy weekend of birthday and New Eden Open (If you didn't watch I highly recommend you do!).

First, I wish this stuff was going to Sisi soon so you all could actually get your hands on it, but unfortunately that won't be for a while still. I posted it rather early so that I could get reactions to these themes before investing more work in the other two classes, which has paid off really well for me so thanks for that.

So by now it seems like the Cruor has won as the most contentious with the Worm and Succubus following close behind.

There's actually several reasons why the Cruor ended up like this and I feel pretty good about all of them. The most important is that it's difficult to push the bonuses in a different direction without finding a lot of overlap with other ship(s) and/or getting far too powerful. For instance, if we dropped webs entirely and gave it some kind of range bonus for cap-warfare it ends up competing heavily with the Sentinel or Dragoon AND is likely too powerful. The current layout is very unique and while the range synergy isn't perfect, that certainly doesn't mean the ship isn't useful for powerful. On top of that, a big goal in this pass was to unify the themes across the entire faction line. You will see more of that when I can post the threads for cruisers and battleships, but wanting a set of bonuses that translates well to all three classes is valuable and this Cruor set does that well.

Most complaints about the Worm at this point seem centered around the missile bonus. As I've already said, I agree that it's a little weird to have a missile bonus on the Gallente skill, but there really isn't a good way out of this. If the drone bonus is on the Gallente skill you are essentially required to have that skill to 5 which we would rather avoid. As for having the missile bonus at all, we preferred giving the option of very high damage output to Guristas over giving more specialized drone bonuses that would either overlap with other ships or not be very useful. That certainly doesn't mean you are required to fit missiles and seeing Worms with Neutralizers rather than missiles wouldn't surprise me at all. Oh, and I wanted to mention that the Worm missile bonus absolutely DOES affect rockets.

At this point it seems that most people agree the new Sansha bonus is useful and powerful but some worry it may not fit Sansha flavor-wise. I'm not a huge expert on flavor of course, but from my perspective, Sansha really don't have a lot of flavor associated with their actual gameplay. Using lasers and being aggressive jerks seems like it covers the majority of what we know about them and I see no reason that an afterburner bonus can't fit into their character. I would also hate to give up a good gameplay design in the name of flavor unless it was extremely disruptive. I hope you Sansha loyalists can integrate this into your idea of how Sansha work without too much discomfort :)

Again, thanks for the discussion, it's helped a lot with pinning down some details on these 5 ships as well as the cruisers and battleships, which you will hopefully get to see before too long.

Hope I answered at least some of your questions.

I understand how the cruor is meant to be used (kite with webs until ready to close in to drain), I just doubt it works on larger ships if they end up getting the exact same bonuses.

CCP Rise, how about looking again at Sansha, the afterburner bonus will be useless on at least one of their ships, and the Phantasm is now forced to use one completely changing the current playstyle for the worse in my opinion.

I've been impressed in the past by how you have altered ships for the better after listening to feedback, and so I have faith you will always get to a good solution.

I've been editing the EveHQ database and come up with some rough designs of my own for what I think would be a much better direction for Sansha. I compared the stats against other ships of equal class and although a rought draft, these would fit in well to the current meta.

Also I'd just like re quote this as it was on what I based the concept of the proposals below.


Seeing as the Nightmare is the most contentious ship, I'll start by showing the rough concept for it which I have made.

Another turret slot is added bringing the ships damage very slightly over that of the current Vindicator, with pulses lasers matching blasters, and beam laser matching railguns.

Also another mid slot is added to make up for the missing slot, this also allows a greater shield capacity making the Nightmare one of the most survivable battleships if a full tank is fitted, base shield is lowered to make sure it will not be too powerful, although I was thinking perhaps to reduce it even further still.

Various base adjustments were made to the fitting and capacitor to allow reasonable fitting, although it will always be on a knife edge as should be the case.

Finally, speed is dropped and signature bumped up, to make this one of the slowest and largest signatured battleships, with MWD fitted it will go up to between 700 m/s and 800 m/s.

I predict it would perform very similar to a maurader, barring the fact that no bastion module can be fitted, and would become a powerhouse in pvp if you can work around its slow speed and agility, and balancing it's large capacitor consumption on a knife edge.


NIGHTMARE

Amarr Battleship Bonus:
7.5% bonus to Large Energy Turret tracking speed per level

Caldari Battleship Bonus:
4% bonus to Shield Resistances per level

Role Bonus:
150% bonus to Large Energy Turret damage

Slot layout: 7H, 8M (+1), 4L; 5 turrets (+1), 0 launchers
Fittings: 14800 PWG (+300), 740 CPU (+30)
Defense (shields / armor / hull) : 9000 (-735) / 8000 (-695) / 7800 (-460)
Capacitor (amount / recharge: 9800 (+2850) / 1025 (-130)
Mobility (max velocity / agility / mass ): 85 (-9) / 0.136 / 99300000
Drones (bandwidth / bay): 75 / 75
Signature radius: 420 (+20)


Also as posted previously, this is the matching concept for the Succubus.


SUCCUBUS

Amarr Frigate Bonus:
7.5% bonus to Small Energy Turret tracking speed per level

Caldari Frigate Bonus:
4% bonus to Shield Resistances per level

Role Bonus:
150% bonus to Small Energy Turret damage

Slot layout: 3H, 5M (+1), 2L (-1); 3 turrets (+1), 0 launchers
Fittings: 58 PWG (+14), 195 CPU (+20)
Defense (shields / armor / hull) : 650 / 550 / 540
Capacitor (amount / recharge / cap per second) : 450 / 210000 / 2.14
Mobility (max velocity / agility / mass / align time): 320 (-20) / 3.5 / 965000 / 4.68s
Drones (bandwidth / bay): 0 / 0
Targeting (max targeting range / Scan Resolution / Max Locked targets): 34km (+2) / 650 / 6 (+1)
Sensor strength: 16 (+3)
Signature radius: 38 (+5)


Finally the phantasm, I did not have too much time to play around with altering the stats, but from experience I would simply suggest adding an extra mid slot which was missing, and keeping it's damage at its current respectable level. The extra mid slot will allow it to perform it's role of webbing and scramming the enemy whilst still being able to fit a respectable shield tank.

I think these proposals would put Sansha in a very good place. I am not 100% on the Nightmare still, I think it may need its stats reducing slightly further, but this is simply a rough draft. And I hope these proposals may be of interest.

I like the idea for the Nightmare a lot- it'd make it a lot of fun to fly
I'd love to have it as a ship more fitting a slow, heavy hitter role.

(Also, "large", not "Small" energy turrets :P)

How do you know it will be useless? There are ways to make any of the three ships depend on speed and excel at it (case in point: Machariel). Yes, it's a drastic change of the current situation, but it's not unheard of. Laser boats in general have been gaining speed, so it's not completely unsurprising to see this either.



How popular are Rattlesnakes in pvp? Because that's essentially what you are proposing here, except for no drone selection and no spider tanking.

I'd argue that being a tankless 3 lowslot pile of poo actually does overlap with the EAFs, in that it's only good for blobbing soloers, or catching new players who don't know what the ship does.

"unify themes"
this had better not mean the other serp ships will keep their ridiculous web bonuses

what happens in honourable frigate battles when someone decides to web and orbit one of the worm's drones at 500m, or tracking disrupt it? I don't like this 2 drone thing, it's dumb.

abusing links and being immune to damage and running away from everything with your silly afterburner actually is not aggressive, it's the opposite.



I'm sure in a few months we'll be seeing dramiel +50 hull, succubus +0.01 inertia.

We just have to wait to test this ships on the test server.

It is not just a drastic change, it is a complete game changer if this goes ahead. Sansha would have just gone from being the slow heavy hitting monsters which they are right now, to becoming the best speed tanking ships in the game. At least save this for a Minmatar based race.

If the ship I proposed was available on tranquillity, it would be a very tough choice over that and a Maurader for battleship pvp, I can guarantee we would see it in a lot of fleet doctrines. Massive damage potential and difficult to alpha, also equipped with two high utility slots for either nuet/nos or RR. That would be a hell of a lot of fun to fly, and could live up to it's name, literally causing a Nightmare to it's enemies when they see one on dscan.

With the current proposal everyone will simply laugh when they see an anaemic afterburning Nightmare, and Sansha will be a pale shadow of its former self.

This has happened before, Sanshas used lasers AND missiles before Dominion and had an armor tank. And as I said, Amarr = slow is an old concept, these days they have some of the fastest ships in game.

you really should give them the extra 50. frigates in particular often cannot afford 30 CPU for a damage mod, and you just can't do damage rigs without 400.

(rigs and rig calibration costs could probably use their own expansion)