Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It's one of the only t1 frigates I've seen used effectively for spidertanking.

For certain values of effective.



Speed rather than fitting seems like the obvious candidate. Despite nominally being a combat frigate, a Rifter is essentially an attack frigate in terms of weight class. It's getting a minor buff, but even with that, an AB 200mm plate rifter is going ~1150 m/s, which is about 200 m/s slower than the slasher with a similar configuration and 25 m/s over the present state of things. Not that the Rifter should be as fast as the Slasher, but I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that it should be significantly faster in relation to other combat frigates than it is (as a point of comparison, I believe that Incursus fit you posted is almost exactly the same speed as the 200mm plate rifter is now).

Correcting a quick typo, the original post had listed +75m/s velocity for the Navitas, it's actually +80m/s

As pointed out by a corp mate, I'm not really a fan of how the caracal's ROF bonus interacts with the RLML's clip size. I think a damage bonus would be much more appropriate, as it actually increases your damage output before you need to reload. The ROF bonus simply decreases the amount of time until you need to reload.

For that matter, the Bellicose could use a similar treatment.

That would be a nerf to HAM fits and the ten guys still using Heavies in PvE.

The 5% ROF bonus increases damage by 33%. So if it were replaced with a 5%/level Damage bonus, HAM fits would see an 8% reduction in dps. I don't know why it must be a 5% / level bonus though, as a 6% or 7% or more roundly 7.5% may all be reasonable.

The problem with balancing the punisher and the rifter is that an extra midslot counters the utility high. Mid slots allow range control while the nos/neut require said range control. Compare rifter vs slasher or punisher vs incursus. An both cases an extra web wil nullify a nos or a neut.

Agreed -- Breacher now gets the same problems as rapid launchers -- not being able to finish off ships before a reload & if those ships can rep...you lose. At least a Caracal with 5 rapid launchers can finish off a few smallers ships before reload.
Maybe you give the Breacher a 10% bonus to magazine capacity to at least offset time between reloads?



If instead the reload issues is a CCP attempt to move the necessity for fleets down to noobland...well I think you need to add some more obvious incentives (e.g. 10% fleet bonus to NPC & PVP bounties due to multi-source confirmation of kills) or people will try solo anyways and just conclude the games sucks and the hardcore will just wait until they can skip frigates.

and torpedo charge volume and/or launcher capacity

**** the 'traits'. if it needs more damage, give it a larger damage bonus.

A few people have pointed out the ROF bonus (mostly relating to the Caracal) - is a problem when you have variable reload times. This is one of the bigger issues that was introduced with the Rapid Missile Launchers in Rubicon - where the reload time is 40 seconds (now 35). Until we fix that, a ROF bonus is distinctly worse than a straight damage bonus.

For the Cruiser level, this is where the Scythe Fleet Issue and Osprey Navy Issue have an advantage over the Caracal/Caracal Navy Issue for damage application with Rapid Light launchers. You can see the 200+ page threadnaught on RLML/RHML for more discussion on that - we don't need to get into it again.

The ammo swap problem introduced by the Rapid Launchers hasn't been fixed yet, and from CCP Rise's last response on the subject, looks like its going to be delayed due to development resources.

If we're already talking about tweaking other stuff to balance the ROF bonus (magazine capacity, reload time), I'd say it's pretty undesirable compared to a straight damage bonus. This obviously doesn't carry over to the Breacher since there's no rapid launcher, but we do run into the same problem during fights where you're stuck in reload more often.

Can someone run the math on how a +7.5% damage bonus/level would compare to the +5% ROF bonus on the Breacher?