Jita Park Speakers Corner

Logi pilots are critical to almost all Eve playstyles.

High sec mission running corps, incursion fleets, wormholers, faction warfare, null sec fleets, etc. all rely on logi pilots as key components of their success and/or failure.

What specific ideas, recommendations, and opinions do you have regarding logi and their role in Eve.

The quiet, calm, and observant logi pilots would like to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for your responses.

This is an unpopular viewpoint, but my belief is that right now all logistics are too powerful . I say this as a pilot who flies primarily logistics in fleets.

Logistics is an important part of fleets, and it’s also an important and necessary role for a pilot to learn. But the problem with logistics now is that it is too powerful. While a single T1 cruiser might deal 300-500 DPS in brawl range, a single T1 logistics cruiser can mitigate up to 700 damage on a target with moderate resists. Under boosts, or with high resist tech 2 logistics/ships, this number becomes even more lopsided (for example, in our tengufleet, a single scimitar can repair some 3000 EHP/s before overheating). This advantage of logistics over damage means the relationship between logistics and damage is binary, you either have enough damage to break reps, or you don’t. In larger fleets, the power of logistics has made alpha extremely important; given “good” fleet comps like tengufleet, any target that catches reps will survive.

In this effect, logistics is a big contributor to the +1 problem. If the enemy fleet has X logistics, you have to bring at least Y amount of ships so you can either overcome their reps, or volley through their ships. If you have Y number of ships, you will wreak havoc on the enemy fleet. But if you have less than Y ships, you won’t even make a dent in the enemy fleet. You won’t drag enemy ships with you, you’ll just die in a fire. This creates the arms race scenario where you bring more to break his reps, he brings more to fight you, etc. If you don’t have enough logistics to tank their DPS, or enough DPS to break their logistics, you will have very little effect on the enemy, you might as well not even engage. The only GSF ships that died in that fight were 3 frigates, dictors, and 2 logi that drifted off anchor, not a single tengu came even close to breaking.

This isn’t even getting into the realm of capital logistics, where the immense buffer of capital ships ensures that any target will catch reps. I can’t fly capitals yet, so I’m not qualified to make a wholesome statement.

These are my impressions as a logistics pilot, however, I do not have the expertise to suggest a well-balanced change.

I agree for the most part, however i think the problem lies less in the numerical power of logi but in the overall weakness of hard ecm right now. If there were viable jammers or even a group of coordinated mauluses spreading damps effectively you essential take a chunk off the n dudes you have to bring to break people. A fleet of 70 for example might only have 7-9 logi, in a perfect world with coordinated ecm these could be taken care of by like 4 blackbirds (of course this would never happen cause the blackbirds as they stand now would get insta-popped) and fight with a much smaller dps force.

There is however something to be said for ECM being "anti-fun", but in their current iteration you only really ever see mass damps and sometime target painters on niche fleets and in either case the FC would probably prefer another dps ship rather then the ecm.

The problem with my idea is that of course if alliances see that ecm gets buffed to help counter logi they are just going to stack 250 of them on every fight. It really is a complex issue.

Logi is something that is great when you have quality people willing to fly it, and not so great when you don't and you end up against someone that does. In Gal Mil, we typically rotate logi pilots, because a lot of our people PVP to get on killmails, and flying logi is a sure way not to get on many at all. Sure you can assign drones to someone, but that guy goes down, you're repping someone else, and you don't have time to re-assign them, and then, well you get the picture.

As someone else mentioned i an earlier post (and this has been asked for MANY times) it would be really swell to have logi show up on killmails as an assist. This is not only for the ePeen enhancement of getting on more kills, but also because killboards can be an important intel tool, and seeing what kind of support someone is likely to have would be nice, such as seeing how many triage carriers are likely to be fielded while looking at a battle report on eve-kill.

I also think some awesome solo kills might not look quite so awesome anymore when people get to see how many logi were holding the guy up.

It'd be interesting to have a fleet display so you could see who other people in the fleet are targeting with effects, with filtering for the types. Possibly OP though.

Oh god! Escort missions!

Failing a mission because of dumb AI is the worst

Thank you for your comments.

It appears that most CSM candidates are in favor of nerfing logi ships. I'm sure many logi pilots will be happy to read this, because their role is not difficult enough as it is. Logi pilots often discuss how easy our role is in comms and yearn for representatives that want to make our gameplay tougher.

There seems to be support for logi killmails. That issue has been discussed several times, but does not affect gameplay in any way at all.

I respectfully suggest that you put a little more thought into your responses other than "logi r OP".

Here are just a few items that you might think about when actually trying to represent logi pilots with something other than a nerf bat.

Overview settings - There is an option for selecting ‘Logistics’ ships in the overview, but it only includes T2 logi ships, not the T1 versions. The ‘Logistics’ ships in the overview settings should include the T1 logi ships as well.

Fleet button to clear broadcasts - When a fleet member broadcasts for reps, they icon above their bracket turns on. There is no button to turn them off. Typically, the ‘In Position’ button is used in small fleets (WH, Incursions, etc.) to signal someone is no longer primary. But in larger fleets, this is impractical. We need a button to clear broadcasts and remove the icons from the brackets.

Broadcast icons on locked targets - Knowing what ships need reps is a constant struggle for logi pilots. Looking multiple places on the screen for the information. Ideally, the broadcast icon that appears over the icon would appear on the locked target icon, much like a projected effect does.

Drag names from Overview into Watchlist - When fleets form, logi pilots often set up their watchlists. Improvements to the UI have made this easier, but the simplest system would be being able to sort the overview by ship type and drag the pilots directly to the watch list.

100% should mean 100% - Currently some structures can show 100% when you mouse over them, when they actually still have some damage. This leads to confusion and frustration when bringing certain modules/structures online. An object should report 99% until they are truly 100% and have no damage.

I'd like to see the cap removed from the watchlist and icons added that show who has what negative/positive effects on them. These ions should be able to be filtered so that if I only want to see certain types of effects, I can.