Player Features and Ideas Discussion

a triple heat sink, heavy pulse zealot does 639dps with conflag.

a double BCS HAM sac with hammers does 674dps with rage.

post fit?
edited again cause was eft'ing without specs to V.

edit - yes, they guy i was replying to has clearly been trying to use his zealot for brawling. poor thing.



Dont think u have the zealot open. with scorch it gets 34km optimal with no range mods. oh and 456 dps.

Applied dps will be lower on the sac against most targets. Compensated for by having a stronger tank.

It would be more appropriate to compare the sac to another missile thrower.

I don't personally use the zealot much but they do have a fleet doctrine built around them so I can only assume the have a use in some situation. Fwiw hacs have about 50% more ehp via resists than t1. Any hac with a hp/level either rep or bulk is going to have some seriously difficult balance juggling to do.

Seriously the new mordus are what t2 caldari ships should have been. Looong range. High damage.

I wouldn't be against knocking their drone bandwidth down to 100 and mebe some of their drone space. Domi should outperform it as a sentry boat, I think.

I can't comment on the battleships but I can comment on the Ishtar Hac. There is a "minor" tweak that can be done, but requires 2 changes to happen.

1) Reduce Heavy Drone Bandwidth from 25 to 20.
2) Reduce the Bandwidth of the Vexor Navy and Ishtar from 125 to 100.

It stops (by chopping out 20% of the damage) the ishtar can do by making its bandwidth 100 (which is 4 sentry drones), vs 125 (which is 5 sentry drones), but does not decimate the Ishtar because it can still field a full flight of heavy drones.

The Stratios and the Myrmidon gain a damage output by having the ability to deploy another heavy, but still is restricted to deploying 4 sentries.

Yes the Ishtar is still a great brawler, kiter, etc, but now it loses 20% of its damage output when using sentry drones, but has exactly the same potential it has now using any other drone setup besides sentries. Ishtar is amazing, but the sentry cruiser needs to be reigned in.

I'd do that.

Updated: gila removed its at 20 now.

Your a bit late on the Gila, it only has 20 bandwith.

Fair enough points, but it's not *just* me who's hellbent on nerfing the ishtar. It's most people in the game who have flown or fought one, and have the presence of mind to realize that a cruiser that can do 500-600 dps out past 100km MIGHT be just a LITTLE overpowered, and could use a nerf.

If you don't believe me, try fitting one in EFT yourself with wardens or bouncers...or even gardes, and see how much dps you pull. 5 garde 2s (with range and damage mods, mind you) in space shoot out to almost 90km with 620 dps. Aside from the missile boats, which don't exactly count for much if you factor in damage application, there isn't a battleship in the game that can pull those numbers at that range. It is absolutely superior in every respect offensively, so either dropping the bandwidth down to 100 or dropping sentry dps wouldn't be asking too much, i don't think.

Yes he addressed them. I read his post. Nothing was solved by stating what they can and can't do. Sure, they have a long list of advantages and disadvantages, but the fact remains that they have abilities FAR in excess of their counterparts. Nowhere did I state that they were indestructible death machines and that drones are the holy grail of pvp and pve.

Let me put it this way...if they nerfed the range on sentries, either from the bonuses or the drones themselves, I would be completely fine with the ship. What I was saying earlier was about how overpowered it is with sentries specifically; Drones are a weird weapon system to begin with, and tend to mess things up for people in general since they follow a very different set of rules in combat.
Down in FW, we consistently maul with and get mauled by Tristans because of how strong they are as a primary drone platform. When they're launched at you, sure; you can deal with each of the drones as the come at you, or if you have friends you can wipe the floor with things pretty quickly, but they don't sacrifice anything from the parent ship to use bigger weapons. If they have a big drone bay and bandwidth, they can just field bigger drones. Small drone ships like frigates and destroyers are limited to a single drone weapon size, so they balance out pretty well. But above that with cruiser or larger, you have this absurd potential arsenal of excellent anti-frigate small drones to large, long-range attack platforms with sentries or brutal heavy drones that can turn you into a grease stain. Or the gecko, which is basically all heavy drone users use if they can field them.
The equivalent would be instead of having to use a mobile depot to swap my weapon systems on a cerb between fights, I could just magically swap them out from my cargohold. Their flexibility generally counterbalances the individual drones' vulnerability, as well as being a generally more efficient pvp weapon against slower or pinned targets due to the ability to swarm.

Now, I can make the same argument with missile in regards to damage projection, but it's bunk because drones have similar issues against fast ships...except when you can downsize on the fly if you have smaller drones in your bay. The fact remains if you look at it, that the ishtar is the most widely used HAC for the widest variety of tasks. it's simply better than its counterparts at what it does.

...I have been a front-line combat pilot in FW for roughly 4 years. You can stuff your personal opinion of my combat capabilities in the same place as your blind spots in this game that get you killed by things you don't know about, anticipate, or expect. I don't care either way since it's likely we won't run into each other, but you should check yourself when you bring the personal competency of the person you're debating into the discussion, because nothing constructive comes from making personal attacks. My personal preference for what I fly is a subjective decision for what I believe and work on in-game, and does not indicate objective ignorance of certain fields from nothing more than your extrapolation of my behavior from my killboard.

That being said, the TLDR version of what I stated earlier was that sentries on the ishtar shoot out too far for their damage and platform type. I will rest my argument on that because I genuinely feel from what I have seen and heard in the game over the years, especially since the rebalance, that sentry range and damage projection is overpowered, and should be dialed down. I will say no more on the subject with the ishtar, although I am more than willing to talk about the other ships.

u forgot how u can drop drones and then move as fast as u like to reduce incoming dps whilst leaving outgoing dps un affected.

what if it is the range, application and dps i have issue with? no other HAC can hit that hard, that far and with that much application. and then the ishtar can kite and brawl as well as the best of them too.

Id rather not nerf drones themselves as other drone boats are doing fine. and im reluctant to completely remove the sentry bonuses of the ishtar because thats what its for. a 100mbit drone bay takes away 20% of its drone dps, turning 780 ogre dps to 620, or 600ish bouncer/curator dps at ~100km to 500ish. thats still bloody decent.

it wouldnt be as useless as a drone fit proteus, as the drone fit proteus doesnt get the same range and application, or even damage bonuses. The myrm does just fine with a 100mbit drone bay with no range or application bonuses.

its only armour ishtars that dont have three or more DDA's, and they sometimes take sentry rigs instead of trimarks.

I said for killing their drones. Drone ships are unique in that they can be driven off the field by destroying their weapon system. I've personally seen and participated in fleets where 40-50 T1 BCs (Brutix/Harby) were capable of driving off a 30man ishtar/logi fleet. We couldn't catch them, we couldn't hit them or apply dps. We killed their drones, they had to run, we win and accomplish our other objectives. Killing drones works. To address:



Yeah that can work, probably easier in small roams than in big fleet fights though. So you're looking at a reload time of a minute or two while depots online.



Note the tengus and sniping battleships were said for the ability to kill off drones with free fire. The number of fleets I've seen where BSes had the logi to withstand the ishtar damage, but not the tackle to hold them down, or the dps to break the ishtar's logi, are too many to count. How many times have I seen these BS fleets give up or run because they can't kill the ships, when killing their drones would accomplish the objectives. I'm not lying when I say that a megathron can kill a sentry drone, and a lot of them firing at will can clear out a large number quickly. Even if the ishtars warp off, refil at depots, and come back, they have a limited number of drones.




In my opinion if you fly a HAC with less than AWU V you need to make training it to V a priority. It's a long skill sure, but HACs are T2 ships. You wouldn't complain that most HAC fits require T2 guns. You wouldn't complain that the FOTM mission fits require T2 large guns. You wouldn't complain that flying a T3 properly requires all subsystems at V. You wouldn't complain that faction pirate ships require too much SP or are too powerful.

And if lasers are super SP intensive at the moment, does that make Amarr HACs promote elitism too? Do Marauders, command ships, and BLOPs promote elitism? Does the ishtar promote elitism if you are a gallente pilot from birth, like me, and all of your training has always gone into gallente, and so that 9m specialized SP didn't require you to go out of your way? If the ishtar requires so much SP to fly properly, isn't its power justified somewhat?

And what is the problem with promoting some elitism? Thorax, Vexor, Domi, Megathron, Celestis, Tristan, Myrm and Brutix. Gallente has tons of ships that aren't terribly skill intensive to fly decently. Maybe not perfectly, but decently.

And if the SP is too much, I blame that mostly on drone skills requiring too much SP, since the rest of the skills are pretty much Core skills and racial cruiser V. Further, because of that being able to fly an ishtar helps you with every ship you will ever fly, as most of it is core skills, and drones of some sort are secondary weapons on nearly every ship in the game.

As for all of it's counters requiring a lot of SP? 200+ man proteus fleets usually require obscene numbers or obscene SP to beat. Supercap fleets too. Hell capital fleets too. If your entire argument is that T1 BS/BC/cruiser fleets have a hard time countering AHAC fleets, then I don't know what to say. I thought that was the whole point. High resist, high damage, high speed, low sig. That is literally every AHAC doctrine.

Don't let my sperging fool you though. I do agree the ishtar is powerful. I even think it might be a little bit too powerful, though I feel people like to overlook its weaknesses and view it through rose tinted glasses. However, I think it can be properly rebalanced entirely by messing with base stats, such as mass, base speed, raw armor/shield, cap amount/recharge, pwg, and so on. You don't need to kill its bandwidth or hull bonuses in order to kill its amazing mobility/tank/dps combo. You could tone it down tons while still leaving it powerful, versatile, fun, and specialized.