Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You have got to be kidding me.




Yeah, like not being able to fly any ship that doesn't outrange an Ishtar with two DCMs. Yeah, it's totally fine if one single ship invalidates dozens of others from even being remotely viable. The rest of those ships are just fine being fodder.

I think the Eagle could use a bigger damage bonus and perhaps a 15m3 drone bay to help deal with smaller prey. There have already been threads about just the Eagle, but it boils down to the fact that it doesn't do anything that isn't already done (and done better) by cheaper ships in the Caldari line, and forget on the HAC level. The speed change that is proposed does nothing for it.

I think the oft-proposed idea of removing the sentry bonuses from the Isthar, and simply applying drone bonuses to heavy and below, is a good start, but there is an excellent point made (many times over now) that sentry drones are broken in their current state, and a HAC that uses and bonuses such a weapon simply amplifies a pre-existing problem.

But the reason sentries are broken is complex and fixing them might, might mean breaking the current ship balance or other fundamental parts of the game. What other weapon system do you know of, uses precisely zero powergrid and cpu? How do you balance a weapon system that allows the ship to use all of it resources towards tank? How do you balance a weapon system that operates regardless of ECM status effects on the ship? How do you balance a weapon system that can be spread out to form it's own blob which makes speed tanking the tracking nearly impossible (remember this problem from the tracking titans and caps super threadnaughts)?

The answer is simple. Drones essentially exist outside most game mechanics. They are so broken that it could be argued that CCP needs to have an intervention staged in their honor. The balances that keep other systems in-line, even if not equal, do not really involve drones. You want to balance the Ishtar, then you need to bring drones into the fold that keeps everything else in line. Keeping a special set of circumstances that only effect drones hasn't worked, and will continue to not work long after the HAC pass (cue the end speech from "Crimson Tide" here).

The Ishtar might not even need a nerf unto itself. But until drones are fixed as a system, these problems will continue to exist. The Ishtar isn't a problem, it's a symptom. People here are referencing slowcats and old domi doctrines that existed and will continue to exist in a broken state even after the Ishtar nerf. So why treat a symptom instead of the problem?

I'm not going to claim to have the definitive answer here, but I'll repeat some ideas I liked that I've heard in the past (and some in this thread).
1: All ECM's need to start functioning against drone carriers. A jammed ship loses it's signal to the drones makes sense. Let's implement it. Tracking disrupters should also translate over to drones. If people could use a tracking disrupter to cut the range of Ishtar sentries we would not even be having a discussion on Ishtar nerfing. This topic also carries over to the next one because....
2: Drones currently don't use ammo. That's fine. They need that to function in the game. But you know what else doesn't use ammo? Lasers. You know what they use as ammo? Cap! Drones should use the host ship's cap. That would mean using energy drain would be a good tactic to use against drone ships. This just happens to translate well over to the next point...
3: Drone assign. I've never used it myself, but it seems like a terrible idea in the first place. But hey, CCP hasn't gotten rid of it yet, but if the hosting ship had to provide the cap for these drones to fire, suddenly being the trigger ship is a bit more nuanced.
4: someone once suggested re-working the entirety of how drone bays work. With hull bonuses for increased capacity or reduced fitting use, drone bays could be high slots. And as we have small, medium, and large weapons that take up more fittings, so could the hanger bays. Of course this would mean every ship would need at least one utility high to bring that option back...but hey, more fitting options and choices and balances in EVE sounds like a good thing to me. Like I said before, with drones taking up no fitting at all, that leaves everything for propulsion and other forms of tank. That's why most drone ships are broken in the first place.

There's a lot you can do to balance drones, but so long as they exist outside of the current weapon norms, any measure is half-butted at best and won't work. And I'm not saying any of the above ideas are perfect in their current iteration, or that we necessarily need to implement everyone of them. But I think this is a good starting platform. We start here, tweak as necessary (especially with shorter release schedules), and it can work to make EvE a lot better.

And by "solid" you mean essentially relegated to missions, incursions and null-sec fleets...? Battleships need a serious buff to overall hitpoints to even begin to offset the various nerfs - in particular, the huge hit to warp speed. You can solo in a strategic cruiser or command ship - but it's basically suicide to venture outside of high-sec in a battleship.

Somebody over there coined the phrase: drones as a primary weapon system and they keep doubling down on it

The suggested setup for the future tempest suggests it will have more viability for hellcat fleets, and will no longer be laughing stock when a pilot attempts to bring one to a fleet because lower HP, damage; Tracking is the only advantage it has over other BSs.

And be able to vaporize smaller ships, yes interceptors and escape capsules and small drones orbitting you at 0m with 10 billion m/s.

They are battleships, make them behave like them.

If someone from the US-Navy would read this and imagines a small jetski attacking a battleship, he would just order someone with a minigun to sink him - ZEE END.

In EVE one Crow ganks an Apoc and makes fun of him in local..

Ditch sentries from the Ishtar, HACs balanced.


An open letter to the sov folks,

the baseprise of a HAC is 42m isk, not 400 million. /Letter

Please leave the Tempest alone. But the Mega should get a nerf to tracking. Maybe swap out the 7.5% tracking bonus per level to 5 percent damge per level or 10 % to drone damage or hp/speed.

Can T1 BS hulls get a dps increase (even if its a minute one) across the board? It feels like a lot of cruisers and battlecruisers can get really close to comparable dps to some T1 BS, but without the drawbacks BS have such as low maneuverability, horrible tracking, long locktimes, etc. Attack Battlecruisers and HACs outclass BS in the sniper category and it just feels like all the drawbacks outweigh the advantages by far.

The Ishtar itself is not the whole issue it is also sentries. As a BS sized weapon system and a rate of fire at 4 seconds that is part of the reason it is overpowered. Other long range BS class weapons have a rate of fire from 9.5 to 40 seconds. This is constant applied DPS between targets. You also have the lack of reload time obviously for drones. Stepping the rate or fire up to someplace between Tachs and Howitzers may be something to put on paper.

There's been a call for this from the time that the rest of the sub-capitals got their balance pass. Battleships were left in the dust. Look at the KBs, look at low-sec, null-sec, look anywhere except PVE content and you'll find that battleships are rarely used anymore. Ships and fits that don't perform don't get used, they don't get kills, and they don't get blown up.