Player Features and Ideas Discussion

And yet ishtar fleets will still dunk all of those ships in fleet.

Do you really think everyone uses them because they're not the best?

There's a simple reason everyone uses them so prolifically. It's 2014 drake blobs on steroids.

Sure, when you over simplify things like that they look great. But why aren't Cerberus fleets being used to counter ishtars? Soon as you turn off the MWD heavies barely scratch and if you go for hams the Ishtar will just run circles around your shorter range. How about zealots? They've got very nice range with the hull bonus and beams, close to if not better than sentries. However you won't get anywhere near as much damage in matter how you fit it. So munnins should be the counter right? Nope. Artillery is great for alpha fleets but they are too fragile and their range is shorter unless you sacrifice alpha damage, which means you need more munnins. Don't even look at the eagle or Deimos. Neither can effectively get the same dps at the same range or tank enough (while keeping proper speed) to get in close enough to use higher dps ammo/guns (which is still a huge step behind sentries) to do anything useful.

interesting although perhaps a 7.5% ROF bonus would be better .. less alpha from OP Artie fits ... so a mini mach basically ...
would certainly need more mobility though..

The eagle does what better? Tank maybe? And I geuss having most of the face cards could be considered stacking the deck.

So why does the Ishtar do almost twice as much damage at similar ranges? Wardens get about 100km optimal with 45km falloff and eagle gets 135km optimal with 15km falloff. In fact at pretty much every range the Ishtar gets better damage and tracking at pretty much every range pattern. Why is a ship specialized and bonuses for long range dps so easily outclasses in every category? This is what's unbalanced. This is why the other HACs see less use. Why use anything else? The Ishtar can most likely do it better. And you may say "destructible weapon system" but when you actually take a look at how easy it is to negate this, even Rise understood it wasn't as powerful an argument. Ever tried killing 700+ sentries with a 10-30km spread that will just be replaced 2 more times? And I really doubt having 5m/s really has any major arguing points when claiming that being that much faster compensates for the much larger discrepancies between the two.

The alliances use Ishtar doctrines because the ship is overpowered, and they have some of the best theorycrafters in the game designing their fleet compositions. Those people learn to recognise an OP ship.

I love flying the Ishtar in everything from solo PVP to ratting in hostile space. That does not stop me realising the ship is hugely overpowered at the moment. (As is its brother the Gila, but that doesn't have the fleet applications the Ishtar has, so the brokenness there is harder to notice).

I still think the best way to declaw the Ishtar for now is to remove all bonuses to damage application from sentry drones. Let it have the best heavy drone damage application of any ship.

It is not only about DPS. The Eagle has a much more formidable tank while being able to apply damage at a much further range.

I still stand by my previous post from a while ago on how to balance the Ishtar - because drones are the problem not the Ishtar itself. However, someone countered with the fact that Carriers are immune to EWAR, which is just freaking silly. Plus my solution, while it would balance out all drones in a more permanent way rather than this "quick band-aid and hope the problem goes away" approach, requires a lot of work. So, now I'll propose a quicker, easier solution to all this that can be done entirely within the time of the Hyperion release.

Someone else put forth a proposal that would work quite well. Cut the tracking of sentry drones by half, or even down to 1/3 of their current form. I'd even be okay with upping the range of the sentries by a bit to compensate.

But this, in itself, isn't enough. Because the devs hiding behind "oh but it's a destructible weapon system!" doesn't mean much because it's neigh impossible to remove sentry drones from the field in any meaningful fashion. You know how riot police use water cannons? Saying sentry drones are destructible therefore "deal with them", is like saying to someone "take an umbrella to your next protest, that'll keep those water cannons at bay".

So, we have to make the concept of destroyable sentries meaningful. And I think this will have a three-part solution. 1: it would help to balance out Ishtars. 2: It would alleviate the problem with Carriers carrying sentries until CCP wises up and removes that option. 3: We're going to make the Eagle useful by giving it a Niche.

For the record, Eagle still needs at least a 15m^3 drone bay, but that aside...

Chop the hull, armor, and shield points of sentries down where a medium rail turret can one-shot it.

Eagle currently has 5 turret slots and the range to use them against sentries. Most boats can only drop 5 at a time. I sense a balance in the force...

Sentries, with a lot less tracking, a bit more range, and almost no HP, MUST be used as long-range sniping platforms. Eagles become a part of fleets to reach out and smack sentry guns at range because no other medium platform will have the optimal range, mobility, and tank to close in on them quick enough to get 'em before popping. And this new nerf would provide the necessary balance to those carrier fleets. You can keep dropping those sentries man, but there's 200 of your carriers and 300 Eagles on this side, and we can wipe out all of your DPS before you can do anything meaningful with those sentries. Or, you know, you can deploy fighters.

Until then, calling out "destructible weapons is totally a downside!" is rather meaningless (and an embarrassment to the one saying it) since each sentry gun has a lot of hit points and the time you waste attacking one, all of them are hitting you. The only real way to take them out, that I've heard mentioned so far, is Stealth Bomber runs, which only work in null (so low-sec Ishtars are unaffected), and are way too difficult to organize and pull off, compared to the incredible ease of organizing a roving gang of sentry Ishtars.

The upside is that sentry drones are still quite usable, even in that form. PvE is perfectly fine, even buffed a bit if you go ahead and up the optimal like I suggested. And if you're circling your sentries, you can scoop them up when they come under attack, like you should be doing anyway. PvP with sentries becomes trickier obviously, but still doable once you take out the enemy support. You know, just like how battles are supposed to go.

Yes, I know I'm about to be flamed to hell and back for saying all this, but with the sentries having all of the insane advantages that they do, they have to have at least one major downside and they don't currently have that. So this would make a good fix until drones are balanced as weapon systems properly. When drones take up CPU and PG, take capacitor to use, and are effected by EWAR on the host ship, we can have another discussion about giving them their hitpoints back.

Unfortunately I am not allowed to link kill mails. But open dotlan and go to Vehan or Y9G-, there are some dead Ishtars, who died against other ship types.

Remember things can still be overpowered whilst not immortal.

And the point about the other HACs is whilst they edge (and it is edge) the ishtar in one or two areas each, the ishtars package is still simply better. i.e. the minor disadvantage in a select area is still more than outweighed by what the ishtar overall brings to the field.

You are welcome to kid yourself further that it's still not an overpowered monster. I'll still fly them in fleets because there's little point in using anything else when it's not a kitchen sink.