Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I want battleships to mostly bring what they have always brought, pain and durability. I'm all for letting HACs have damage mitigation hands down, and letting squishy ABCs exist, and mostly OK with t3s being able to get most of both at three + times the cost. But in my mind, baring capitals, battleships should bring the most pain, and be hard to kill until you get into the blobs which break anything.

Thank you, but I'm pretty sure that if the tears the first time, and the last dozen threads here weren't enough to get them to do it, no amount of forumwhining is going to. Also as getting the battleships and to that speed without using a single module or rig is trivial for a player with even medium deep pockets if you do not NEED some other implants to be able to play the game makes that a bad argument, as people have been unwilling to even consider bringing things slower than cruisers, and the buff makes it trivial to get them to frigate speed.

Dear James,
I promised you something different but with further reading I changed my mind and will just add a few comments.

While being viable, talking about tracking and other turret attributes will not bring us closer to what you want to achieve. So let me just give a few comments on the ships themselves.

Rokh:
While an excellent sniper with 425mm railguns at insane ranges of today, she lacks some mobility. If you forgo to fit a large cap booster you will cap yourself out with prolonged fireing of antimatter L, javelin L and spike L

Megathron:
You can do both with her, sniping and brawling and she can field a strong active tank but still lacks some mobility.

Navy-thron:
This would be the Megathron done right.

Navy Dominix:
Feels like a less agile Hyperion but doesn't lack any firepower.

Hyperion:
For short jumps and in a pure battleship field, she can hold her own with an unmatched active tank. I wouldn't recommend sniping with her though.
The speed and agility seems fine.

Apocalypse:
Here I have to admit that I don't have a very long experience with lasers but what I have seen so far is that both pulse and beam laser fits are "punished by their gun" so to speak.
She could be a tad more agile but the speed is okay-ish but both tech 2 pulse and beam laser crystals will cause more problems than their powergrid requirement.

Navy Apocalypse:
Better fitting, better everything. Doesn't suffer too much from shooting tech 2 crystals for a long period of time.

Navy Armageddon:
I like her. Good overall mobility, firepower is okay but still she suffers from shooting the guns for a long period of time, even more so with the bonuses.

Abbadon:
As you said, nice brick.
She is better suited for fitting lots of 1600mm plates and have an Archon behind her to give her capacitor and armor reps.
The capacitor is just sad and being a laser-boat - I got nothing..

Nightmare:
Also nice brick. Wait what?
Yeah, the Nightmare is one of the coolest looking ships in EVE but she could use some better engines. She is in dire need of more agility and a stronger afterburner bonus (not base speed).
An active shield tank and even just four turret still hurt the capacitor alot.

Large Laser Turrets:
My advice would be in case of dire capacitor needs, shoot with standard L only.
Anything that comes closer than 20km on beam laser ships will be the end of that fight.
Anthing that gets below 5km for large pulse laser and it webbed and scrammed, will make your large hull convert into a white triangle, unless it's a Nightmare.

Hybrid Turrets:
Large railguns will put close to the same pressure on any capacitor, unless it's the Naga or a Talos.
Large blasters don't have much capacitor problems, just range problems and tracking problems small and close objects.

Overall:
All battleships are in dire need of better technology. Meaning, all sensor resolutions should be in a range of 150-175mm.
By the time you may have a target lock on anything, you will probably have to upgrade your clone again.

This must be a terrible funny joke in the Island office but the Caldari invented technology and they have the sensor resolution of a galaxy cluster, they should have the highest sensor resolution of all ships in EVE.

What I can live with is warping with 2 AU/s on the way to action but what I cannot live with is the terrible brakes we have of the largest engines in New Eden.

S..............................................................l............................................................o...........................................................w...................................ing down in 6d5h45m. Please wait.

Weeks later and looking around on the grid.

WARP DRIVE ACTIVE.....................(hey I landed half an hour ago)...................................WARP DRIVE ACTIVE.....................................

One hour later..

Aaaah finally.

I cannot comment on minmatar ships or auto-cannons.

And as promised, I'll leave comments about missiles out of this.

Nothing to add just yet, but wanted ya to know that I'm keeping an eye on this thread...
Someone's got to make all these reworked Battleships and Battlecruisers after all.

--Gadget

As I have minimal experience with industry, and that mostly with building mods from dropped BPCs, this helps alot. Do you have general feelings on battleship and battlecruiser production as they stand?

This is something I agree with.

It is something I may have mistakenly skipped over, assuming that everyone already accepted the details of.

The BS has been made obsolete by cruisers and battlecruisers, at this point.
In almost any PvP situation where the tactics are based on mobility and the ability to react, they are not the best first choice for a group.

I see two paths for these ships, maybe even a combination, but I don't expect anything but the second option.

Option 1, CCP takes back the cruiser and battlecruiser aspects which have made BS use unattractive.

Option 2, taking the cues from the Tech 2 BS examples, we rethink the BS as an ambush predator styled vessel.
It's targets come to it, instead of it going to them.

The Marauder, by using bastion mode, locks itself down and stands it's ground as a fortified position.

The BlOps, by most practical use, avoids all direct contact and enables other ships to go places that were previously not cost effective to consider.

We don't have a mobility centric role, better performed by a BS than a cruiser.
I seriously doubt we want one, in fact.

Put simply, as a foundation for the BS concept itself, how exactly do we want to see these being used?

Too fat to do sub cap work where mobility matter a lot, not strong enough to do strategic jobs where cap are more effective.

Excellent thread and OP. Yes we all agree that BSs and BCs are now overlooked. I will add my voice to those saying the warp speed nerf to them was overdone. And most people seem to be asking for some measure of hp buff.

However, another aspect that seems to be getting less notice itt is the economics. When I started playing pvp in 2007 (on another character) a BS was around 90-120mil, and HACs etc were about 140-180. BSs got used then heavily for sniper BS fleets. Then came remote rep BSs. This BS usage continued even as sniper BS was killed with scan changes and range nerfs. They survived as relevant comps even with first the rise of sniper HACs and then even some usage with AHAC ascendancy.

But the one + two punch of increased price and warp speed has killed them. I don't miss the BC hegemony. Having chaep and easy to skill Drakes and Hurricanes everywhere was boring. But the old mixed BS fleets (whether sniper or rr) were nice to see.

When a BS costs 200+ mil and a HAC costs about the same of course the HAC makes more sense (warp speed and mobility reinforces that choice).

There is also the skill investment. Some folks say well a HAC should be more powerful than a BS because it is tech II. However, properly fitting a BS with large tech II weapons is about an equivalent sp investment and possibly more than training a HAC with tech II medium weapons. The sp investment argument holds more validity with BCs.

Anyway, yes lighten up the mobility nerfs on BSs, maybe throw some small measure of ehp their way as well. But also fix the economics of building the damn things. Looking for a target price of 150mil or so would help us see more BS competing against HAC, tech III, or now even CS fleets.

For small gang, a lone BS or BC should never be a tanking or applicable damage beast. It should rightly die if it gets mobbed by smaller ****.

I hope Fozzie et al are reading this thread

edit - oh also forgot to mention the blap dread hotdrop as a nail in the coffin for BS fleets. Maybe that is already being addressed with other recent changes.

Okay full disclaimer: I am a Fleet commander in Warp to me with Baboli and like the guy as a human being so i'm biassed as hell...

That said this feels "Correct". I like flying battleships, they are my weight class of choice in eve online. I dont mind them being lumbering brutes (what i like the legroom) and i dont mind them being tackle-able for people who may or may not have 1m isk to their name in an atron they got from the newbro program with a web and a scram they found in a level 1 mission.

That's all cool... you know "dont fly what you cant afford to lose"/HTFU etc. ad nauseum.

I wonder if given the name of the thread people have considered just letting **** bigger then (battle)cruisers warp without acceleration and deceleration. (not sure on the technical feasibility of this) It would let the BS get onto grid quicker and would give them a bit of a movement edge in regards to "oh f@*k a red warp".

I also like the idea of upping scanres on them in general Locking a frigate in 12 seconds with maxxed applicable skill is nice and all but wouldnt say 9 seconds also work? Would allow you atleast a glimmer of a chance to get the Atron barrling down on your ship with just enough transversal to be hard to hit...

Okay my limited pvp stories (*98% carebear talking*) I have had my best pvp fights in battleships, wormhole fights in spider -tanked-drone-dps-Armageddons (couple of domis and armor scorps thrown in for the lulz) where we fought off (and won against) 3:1 bricks of t3s with logi backup, or t2 cruiser roams and all the other things that supposedly "hardcounter" the BS as we all know them.

Now part of that was us using the wormhole to our advantage and locking part of their fleet out and such. But in my experience battleships can work in that type of configuration. Now my 8 man corp is hardly the guiding star of game balance but we managed to hold our own and were almost always isk-war green at the end. This -to me- suggest that if you make battleships better at tanking, either local or via some kind of spider setup, they become capable of stand up fights with the supposed hardcounters. Assuming you fly with a few guys who have their **** down to an art form (i was decent at best and i was by far the worst one in my corp at this stuff)

Ofcourse something like that might very well break nullsec blobs and lead back to the domain of the 1400mm fleets with some kind of baller tank on them, cannot speak to that. That said i at this time own 2 battleships, my incursion mach and a vargur i used to get jumpclone standings, i wish i had a reason to own more and actually use them. But at this time i just do not...

Sorry for stream of conciousness ranting but its the best i can do:)

Addendum: Why doesn't minmatar have a battleship with tracking bonusses? Even if you include pirates like the Mach you end up without a 1400 platform with a decent projection against non vindi-webbed targets.

This is what I was going for with the scan resolution.

By the way, if you are on SiSi people will use links and snake implants (the signature ones) and a linked interceptor takes 30 seconds to lock on in a Rattlesnake, Scorpion and Scorpion Navy Issue.

"The minute" you have a target lock, that ceptor is either out of range or yoloing circles around you.

In the battleship changes threads other and I did say that increasing the scan resolution to the range of 150-175mm on all battleships (all the things at level V) will not suddenly make them op or breake EVE.

What happened then was that they more or less increaded and decreased the ehp on some ship to bring them "closer together".
The idea behind it wasn't bad but the execution left some questions like, so my boat has less ehp for some higher top speed and will cost twice as much