Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi James,

I currently use 1 hyperspatial rig on geddons to at least try and keep up with BC's. The idea however of giving away low slots - and 2 of them at that ... well no. No way. Plus the draw back on the rig is CPU ffs.


But to answer your question if there was a default buff to raw HP that balanced out the loss using the hyperspatial rigs then I would fit them.

James please read this, it's a point I've been trying to make all along, but I hadn't found quite way to put it together.

I think that you'd have to see a somewhat larger EHP bonus than 10% to achieve the desired effect here, unless CCP decided to unveil larger sizes of plates and extenders along with buffing CPU and grid to use them.

I know drawing analogies between ships with differing roles is risky, but in the case of the only really viable current battleship doctrine in use, the napoc doctrine, the EHP difference between apocs and napocs is what makes the doctrine work. Incoming dps is often so large because of the ships slow speed and large signature radius that to take advantage of the repping power of a logi wing the ships have to have enough ehp for the first reps to land, and in the case of max tank doctrines, its pretty substantial.

A well skill character can have 155k EHP before boosts with an apoc, and 255k with a napoc, and napoc FCs often require their pilots to use t2 rigs, with faction energized membranes being quite common and pushing the ehp difference even higher. That's a pretty wide gap, but that difference is what makes the doctrine possible; and even then incoming DPS to a napoc fleet is much higher than it is for a tengu or hac fleet, requiring a much larger logi base to support a given number of dps ships. This is what I think of as a fairly linear increase in ship power.

Now, lets consider the napoc I've described and compare it to the eagle. As it stands right now, an eagle does about the same damage and has almost twice the range with 25% better tracking using navy antimatter compared to navy multi, has a longer engagement envelope (longer locking range and optimal of long range ammo types), can be made to be cap stable in a fleet fit (which can be significant.) Offensively the only real edge that the battleship has is a bigger alpha strike.

Defensively the eagle has less than half of the ehp of the napoc, but at the same time it has a little more than half of the signature radius and is a little less than twice as fast as the napoc. Overall, the eagle can take a couple less bombs than the napoc, but is much more able to avoid being hit and it has a higher resistances, which is significant when logistics begin landing reps, as it means it takes less damage overall and requires fewer logi pilots.

Battleships need to have a pretty substantial bonus because the effects of signature radius, speed, tracking, and resistance scale together multiplicativley. A lower signature radius amplifies the effect of higher speed, which in turn together amplify the effect of higher resistances. They all factor in together- it's not just ehp and dps. I really want people to understand this. A triple variable on a ship feature like tank has led to a runaway, it's part of why t3s, and tengus in particular, are so insane, and why battleships are so terrible.

When Im flying through wormholes deep into enemy space on the other side of EVE it does become problematic on calling for help. Thanks to this patch roaming is getting fun again.



This attitude is why you don't do well with battleships.

Exact reason why I never used anything other then EMP, Phased Plasma or Fusion. And yea, I did test this stuff with my damage analyzer shooting stationary ship with 1 gun on different ranges with different ammo and conclusion is that each time short range ammo does better, even when ship is orbiting at range.

My main is in a busy part of nullsec and can say that there has been a lot more activity in our region of space and people are coming here from the far corners of eve via wormhole connections. I agree that it's been a lot of fun lately. I even see goons down here every few days, they even brought a hawk fleet (!) a little while ago.

I also agree, even if I don't think battleships are the optimum choice, that they can still be fun, and while there's a time for being a little more serious, the EVE experience for me is really about fun per hour, so I still yolo them from time to time.

Hi James,

So if there was a base increase to the HP of BS that would give us a CHOICE to either fit trimarks or hyperspatial rigs that would be fantastic. It would mean that I could chose to either take a hit on EHP or warp speed.

Unlike what we have now which is to just leave it behind or shoot myself from a titan....


So yeah the butt hurt would lessen with a general buff to either the base armor levels or base shield HP.

Not too worried about the CPU draw back on the hyperspatial rigs, I dont like it but can work around it with fitting choices. Its the loss of the trimarks, the slave clone or the low slot damange/tank mods which I find particularily offensive.

Cheers for keeping this topic rolling.

+1

Battleships simply suck to fly as they are now. You shouldn't have to gimp your rigs or clone implants with ascendancies just to undo the inherent suckage that exists today in these hulls now.

I have an inventory of gorgeous battleships I would love to make more regular use out of. Why don't I? Because it SUCKS to simply fly them four or five jumps, and when you do get there there isn't a big benefit over a HAC/T3 that can get there in much less time.

At a time when EvE is staring down the barrel of competing with twitch-flying games like Elite:Dangerous, having a sub-capital class of beloved ships that maneuver to battle in slow motion is like saying "we don't need to stop selling buggy whips, cars will never replace the horse and buggy!"

F

Agreed for the most part. May I suggest an agility buff for the Raven, either inertia buff or mass reduction, whichever seems more agree-able.

james,

I agree with most of this. Good work putting it together and good analysis. here's my 5c.


Warp speed
From my POV, one of the biggest problems with BS and BCs is the warp speed. It just takes so long to even land on grid...its a good 5 seconds between when you saunter on to grid and when you can even begin to lock a target...with your crappy native 100mm scan res. All your targets are now either kiting, have you scrammed, are gone, or you are suffering EWAR, neuts, DPS before you can even begin affecting things. Compare this to any frigate or most cruisers warping on to grid - you just appear as if by magic where you need to be, and can begin affecting the outcome of the battle instantly.

This infers that scan res and the warp onto grid is at least as important as the warp velocity. Even if the current warp velocity stays the same, the entry and exit from grid should be sped up significantly, so that BS and BC can begin making an impact.

in wormhole fights, we prefer Enyos because it's faster from wormhole to fight over any engagement warp, and we try to leave BCs and BS at home because the stupid warp speed of the slowest ship munting up everyone else's warp speeds. This costs us so many kills even when we want to bring a Geddon along.

Turret tracking / sig
Your analysis doesn't address the real meta of brawling, which is sig vs tracking, and focuses entirely on optimal and falloff and DPS. Even in range engagements, tracing and sig are equally important for landing applied DPS deep in falloff (napocs, Arty, etc).

The meta of the game at the moment is entirely based around sig-track formulas. Sig tanking is the prime importance as the guy above pointed out in the Napoc vs Eagle example. This is even more important in small gang and brawl environments, where the "get at 500 and AB"answer is used on every single BS hull, ever. Except fully EWAR supported cruise boats, and Rattlesnakes, where Geckos murder you.

The reason you only ever see Geddons, Domis and the odd Phoon is the capacitor warfare capability of large neuts, which work out to disruptor range and wreck everything except drone, missile and projectile boats. Given Ishtars are an exception, this basically is why cruiser meta has moved to drone boats (Nexors, Gilas, ishtars, Prophecy) because they do equally well vs other cruisers, and against a neuting BS, you only have to try to get out of range, not worry about losing all your DPS because the drones keep trucking.

So what's the problem? Tracking and gun resolution. Even if a gun can track appropriately, the sig resolution of the gun still means that against low-sig opponents it lands a fraction of the DPS. Get in at 500 on a BS without webs on you and you can passive tank in shield in an armour ship.

Solution: Fix large gun tracking, across the board. I'd say you need gun res increased 50% and tracking +15% across the board. There's no fear of 1350DPS Navy Geddons when you're in a sig tanking setup.

BS EHP/Sig
The 'give BS 10-30% more EHP" idea is flawed, i think. It does nothing except allow their use in larger fleets where they can survive long enough to land reps from logi. In any other situation, they just take 10-30% longer to die when outclassed by ishtar/gila/Nexor fleets they can't hit, can't track and can't apply DPS to.

I won't say no to more EHp, but i won't use a ship that's got a sig the size of a whale, slow as mud, and incapable of projecting and applying DPS, no matter how much EHP it has.

Like I said, properly constructing doctrines basically boils down to sig, ehp, damage projection and damage application. EHP is good, but without any other benefits, BS will remain where they are - mostly useless.

True, maybe that was a perception thing but last Monday on SiSi even with links the Raven felt like she could use a tiny mobility improvement.



Yes dear!
Hence my thread from last month with the title "We need better brakes". I can only hope that we get something like this done.

Thing is, I can live with the 2AU/s warp speed on battleships but I cannot live with the time we appear on grid and are still in the process of slowing down when ceptors or other stuff is already kiting us, waiting to lock us and we start locking target but the second we can lock something to shoot at, we are going down