Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Howabout separate fleet, wing, and squad boosts into meaningfully different categories?

Currently fleet boosts are rather overpowered as one pilot can offer very significant bonuses to as many as 256 pilots including themselves. Squad boosts, on the other hand, are pretty underpowered because the boosting ship gives up a large chunk of its potential output to instead boost no more than nine other pilots, and this comes at the further cost that the squad members cannot even receive the booster bonuses if a wing or fleet booster already has the same boost type covered. So most squad boosters don't even fly a booster ship and instead just use their leadership skills for passive boosts.



My proposal is to allow all three boost tiers to stack on top of one another, but to reduce wing boosts to half effectiveness and fleet boosts to 1/4th effectiveness. Furthermore, there should be range limitations: squad boosts should apply only on-grid, wing boosts could carry across the whole system, and fleet boosts could operate through any systems within a range given in light years. This would allow a fleet commander to provide boosts to several parts of a fleet that are spread out, while the strongest boosts would only be available by squad commanders immediately present with their squads.

The end result of this is that fleets will be able to have slightly stronger net boosts, but it will come at the cost of a higher level of organization and a higher cost of ships fitting ganglink modules due to the squad commanders being the most important part of the links,

I think it's a good idea to roll out a balance pass along with the update, put a bunch of things together at once. There's not much point in only putting them on-grid when we already have the tools and experience to make a better composite right off the bat as soon as the on-grid code is complete and functional.

So I need to get three linkalts to boost my *solo* ship?

If anything, make links weaker when used in context of a wing or even fleet, since right there one dood flies a doubleplated damnation with a painter, but leave small gang intact.

At the moment, forcing links on-grid will change the servers into molten slag.

So ... pretty drastically.

Would be a nice way to shake it up.

I like the idea of FC being able to do a weak link but across multiple systems. This would allow more fluid engagements instead of "ok well they moved system, lemme get our links in there first before we engage" then wait for 'em to get safed up, etc etc. Meanwhile multiple fleets sit there giving each other dirty looks while waiting on 1-3 pilots (usually just alts anyway) to move around into position.

Not so sure about wing command boosts though. As a dude who spent the better part of a year on maxing out leadership skills, I'd be pretty dissapointed if it got nerfed into the ground. Or a "remap" of leader skills in each tier, but allowing people to re-use invested SP elsewhere if they changed their mind.

I figure forcing links to move on-grid will change the servers into slag because CCP Fozzie said so himself. They can flip the switch at any time and force links on-grid but doing so will currently melt the servers and set the hamsters ablaze in their glowing-hot hamster wheels.

OP, nothing says your squad leader can't fly a CBC with a single link in its utility high slot. Go check out the SkyCap Drake thread in the military section of your alliance forums. I distinctly remember posting a viable 1-link Drake there when I was in TEST. The same principal can be applied to pretty much any CBC with sufficient fitting available.

Um that wouldnt happen. People would still wait for all the link alts to get into position.