Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Can we please hurry and get the nerf to either bombs or bombers? Back in November CCP was considering making cloaked ships able to decloak each other again, then went back on that because people complained. The biggest factor in making battleships nearly non-existent in null sec is bombs, as much as people may complain about the 2au/s warp speed (and it does suck). Bombs are a completely broken mechanic because it is possible for 7-8 bombers to land cloaked on grid, decloak, fire, then warp off and in less than 13 seconds be able to wipe out an equal or greater number of ships. Of all the ships in EVE they are the only ones capable of doing this, and it is specifically against battleships, and to a slightly lesser extent battlecruisers.

In their other role as small torpedo boats there is no issue with bombers, typically for hot drops or to a lesser extent roams and structure bashing. They are small, inexpensive ships that are relatively easy to train into and do good damage to large targets. Also in their role as torpedo boats they may or may not fit a cloak as it is not used in an offensive manner like with bombing runs.

Over the weekend I got a few other people together to do a battleship roam because I miss the old days before bombs when I actually got to use my Tempest, and despite the relatively short notice I actually got a significant number of people who were also excited about going out and shooting stuff with slow lumbering battleships instead of the typical null sec meta of only cruisers, destroyers, and frigates. Shortly after we set out, people on intel channels heard that we had battleships in the area they quickly formed an 8 man bomber fleet and ambushed us. Thankfully we were sitting on a gate and most of us jumped out in time so we only had 1 loss, but it speaks to how overpowered bombs are against battleships when a 40 man fleet with about 25 battleships and battlecruisers has to be concerned about being wiped out by 8 guys in ships that are at best 1/10th the value of the opposing fleet.

There are a number of things that could be implemented to reduce the effectiveness of specifically bombs while not nerfing bombers in their other roles.

• Actually go through with the plan to make cloaked ships decloak each other so that there is some additional warning either with active D-scan vigilance while they are in warp or seeing a cluster of bombers land on grid in your overview to give you a few extra seconds to have anti-bomber ships try and knock out some of them or give battleships extra reaction time to spread out and avoid damage. Proximity decloaking would 90% of the time only affect bombers that are clustered and preparing to do a bombing run and it would only be a minor hindrance to other ships that fit cloaks.


• Make bombs do less damage as it radiates out from the center of the impact zone. This would make it so that bombs aren't the current 30km AOE nuke that can wipe out every subcap of a large enough sig radius in the entire blast zone. Doing decreasing damage as the blast radiates outward from the impact zone would also make accuracy important for doing maximum damage against a specific target.


• Make it so that there is a firing delay after decloaking of some type, either bombers have to have a target locked to fire, or a flat delay after decloaking.


• Making defender missiles a point defense tool to counter bombs/ allowing small ships to target bombs and shoot them.

maybe make it easier for battleship to lock bomb itself and shoot it down by increase bomb sig rad to 600m?

it is my understand that bomb need 12 sec, and if sensor is fast enough you may able to shoot them off.

yes it takes 12 and it takes under 10 for your MJD to activate




however i do think you should be able to target bombs but it should only be practical with frigs or desis not battleships themselves

And people might finally have a reason to not fly 200 of the same ship.
The horror.

Thing is, anything the OP suggests makes bombers impossible to use, and that's bad.

with a recalibration delay on the bomb launcher, they don't become impossible, merely harder (assuming the right balance is struck - obviously a 120s recalibration would make them impossible to use)

I would concede that in big fleets if defenders could defend against bombs that might completely castrate bombers...

however, OP is not wrong in that there is too little risk for too great reward in using them (too much DPS and virtually impossible to counter if piloted half-well)

This i like

-Point of impact = full damage (sig radius dependant ofc)
- Shockwaves = could have a delayed damage, speed based say 1km/s 25% less damage per 10km's, this would give you a chance too burn too a safer distance too take less damage, or potentially outrun the explosion entirely.

The decloak doesn't make them impossible, I'll admit, just much, much harder to use in anything that even resembles a co-ordinated fashion, which is how you HAVE to use them to fight large numbers of battleships. People would, most likely, not be using them the way you think though, as any warning at all is enough fr the dictors to get in place, the anti-support to overheat SEBOs etc etc. You'd certainly never see another fleet wiped out by ~12 waves of bombers again.

Less damage by range again makes them useless against the only real target they have - blobs. Bombs are not used against a specific target, that is not what they are for. Bombs are used to blow up blobs. If they can't do that, there's no point to them.

Given that it is not uncommon for a wing of bombers to take losses on a run right now, how many do you think would ever actually get a run off properly if there was a firing delay? Any kind of a delay like you suggest would make the bombers impossible to use against any fleet that has anything that even resembles support. Speaking as a person who flies said support over line battleships, that's every single one.

And allowing bombs to be shot out of space by defenders or by support, again, makes it impossible to actually get a bombing run off against an even halfway competent blob.

Why, exactly, do you feel that the only tool to beat a blob should be another blob?

Can you rephrase this, as right now it comes out as bafflegab to me?

okay, now I get it, and agree to a point. No cruiser can match the raw DPS of a similarly fit battleship, but they can apply much more of that DPS to anything other than battleships on up. But, t3s are unmatched in subcaps for EHP when brick fit, and have stellar non-resist mitigation to boot. HACs can't manage the same EHP, but still have that stellar mitigation