Ships & Modules

Yes. This is the situation now after the hybrid buff. It also highlights the relative bad design that is the Hyperion.

If the active rep bonus were to be replaced by an hp per level bonus and the slots altered to 7 lows and 4 mids it would get used. Possibly even just altering the slots would be enough. Not sure what would be a good hp per level amount to approximate the resist bonuses on Rokh and Abaddon but CCP should be able to come up with a number. Six lows is simply not sufficient to fit plates, resists, and damage mods and be equivalent to the abaddons or geddons.

A dropping of the active armor bonus on the Hyperion would leave the Mael as the only one with an active tank bonus. But due to the desireability of the arty bonus it probably would be ok.

Except anybody that wants to shoot further than 100km.

Came here expecting turret balancing discussion but got stealth nerf minmatar long range guns,short range guns,range,tracking,targeting range,targeting speed,sig rad,impulse speed,ab/mwd speed,agility,ammo types,nerf base dps,nerf all dps, nerf droines on mini ships,cpu,power grid,amount of guns and slots in general type of thread and left...

disappointed .

I'm quoting Alara, and i'm doing it because it was the first post in the thread that had good substance.


Statistics: (quote)

This argument can be made for any aspect of the statistics, when people pull them out of context and don't realize that you can never fully measure quality with quantity alone. In other words, you can use statistics for reliability but never for validity. I've pointed it out a couple of times in the past and i try to refrain myself from arguing out of the statistics for that reason. It has always been about large-fleet popularity, nothing else. That's what you can derive from them, Alara is right.

The report say more about that Goons and their wagoneers use Maelstroms, PL and their copycats (yes, that's a pun) use Tengus, alot of groups still use Abaddons because it's still useful even if it's second generation and they use Hurricanes either as stepping stones (welp-fleets) or because it's popular in a smaller scale setting (nano Canes, similar as to why you see Vagas, Cynabals and to some degree Rapiers). Drakes are still used for all the reasons attributed to Abaddons and Hurricanes. Alara has also already pointed out how many Minmatar ships fit into support roles - but that's also where it starts getting interesting.


Gallente:

This bring us to why Gallente seem unpopular looking at the statistics. The point that undershooting (blasters) or overshooting (railguns) your opponents don't tend to stem popularity in large-fleet gameplay has also been made enough times that i don't think it warrants being repeated (feel free to click my name and revisit old posts if you want read about it). On top of that however you have other issues, such as how drone mechanics apply to laggy environments, how it's affected by AoE damage in a large scale environment or how Gallente support ships tend to provide points - which are replaced by bubbles in large scale environments.

There are so many things keeping them out of 200+ locals, yet they are - or at least were - quite interesting even up to a medium scale setting (let's define that as 50-man gangs and locals up to around 100). This is also where i belive Alara stop being entirely on key, and the latest issue i've begun bringing up in my posts. That Gallente has "become even less popular in the statistics" isn't surprising to me, and i've pointed it out with it's fair share of criticism in my recent posts.


Crucible:

The problem is that with Crucible CCP introduced a new line of ships that fill the gaps in the existing "doctrines". There were alot of interesting ways to deal with many popular concepts as long as scale was kept within full server-side stability. Many of those were Gallente, or at least contained alot of Gallente ships as they favoured mechanics or roles held by those ships. Tier two Battlecruisers all had shortcommings in either regard to reach, mobility or tank. The same goes for Battleships. They also relied on a small contingent of higher complexity and techy ships for performance (take the tech II support cruisers away from a Drakeblob and it's performance will fall).

Those were weaknesses you could exploit, and Gallente were often quite decent choices for the job. Not that many groups used them, but some did. Rush your opponents down with a well-composed high-power gang. Point your targets from afar, out-range them, control the grid, knock their support out of action, support yourself with EW and surprise with cloaks. You could do all of these counters at the risk of something else (and usually by risking higher tech assets), such as ISK, tank, reach or scalability.


The circle-jerk summary:

With tier three Battlecruisers though, most of these concepts either see mimic with better performance or are countered directly by the new ships (reach and damage with mobility and limited buffering) while all they have to give up is overall survivability - which is balanced against the other popular (fleet-) concepts, and simply overcome by having numbers (with low isk-risk) to throw away. The sad part is that it shows as narrow a scope from the designers, as it does for what works in a large-scale, performance-demanding environment. It's not like the game needed more profileration towards numbers, yet that's what it got.

Let me be pretentious and sum it up by qouting an older post of my own: "Old AHACs [Ishtars] beat Drakes just fine, they just didn't scale to blob".

Yet today, who would want to rush a faster concept that has high-damage, decent-tracking, high-reach and extreme alpha concept shooting through your resist holes? They do everything the Drakes do better, except tanking. Who would want to uncloak virtually tank-less ships relying on positional reach and control? Who would want to rely on static or piling drones, while they zip around the field? The Arazu, Proteus, Deimos, Ishtar, Domi and Mega will hurt far more than the Drake et al.

In order to shake up Drakes-Baddons-Alpha (with sig Tengus, and some AHAC remnants on the side), CCP reintroduced "more alpha" that have a much larger impact of everything else, that wasn't already flavour of choice. All they've done is reinforcing sig-reach with some mobility. So how do you counter tier three BC? Tengus, the same thing you already use to counter Drakes, Baddons, AB-Zealots and Maelstroms (before a "cultural victory" from Goons pop in, scaling and support-countering is yet again mostly the reason Maels do quite alright even versus Tengus; same as Drakes did alright versus the AHACs meant to counter them).

Want to promote balance, spectrum and ingenuity? Nerf the blob.

We could just make all ships and turrets exactly the same and just have different graphics for them. For example an AC Hurricane would be exactly the same as a HAM Drake except look different... Would that make all the people crying for "balance" happy? How about just accept the fact that different ships will have different uses, tanks, range and DPS. Yes the CNR and Ferox aren't on the top of ships used for PVP but so what? Get yourself the correct ship for the job and quit crying about not being able to do it with some other ship. If all ships were "balanced" Eve would suck!

People aren't crying for equality. They're crying for their SP to not be completely wasted. There are no fleets out there that want a Gallente Battleship. Really, Gallente and Caldari battlehips are only worth mentioning for their ability to do missions well in one way or another. That's kind of silly in a PvP oriented game.

By that logic, why even bother having multiple races? Minmatar and Amarr both have amazing ships for PVE, on top of being the PvP kings. We'll just have 2 sets of ship skills. We'll call them "PVE battlehips/cruisers/frigates" and "Anything your heart desires battlehips/cruisers/frigates"

It's not like you start the game and gallente and caldari are labeled as being bad at PvP. Cross-training can take months depending on how big of ships you want to cross-train to. Don't waste your time with ******** statements like "nobody told you to train xxx." That's just ignoring the problem.

Edit: Could you imagine how balancing would be if everyone thought like this? Theoretical situation:

"Ah s***, we nerfed HML's so bad they hardly cut it for missions. Oh well, minmatar ships can pick up the slack with the projectiles. Everyone's bound to train for them sooner or later."

Sir I find your argument stupid, your manner arrogant and your pursuit of a bland generic eve online quite frankly frightful.

This man speaks with wisdom and truth!

ahh ok so they would be recieving the same benefit as the dmg mods for hybrids do ... seems fair to me.

in your own words if you cannot see that why should anyone listen to YOU? DERPITY DOOOOOO

and besides i could care less what some forum trolls think ... my message only needs to get across to 1 party .. CCP .. and the stats do not lie ... Winmatar nerfs INCOMING