Ships & Modules

My main gripe with minmatar is medium artillery and medium ac's and not having a viable long range weapon system.

Ac's project such low dps at point range, you can mainly only kill frigs and low tank cruisers in any reasonable amount of time. Anything else and you cant break their tank, or it takes so long to break their tank, their friends come to help, meaning you have to disengage. Not to mention, the T2 kite ship (vagabond) is barely used to kite anymore because of this. Its now some goofy 100mn XLASB brawler or a-type LSB tank that still cant beat a deimos or sac, because its dps is still too low, or the tank gets overwhelmed.

Now i could forgive/accept ac's shortcomings if it werent for the fact that you cannot fit minmatar's long range weapon without completely gimping your fit. Or, that 650 artillery is mostly trash, except on a couple ships with very niche' fits. Then 720s are impossible to fit on some ships period. Putting 720s on stabber uses up more than all your grid before prop/tank. Putting 720s on a cane uses 95% of your grid before prop/tank. The muninn with 720s can only fit an LSE for tank, unless you leave utility high slot empty, which then leaves you with 1 mid after prop for point or web. A 140m HAC with sub 20k EHP to make 720s work.

If 650s werent terrible and acted like artillery instead of trying to be a railgun, things wouldnt be too bad. I beleive 650s should have longer RoF but more alpha to actually feel like arty. I dont want a fast shooting, lowish alpha arty turret, thats what rails amd beams are for.

Then the last issue with minny is all the speed creep in every. other. race, but minmatar. They still have weakish tanks, but their speed isnt all that unique anymore. So they cant speed tank as well as they used to. Regardless though, i can manage the speed issues for the most part. Just fix the damn weapon systems.

Acs need more falloff, especially after TE nerf. Lowering arty PG requirements would help a lot as well.

Minmatar are good in most areas except in medium hulls. Medium acs and arty are the worst offenders as preciously discussed. There are some exceptions like the scyfi and sfi.

Small ac and arty are in better shape. Small arty recieved stealth fitting buff with the recent changing/buffing of small shield extenders. Now my arty jag with SSE has better tank than my MSE jag, and was able drop a fitting mod. Most small minny ship hulls are good as well. The thrasher, breacher, slasher, talwar all see steady use. Yes even the rifter see's use, even if only as a newb welp ship. Not that it means its good mind you. Then we also have the svipul and sabre which are at the top of KB. The AF could use alittle tweaking though.

Large acs work decently since they have good base range and can make use of selectable damage types. Large arty, even if its fittings are crazy, give you what you pay for (monsterous alpha). Unlike medium arty, unless you are flying 720 sleip.

The vaga, ruppy, muninn could use some looking at though. Either create a new role for them, or fix the weapon systems that go on them.

I was more thinking tornado when i mentioned large AC's, since it gets a fall-off bonus, adding to the nice base fall-off on large a/c's. Its like a big vagabond (even has agility characteristics to match the role), but is obviously more susceptible to small stuff.

About the pest though, yes it took a big hull bonus to make the ship slightly more viable, I still feel its a slightly unfocused ship, but maybe that's the goal CCP wanted. To make it unpredictable.

I've mentioned in other posts about making similar adjustments to other minmatar hulls like the sleip received. Giving it huge bonuses, but lowering the number of turrets. Like the Muninn. If muninn lost a turret and gained a 10-12.5(?)% dmg bonus, we could move a high to a mid and it would actually fix everything wrong with it in one balance pass. Since -1 turret free's up the needed grid for arty fits, but still keeping decent alpha.

Vagabond could maybe see a similar adjustment, although i'd like to see it just get a flat 7.5% RoF bonus, on top of the existing 5% dmg bonus. That will increase dps and help damage application at point range, or actually make it a brawler to be fearful of. And maybe make a 650 fit viable. 720's are out of the question, unless you run with no tank, so i'm not worried about that being overpowered. Some will probably say a 550-575dps vagabond would be OP, but considering its only doing 250-350dps at point range, pumping it up to 300-400 would make it comparable to other kite ships. Course, that would obsolete the cyna potentially.

People actually use short range guns on battleships nowadays? Other than the occasional navypoc with pulses, that just seems terrible in general.

When was the last time you both pointed and shot someone?

You realize short range guns on a BS have the range of long range guns on a cruiser in most cases right? Not to mention the added utility of heavy neuts and MJD. Venture outside your nullblob doctrines occasionally, and you will see plenty of BS with shortrange guns, or RHML.

So you are saying minmaar ships are ok because ne of them got boosted to be strogner than othe rminmatar ship?

That is not a great example of logic.

I think a lot of that is people start as caldari and just keep training that way. I hate caldari ships for mission running, the delayed damage from missiles drives me nuts. I mostly fly a mach and a kronos for missions these days. I love the paladin, but I mostly decline the missions it is good for now. WH I can't really speak to, other than sounds like there are a lot of options. Small gang, there are tons of options. As for explo is a buzzard any better (if so I'm guessing that is more of a slot layout preference), or is it more the people are just used to saying buzzard?

It took me a long full year to finally max out CS 5 to fly the Sleipnir. And now with the CS price spike combined with that non existent insurance payout, I find my self looking at the Hurricane as a trainer ship before I go low sec diving in my Sleip. But according to this information, even with your proposed changes on BC projection role bonuses, it won't help much at all when the medium ACs are in such a pitiful state. Instead of proposing these BC changes Stitch, maybe you should've proposed for an Medium Projectile Turret rebalance first and then made your BC projection role bonus proposal afterwards.

Actually beams are easier to fit than artillery is. I have enough grid to put a 100mn AB and beams on mallers and omens. I have flown and killed things in a 10mn beam retribution. A 10mn beam punisher is also viable. Also, beam slicers are real, Chessur has shown how viable it is with a skilled pilot.

For medium sizes, Amarr have Quad Light Beams. An option minmatar don't have, that is, we don't have an easy fitting, high dps, high tracking artillery alternative like amarr do with beams. 650's use less fitting than 720's yes, but is still disproportionately high to the end result. What you get out of it, on anything that isn't a hurricane, is low dps and alpha with terrible tracking. In fact, in many cases its better to use small 280's since they have VERY similar alpha, and better tracking. An arty 280 thrasher is only 150ish alpha behind a 650 hurricane.

This trend also follow's gallente, which have dual 150mm railguns. Even missiles have RLML. Artillery though..? Nope just 650's which still use loads of grid, but provide almost no benefit over a small artillery turret. 720's are much better, but track worse and are damn near impossible to fit without severely gimping the fit.

So Amarr have options that Minmatar do not have with choosing artillery compared to beams. Beams are not nearly as hard as artillery to fit.

Quick comparison:

T2 Quad light beams
CPU: 26 PG: 89
T2 650mm Artillery
CPU: 28 PG: 198

Even Focused medium beams don't use the grid of dual 650's, and only use slightly more CPU than 650's. Yes, fitting the biggest beams will have the same hardships as fitting the biggest artillery. But the smaller, more "skirmisher" type artillery, has terrible fitting, dps, tracking and volley for what you get. So, we get to choose to gimp our "ranged" fits with 720 artillery, or use A/C's which have terrible damage application past 20km.

As to breacher and talwar being more popular, i'd like to say in my neck of the woods I see just as many Kestrel's and Corax's. With logi, corax's tank and apply damage at range with no problem. They might be slow, but it doesn't matter when your missiles reach 60km+ and still apply well. The Kestrel actually outranks the breacher in the KB right now as well. So, its certainly killing more than the breacher. Condor beats all of them, as it is LML most of the time, which is closest comparison to breacher. But to say because Breacher and talwar are used, that means minmatar are fine, is stretching it a bit.

I would agree Gal being nerfed slightly and see how things settle, but there are still a couple glaring issues in overall minmatar philosophy in the game. Such as, fixing artillery PG requirements, and/or adding a 3rd Artillery turret (low fitting).