Player Features and Ideas Discussion

They are in a good place combat wise. They perform their job of finding hostile ships very well.

Also, you can absolutely murder a torpedo fit stealth bomber with one if he tries to tackle you in a relic site (if you actually fit a single turret or rocket launcher and a point or scram).

When I upgraded my Probe to a Cheetah, I felt like my covops was very specialized with strong bonuses (scan, hack, cloak) and strong maluses (half cargohold, fitting issues, rip drones, bad cap, no more salvaging bonus). In a way this was very interesting because my first reaction was "T2 is very good at what it does but at the cost of everything else".

Then I trained Caldari and Gallente frigs V and their Buzzard and Helios were superior in all but one aspect to the Cheetah (base speed). I don't think that moving to them from Heron and Imicus gives the same feeling as I had with the Probe-> Cheetah.

Current slot layout for covops are nice. The difference between Helios and Buzzard is interesting and as a matter of choice, I prefer Helios by far to the Buzzard for my use.

Big question is now what to do with theses covops. For exploration, they scan a bit better than the Astero at the cost of being completely useless in any confrontation. To open a covert cyno, people are using mostly other ships. There was even a trend at some point to use interceptors to do exploration...

If it was up to me, I would tighten fitting requirements to the non minmatar ones, increase a bit PG on the cheetah, remove the combat bonuses and give them other that enhance the specialization of those ships. Imho it's important that they outperform T3 in scanning and offer a more viable alternative to combat explorers.

Main thing cov op scan frigates need is fitting buffs.
Everything else comes second imo.

This is pedantic. The lack of a quarter of PG on some of those ships offers nothing for racial flavour except for desolation and spite towards the hulls. Trading in even more slots as they are used up for fitting modules does not equate to the marginal speed increase in value.

Hardly, the OP outlined racial-role attached flavours dictated by the same pattern as logistics ships.

Neither is the thread an attempt to balance Cov-ops frigs, as much as to shake them up, and question the clearly mismatched combat bonuses that serve no real practical significance in any direct encounter where the cov-ops frig has a chance at surviving.

That would be pretty sweet.

Not combat viable but offering an alternative to it. They should still be sitting ducks, but do other things. Point range, sensor recalibration, that's the general idea. What about a doubled dscan range ? (i guess legacy code is involved here), it would fit their role perfectly.

What's so bad about the current balance of helios or go home?

Oh, right...

Overall, buzzard/anathema with good grid for an MSEs/400 plate, together with some defensive stats like res/lvl would be great.
Warpspeed bonus and cloaked velocity for the other two sounds good too.

They should also straighten them out and remove all offensive capabilities and bonuses to that, leaving but a 5m³ drone bay on each with an unbonused hardpoint of choice (turret/missile mount for all, cause festival launchers and mining laser)

"Designed for commando and espionage operation"

Commando: is a soldier or operative of an elite light infantry or special operations force

Special Operations Force: military units trained to perform unconventional missions...
...special forces may perform some of the following functions: airborne operations, counter-insurgency, "counter-terrorism", covert ops, direct action, hostage rescue, high-value targets/manhunting, intelligence operations, mobility operations, and unconventional warfare.



Caldari Frigate bonuses (per skill level):
5% bonus to kinetic Light Missile and Rocket damage
5% bonus to Light Missile and Rocket Launcher rate of fire


We can kinda see the direction CCP wanted to go with these ships. Whereas bombers were meant to be able to deal with heavier targets and use bombs, these were obviously meant to be the recon cruiser style of ships for frigate classes along with being the main probing ships people use.

They haven't been touched in a long while though, whereas new ships have come and other ships have gotten reworked. Cov Ops ships seem to have been underpowered in one of their intended areas when released, and since a whole range of changes and the introduction of the Astero, they have become even MORE underpowered.

Speaking of the Astero, it trumps Cov Ops in pretty much every catagory. But if we look at the ship lines they're modelled off of: AFs and faction frigates, then we can see there's a disparity there.

The Astero is the faction frigate to the T2 Cov Ops, but it can kill cov ops 1v1 almost every time because of it's strengths. AFs can take faction frigates, Cov Ops should at least have a chance to take the faction Cov Ops ship.

The current balance of the Covert Ops for Exploration is Helios or go home. So much for meaningful difference between racial ships. I also suggested in my Proposal that we split the races into 2 different flavors, with Anathema/Buzzard being focused for probing strength with utility bonuses, and the Helios/Cheetah being more focused on mobility, getting into position and evading camps, which would provide much more reason for someone to own more than 1 type of covert ops for different specialized jobs.



This is precisely the problem, T3 Cruisers completely obsolete them at almost every role, better scan strength, similar mobility, while being much less likely to die due to better defenses and interdiction nullification. It would be nice if Covert Ops (Anathema/Buzzard) were a bit better at probing than T3 Cruisers, and the Helios/Cheetah had a bit more mobility than a nullified Strategic Cruiser which can just warp gate to gate without issue with the same agility if i-stabbed.

I don't think Covert Ops should be any stronger than they are now in a direct confrontation, I don't think they should be any better at tackling than they are now, however, I think they should be more mobile and better able to provide warp-ins and get in position easier before tackling in the case of the Helios/Cheetah as I suggested.

Precisely the problem of T3s, which now has the D3's making almost every t1/assault frig/dessie obsolete.
Do we now buff every other ship to compensate? Where does this end up?

I understand your suggestions, but care should be heeded. There are alot of players who absolutely HATE covert ships. Buffing any of them will cause a storm.