EVE General Discussion

There once was a time when people claimed EVE was "world of battleships". The battleship was the "be all end all" of ships. Supposedly during this age, nobody had a reason to fly anything else (which I believe is nonsense, BS are expensive as hell to fit, and not everyone can afford to fly or lose one). So, in came the CCP nerf bat which nerfed turret tracking and medium/large turret damage application into oblivion.

Now, in 2015, we are left with a game where PVP is dominated by fast, small ships, and larger ships have been rendered near obsolete because of their inability to apply appropriate damage to smaller ships. Instead of BS fleets, we have frigate and dessie blobs. Hardly anyone flies anything else because larger turret based ships have no real counter to smaller vessels and the smaller vessels generally get more bang for their buck. The occasional t2 cruiser shows his head, but even they are overshadowed in many regards.

I understand the concern for variety, but how does it make sense that my 1.5 billion isk ship is out performed by some cheap t2 assault frigate worth maybe 50 mill total? I always hear, bigger is not better in EVE. Yeah, I get that, but that makes no sense! Think about how ******** that concept sounds. If I spend 1.5 bill on a ship, it better perform like a 1.5 billion dollar ship and not be a hangar trophy to spin and say "ohhh pretty". Or else, why even bother buying a big badass ship, when I can buy an assault frig or t3 dessie for a tenth the price that is more effective?

The benefit of a frigate is its cheap and fast, can be easily mass produced, and a fleet of them can be put together fast. In great numbers they should be formidable. Current state of the game has solo assault frigates charging head first at player BS and cruisers in missions and plexes with zero fear of death, knowing full well that the BS/cruiser wont be able to do a damn thing about it unless its equipped a neut. Drone damage on a turret boat is piddly and they can be simply shot down with ease, so drones are laughable as a counter.

Note, we are not talking about drone boats or missile boats, which perform fine against any target. This seams to be a turret based issue.

shhh no common sense, only CCP, and their wierd way at looking at how ships should be.

They need some help but making them be able to blap frigs and dessies left and right w/o breaking a sweat is not how eve works.

Absolutely agree. I made the mistake of training ONLY battleship related skills for the 2.5 years I've played EVE. As a dedicated battleship pilot, I feel that I'm stuck with the following problems:

1) It's difficult to break into PVP - Sure, I can fly smaller hulls, but I don't want to have to. Outside of experienced pvp corps outside of high sec (which I can't get into because everybody requires experience + a good killboard), I don't really have an avenue to start. Considered FW, but turns out they all use small hulls as well. I can't afford to be whelping battleships in PVP left and right in this meta, and corp I've seen has a ship replacement program for battleships. Nobody wants them because T3 Cruisers are better it seems. And solo PVP with battleships in highsec is practically suicide, especially without boosters.

2) I feel corralled into PVE - Only outlet I can make a living flying battleships. I hear they're useless in wormholes too, unless I can afford to whelp marauders.

3) Feels sort of like I'm in a place where I'm useless against ships smaller than me (without lots of support, but in those situations, might as well have a bigger T3 cruiser blob instead of battleships + logi&support), while simultaneously useless against ships larger than me (I hear dreads blap battleships left and right). Not quite sure what my role in life is. Although maybe now I can blap battlecruisers since they're going to be seeing much more use!

But I admit I'm not really experienced enough in this game to complain, so I generally keep my weeping to myself ^^

If Eve emulated reality the battleship class ships would have been decommissioned and scrapped; because they've been made obsolete by more effective fleets of carriers and their attendant escort groups of smaller ships.

In reality there are no active duty battleships left, the last hull was launched in 1944. The only ones that are still afloat are either on their way to the scrapyard or museums and tourist attractions.

Medium and large projectile tracking is fine. We do not need to go back to the days of battleship solopwnmobiles. If you want to deal with frigates in your battleship then fit accordingly, it's all about tradeoffs and by the sounds of it you traded off in favour of more large target dps numbers.

To be fair, I would like more numbers in the UI as to whether one missed because of poor tracking, falloff, signature, or just poor luck.

Webs, scrams, neuts, drones, target painters.

Also the concern for dps over application. A track speed fit bs can do some serious harm to little ships. big bs were only fleet meta cause alpha was king.

As a Battleship aficionado, myself, I too get the frustration. Battleships never really were overpowered, even when they were able to kill orbiting frigates without neuts or drones. The problem was that the frigate was guaranteed to die to the battleship, eventually, if the BS pilot kept shooting.

I usually get flamed for it, but I've always thought Battleships should have slots for Large and Medium weapons without losing effectiveness:

An example: Apoc goes from 8 turret slots to 4 Large and 4 Medium turret slots, and the bonuses apply to both, with a ROLE Bonus for +50% Large Energy Turret damage.

So the Apoc would go from 8 Large Lasers to 6 Large Lasers and 4 Medium Lasers.