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When I started reading the article I was just contemplating the suggestion of a area ewar effect that could be projected from capitals and then I was pleasantly surprised to see such a thing being proposed.

I would ideally imagine this to work by allowing a Capital to equip, or be built with only a single debilitating effect that they can turn on that will affect all ships that are within range, but ships that are closer to the capital with receive harsher penalty effects for the duration of the debuff, or perhaps the debuff with last longer or have a higher chance of affecting them.

I wonder What kind of area limit they are thinking of applying to this ewar pulse?
If they make it an incremental effect with distance I imagine up to 100km could be workable but it will probably be a fair bit less.

1000dps in a battle ship isnt that hard to push. much more than that and you have to start looking at only certain ships or much more pricey things. Do note that the dps is always referred to is the max dps it can do at its closest range weather or not its even feasible to be able to stay or get into that range.

the xl guns now aren't the greatest for range and they implies the ones for sub caps would be even shorter.

Actually I'm not sure that combat refitting even needs to be prohibited on the rebalanced capitals. The reduction in base hp and the requirement to use plates and extenders to get good ehp (which can't be fitted for instant hp) makes it less powerful than the current state where you can fill a rack with hardeners, no?

Most aren't saying useless, what people are rightly asking is: Is the step up enough to justify the cost and the massive limitations of it?

The tank will be less impressive seeing as refitting is dead, or the dps won't be up to snuff. They're not as good as you're making out.

I have a radical idea.

How about, instead of devoting all this time and effort into capital ships, CCP reallocate all those resources towards fixing the game for smaller ships that players actually use?

You know, so that people keep playing the game, and subscribe to it?

Just an idea.

OK, I'm not trying to defecate on your parade here-- the reimagined scheme for fighter combat looks like it has the potential to be really cool, I like the refitting change, I love the notion of making all flavors of cap be useful from a personal logistics standpoint, and I like the idea of the HP / module rework for caps.

That said, I absolutely do not understand how you're going to balance these ships. The new fighter scheme, the new anti-subcap weapons for dreads, and the new AOE damage / ewar tools for supercaps strongly suggest that you want to make capitals strong combatants VS subcaps. This makes sense in light of your decision to implement damage mitigation on strategic objectives-- a change that largely destroys the usefulness of capitals as siege weapons (why bring clumsy, expensive ships to do a job that can be done just as effectively by simply bringing along a few more doctrine-fit subcaps?).

If your new role for capitals is as bruisers that can repel large numbers of opposing subcaps though, how is this not going to lead to the same, stale N+1 gameplay that people have been complaining about for years with existing caps and supers? I understand that you're going to nerf the spider-tank, and that the idea is that a team's ability to tank will be limited by the ability of their auxiliaries. But how is that actually going to make a difference? If caps remain strong against subcaps as well as structures, the answer is still always to bring more caps. The only difference between the proposed paradigm and the "wrecking ball" type apex-force paradigm that people have been complaining about for years is that the resulting fights will presumably be a lot bloodier as a result of logistics not being able to keep pace with damage. That will do little to affect the strategic outcome though: the side that can field more caps will still win; the bill will just be larger.

Would it be possible to give the Rorqual a Capital mining laser that acts like the "Sickle" Doomsday? Also, give it the ability to do potential damage to ships in LoS? I am not saying DD LoS damage, but a fair amount to use it as a deterrent.

Real humans are Eve's most precious resource. That means that nearly everyone talking about how a Dreadnought's HAW needs to be better because "we can just bring two or three Battleships instead," is just straight up full of nonsense. Most groups don't have two or three extra humans they can bring in Battleships instead of Dreadnoughts. And if they do, why not bring them in more Dreadnoughts? Or one Dreadnought and two or three support ships? And if you don't have more humans, than Dreadnoughts are among the easiest ships to multibox - I've been doing it for the past few years with sexy results.

Really what many of these people are concerned about is how they are going to find a way to make lots of ISK if they cannot run Carriers in anomalies or Dreadnoughts in their capital escalations. They are just afraid to come out and say that they are more concerned with PVE than PVP.

With a few broken exceptions, Eve does not scale linearly. A marginal increase in performance usually comes at an immense cost in skill training time or cost. Why should it be any different with Capital ships?

With that said, since Dreadnoughts are among my current favorite ships to fly, I will not object if they get more DPS.