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Change role bonus to: Immune to ECM

They could.

Though they have not.

The Enyo turns like a brick. It takes some getting used to. You can't just hit approach and land in the 3 km sweetspot. You usually overshoot the target and have to claw your way back under web and scrambler. This leads to more hooked approaches and/or work with ctrl + spacebar. Something to chew on. I would not call it OP.

I was joking ofc.

That said, the mwd role bonus seems OKish. Not as bad, but still feels like it is a fix for another issue that should be addressed. The whole BS gun one shotting an AF while he has his mwd on. If that was dialed back then the AF role bonus could be something that is an actual role, not a band-aid.

Do me a favor and have them turn the fitting requirements of the small remote armor, shield and energy transfer modules back a bit. Really would like to see a small form of frigate logi support possible. I am not talking about increasing the range of them, just ease up a bit on the fitting.

Said Wolf has gigantic resist holes though

The Retribution could lose some hitpoints as well if it gets -1 +1 med and has its then unnecessary tracking bonus replaced by a second damage bonus. The current design is trying to fit square peg into the round hole and all that.

It has been repeatedly discussed and explained to be essential for the use of these ships in nullsec. A web/neut resistance is a horribly overpowered idea. And are you honestly suggesting that a 33m sig radius ship should be harder to hit?



The enyo has more damage and much more balanced resists tho. Generally the Wolf currently wins by making use of it's superior damage projection to wear the enyo down before going in for the kill. In a point blank brawl the Enyo wins, if piloted well it's far more equal due to the difference in flying style of the two ships.



And just to warn you, about to triple post some very wall of text stuff on both the overall AF balance as well as the Hawk specifically...

The Hawk

The Hawk suffers due to a difficult combination in it's design philosophy, namely the mixture of an active shield tanked frigate as well as a ship that relies on missiles for damage.

Due to the nature of active shield tanks, in order to fit an effective tank the Hawk must use two of its limited midslots for this, leaving just two slots for prop and point. One choice currently is a pure active tank; using a medium shield booster to provide sufficient repairs along with a cap injector to allow this cap hungry module to run. However, this suffers from the need to carry cap booster charges (generally Navy 400s) making extended roams without the ability to resupply impossible with this fit, especially given the preference for faction cap boosters at the frigate level. This leaves this pure active setup limited to lowsec or the area around a pilot's home system.
In order to address this issue a combined passive/active shield fit is used, utilising a shield extender and a small shield booster. While this fit has nowhere near the same level of repair as the previous fit, it has the advantage of being able to run purely through use of a nosferatu while the shield extender provides enough buffer to balance it when compared to the medium booster/cap boosted fit.

The problem with both these fits arises when they are combined with a ship that uses missiles. In order to achieve effective damage with these weapons the target must be webbed in order to bring them below the explosion velocity of the missiles, especially when fighting afterburner using frigates. Obviously a four mid slot ship that requires two of those slots for tank is unable to fit a web and is forced to sacrifice much of its damage (or alternatively, to forgo the active tanking bonus and use the commonly seen passive shield tank along with a web).

In order to address these conflicting aspects of the ship, a fifth mid slot was added, allowing the fitting of both an active tank and a measure of ensuring damage was effectively applied (as well as giving the relatively slow caldari ship some chance of range control). In this form the Hawk is entirely balanced...


Unfortunately, this has also given rise to very, very powerful ship. If people continue to ignore the active tanking bonus it is possible to fit a passive tank comparable to other assault frigates as well as two webs, not only giving the ship unmatchable levels of range control (something incredibly important in pvp, hence the prevalence of afterburner fits at the frigate level in any area where speed is not required for survival) but also allowing it to negate any of the downsides to using T2 ammo. The following ship fitting is able to dictate range against nearly all existing frigates as well as apply full damage at any range within scrambler (and slightly beyond this);


While this ship is not unbeatable, it has far less counters and weakness than the rest of the lineup. Capable of inflicting nearly 250 dps at any point within its engagement range (due to the dps increase the webs provide) as well as having a 9.5k ehp tank (comparable to or surpassing many other of the assault frigates). Due to the range control provided from the webs, it is also able to dictate the terms of many fights, either out ranging the full dps of a ship or positioning itself under the tracking of those better able to project damage.

Obviously, the solution to this is to remove the additional midslot the Hawk gained. Unfortunately this returns to the current problem with its inability to fit an effective active tank. There are two ways of then solving the issue of applying effective damage; either let the Hawk fit a viable active tank with only 1 midslot dedicated to this purpose or allow the Hawk to apply damage without the need for a web.

The best way I can see to do the first is to change the shield boost amount bonus into a reduction in the capacitor usage of shield boosters, allowing the hawk to use a medium shield booster without requiring a cap injector (although for the sake of balance, a nosferatu should probably be required to be cap stable while running the booster). This would allow for an active tank that is capable of fitting a web as well as avoiding reliance on hard to replenish cap booster charges for longer roams.

To achieve the second solution the Hawk would require one of the missile bonuses to be changed to an explosion velocity bonus. While I favour changing the new rate of fire bonus in this case, in order to achieve balance the kinetic damage bonus would probably have to be changed to all damage types (and possibly reduced slightly) so that damage type selection can be used to balance the reduced overall damage compared to the other buffed assault frigates. However, this solution would require a larger amount of testing to ensure that the Hawk remains balanced within the assault frigate line up.

The first of these solutions produces a slightly more damage focussed ship, the second a more tank focussed solution. For preference I would suggest the first solution since not only would it be easier to balance, it would also provide the fairly slow Hawk with means to control range and prevent targets disengaging

tl;dr – Dual web hawk has nearly 10k ehp, does almost 250 heated dps at any point within web range and can range control anything except a cruor/daredevil. Solutions are proposed...

This.

Having spent around 8 hours on SiSi last night, I can attest to the fact that this happens. Every other frigate now sports a scram to counter AFs, and as soon as you're in range of one you're DOA. I found I sported AB fits often just to counter the scrams, completely negating the whole point of the role bonus.

It may work better on Tranq, where you're not consistently engaged with any/everything around you, and where the moment you take any damage the entire field turns against you. However I found that the only ships that effectively kept from being blown up were those that kit fit, with a long point and the speed to stay out around 14-18 km. I.e. scorch fit retributions.

Gangs were effective however, as with an enyo/retribution/daredevil we took down some more notorious ships, cynabal, vagabond, curse, etc.

So, it makes me wonder just what the point to this was, the MWD bonus is moot in solo combat as it will always be countered for,

In gangs, we did usually burn some 40-50km to get to the target, often having one tackle and tank it while we popped the drones (if any) and the tackle got underneath the guns, at that point between 3-4 AFs it went down pretty fast. We would often loose one of the ships though.

Role bonus aside, they do feel a lot more viable in pvp combat than before.

Also, with the right rigs, most of them can perma-run the MWD. At least I could in the retribution.

My browser crashed with my long reply
So forgive me is this sounds harsh or anything, I just want to rewrite it all

@Takeshi
It wouldn't be a new bonus, just a tweak to the bonus it already has
The Enyo is doubled counting a two bonuses for redundancies sake. They could just as easily move one of its current bonuses to the frigate level, and then have the second 5% bonus as the AF level one. Would be similar to how the Wolf/Jag work

@Tawa
I agree with everything you've said about the AFs (despite some factual errors) except for the Hawk.
The situation you've described, while threatening, isn't a terrible concern.
The ship can only reach that level of damage after implants, full skills, and overloading. And that damage is only in Kinetic.
Even the biggest passive tank (while retaining tackle) is flawed and has holes large enough for the majority of the other AFs to counter. The only ships I can see having any potential issues would be the Harpy, Enyo, and (atm) the Jaguar.
Every other AF would shred the ship silly.

As we discussed elsewhere;
The fit is so exploitable that if such a fit were to become popular, the counters would spread just as quickly.
If it were to remain a niche thing, then it's not more of a concern than ships like the BattleHelios

@PinkKnife
On TQ, most ships who are looking for close range combat will fit a scrambler. The ability to limit ones escape & propulsion is extremely valuable. I trying see what you're so concerned about, as that's pretty much the norm.

Also on TQ, afterburning fits typically trump equivalent AB fits when entering close range.
This is also normal and doesn't change anything with the ships. If you are in an MWD fit AF looking to fight another AF, you need to be aware of what your target is using and if it's worth your risk or not. All the AFs are sufficient damage projection across scramble range, but the advantage (fitting/cap/combat speed) is tipped in favour of the AB fit.

Each has their advantages and disadvantages.
The goal isn't to replace AFs with ABs, but rather add extra versatility allowing people to fit MWDs.

Judging by your post it seems to me like you've already noticed that fitting can MWD can be advantageous.
Just keep in mind that if you had even attempted to pull a stunt like that on TQ, you would have been shredded long before you'd managed to get some tackle