Upcoming Feature and Change Feedback Center

Hey folks. We've been talking to some incursion-focused players and the CSM about capital ships and lowsec/nullsec incursions, and we'd like to see what the rest of the community thinks. Thanks to Plaid Rabbit who initially brought up the idea to me and provided his well-reasoned arguments for the concept.

With the updates to capital ships coming in the Citadel expansion, it might add some valuable options to low/null incursions if we opened the gated sites up to capital ships. Our initial discussion has indicated that it probably wouldn't be all that overpowered to allow them, and that capitals in fact might not end up being used all that much but that at least opening up the option may allow for some creative experiments and potentially some cool new tactics.

We we're calling on all incursion runners for your feedback: do you think it would be a good idea to allow capital ships into lowsec and nullsec incursion sites after the Citadel expansion?

I'm very interested to hear what you guys and gals think. As always, I'm especially interested in the reasoning behind your opinions.
Thanks!

Edit:

My biggest worry is the lack of risk vs. the reward. Essentially if things go south with a Subcap fleet lots of ships tend to die. I have a feeling that won't be the case with capitals running the sites. Especially since you can just sacrifice a ship and cyno everyone out.

Are you going to make Dictor and Hictor Incursion NPCs? Sure, there are a few pointing ships in these sites, but I don't think enough to keep a super or a titan tackled/keep a sieged dread or a triaged FAX tackled.

Can these sites kill a triaged FAX in a reasonable amount of time? If these sites can't kill a FAX quickly then low/nullsec incursions become virtually risk free.

Can titan's DD the rats to death? I have a feeling the AoE DD will be quite popular with these fleets if it can insta-clear waves.

Players will sit here and claim "I spent a ton of isk making this fleet therefore I deserve to have less risk." I agree with that. There is a fine line between less risk and risk-free. Ensure that this will be far from risk-free even with titans and supers and a mess of FAX on the field.

You could make capitals count as multiple pilots in the payout calculations, but not actually increase the per-pilot payout for those flying them.

So a carrier or dread in an HQ site might count as, say, 6 pilots in terms of the payout scale calculation, but the person flying it would still only get one pilot's worth of payout (45m ISK in low/null) instead of the number of pilots that hull is "worth" by the count (which would be 270m (45*6) ISK).

Would that help?

There's a couple arguments:

1: Will capitals allow you to insta-blap everything and make 3 trillion isk/hr? No. There may be some gains, but not in game breaking ways because there's limits.

Scouts: The payout for these sites is terrible. If you just warped between the sites in a hyper-spacial, nano'ed capital, you couldn't make more then about 50M isk/hr.

VGs. Current site times for a "good" group are about 240 seconds sites. About 1/4 of that is taking gates, warping between sites. Hisec groups currently use nano/hyperspacial BS already, and this will warp slower then that. The rats are primarily frigates and cruisers. Caps, even with HAW, won't do a great job of tracking frigates, and those tend to be a bit of a bottleneck in the site speed. In addition to that you have lock time on the 3 waves. There could be some uses, but no "I WIN" button.

Assaults: NCN: No one runs NCNs. You need to have T3s, and it's better to just skip them. OCF: Might be mildly useful, but you still have to wait to tractor the cans in. Still a bunch of frigates. But now there's enough romis it might help you do the site a bit faster. Lock time still matters.

HQs: Travel distance will be a big limiting factor. TPPH: Hisec groups do these in about 15 minutes. You have to burn ~150km to get to the tower at the end, which is where you can apply a crapton of DPS, but it'll take you ~10 minutes to get there. Normally this is done with MWD'ing BS, and the travel time is one of the big limiting factors. If you think MWD'ing caps will travel faster then MWD'ing BS, then there might be a problem, but I don't think they will. NRFs: Hisec groups normally do these in about 12 minutes. Range is really important. For Waves 1&2, you need to burn ~70km across the grid, shoot crap, then move another 30km for shooting waves 3&4 (details vary depending on how you do the site) You won't be in range of most of the spawns, and a large percentage of your time will be spent burning. TCRCs: You land ~70km from the tower. Good hisec groups can do this site, payout to payout in 7.5 minutes. With the distance you have to travel and the amount of warping, you'll still do sites in about the same amount of time. You won't be able to get to get in range the tower too much faster while having some amount of tank on.

2: Risk vs Reward: In hisec, the number of loses from PvP is very low. I'm a FC for one of the major hisec groups. I get a mail every time they lose a ship, if it's to rats or due to gankers. The number of losses is pretty close to 0. In nullsec, we often lose people, partially because we're bad, and partially due to gankers. We either get camped into station, or run with hostiles in local. We've had a couple times were someone has got us in a good bubble, and had a good chunk of our fleet tackled. I think when that happened, we lost 1 or 2 ships, because we stayed calm, and handled the situation. I'm quite sure, espically after this thread, there will be plenty of people watching for incursions, and trying to find ways to gank us. This is called "content" I'm willing to be your killmail. Give us some rewards for being your favorite killmail. You can find out where we are, we have to stay in the incursion system to run it, so it's not like we're sneaking around doing this. You can setup a trap for us. You can spend some time, figure out a counter to us, and figure out how to drop us. Feel free to, that's how eve is balanced.

3: For people saying "LOL TITANS/SUPERS WILL OWN": Please tell PL where you are ratting in your titan. I'm quite sure they will have a specialist out to help you soon. If you're dumb enough to rat in a titan, you should make a crapton of isk for that short period. You've got to make a lot of isk/hr to be able to cover that hilarious lossmail.

4: Unless the new guns have 10x higher signature resolutions, they will have worse applied damage. Incursion groups are already doing pretty strange fits to be able to hit cruisers effectively with BSs. (My love goes out to all the shield vindies) It will be challenging to find good fits that will apply a large part of the capital damage to all the incursion rats, which have stupidly low signature radii.

5: Siege won't be that great. You'll be pinned ongrid for quite a while, unable to warp to warp to the next site. You might be able to get one siege cycle off, then you're done. There's at least 5 minutes of your site time right there, not taking into account warp-times or getting into position.

6: Capital Triage/logi/whatever: We're already able to hold the grid with T2 logi easily enough. It doesn't really matter if we use T2 logi or capital logi. Except the T2 logi are much more manuverable. I might be able to get away with half the logi I currently need, but I'd be replacing that with a couple DPS, and it wouldn't radically change how the site works.

I would say incursions weren't really designed for caps, so even though adding them would seem beneficial as a nice option, I lean towards not putting them in there.

If you really wanted to allow them in, I'd add sites within incursions that were balanced specifically for caps. That would be more fun for the cap pilots too.

That all being said, I don't think it would hurt much to do a timed test case. Try it out for 2 months and see what happens. Review the results and decide to either revert the change or make it permanent.

Can you describe a site and a capital ship configuration that you think would be overpowered? You ran one of the hisec groups, so I know you know the sites really well. Can you describe a way to get a capital to go much faster then they are done in hisec. Yes, you'll get some DPS, some site speed improvement. But any in a breaking way?

The new capital guns aren't going to do dps like they used to. Dreads will still have their siege timers. Carriers won't be able to remote rep, so they won't be logi+dps rolled into one. They'll be slightly higher dps, but drones take time to travel to apply their damage.

i can already feel the shekels filling my pockets

I'm not a capital pilot or incursion farmer, but every kind of pve that allows capital ships so far has been completely broken by them

86 mil isk tick Avatar would like to disagree.


Range doesn't seem to be an issue. Which means I don't really need to burn 150km. I just need to burn from gate to gate. Which will be pretty easy with MWDs. Not only that but fighters/Fighter Bombers will cover that distance in no time. I imagine supers will complete these sites in a matter of minutes.


Cynos can't be lit incursion systems at all. Covert cynos can't be lit in deadspace sites. So hot drops are out of the question. Instead, I have to throw subcaps at you. Which won't end well against titans that are tracking NPC frigates. Or you could just have an escape cyno permanently lit so when a real fleet comes in you just cyno everyone out because the incursion rats won't have enough points to tackle you. My only real shot would be to try and catch you when you warp to a new site. Seeing how I can't cyno in to the system at all, due to the incursion cyno jam, you will likely see my fleet coming from at least a system or two away. Using BlOps cynoed in to a celetial and warped to the site would be pretty lol seeing how CCP hasn't rebalanced BlOps BS. I would be trying to fight supers with FAX support with BlOps BS, SoE ships, T3 logi, and stealth bombers. That's not going to end well. It will be even safer in lowsec where I can't dictor bubble. I guess it is possible, but only if you truly screw up.


Except you would only have to triage is someone truly messed up due to the base EHP of titans and supers with slave implants. Which would be a rarity seeing how quickly a fleet of titans (which is larger than normal because you need fewer logi) would decimate these sites. Heck you could not use FAX or logi at all and just have the titan/super warp out to a pre-triaged FAX who will rep you up in no time and get you back into the fight. Not like you will be pointed enough by the incursion rats anyway.


And who will stop PL, NCdot, Goons, etc. from doing this? They have more supers than most groups in game. Which means only they can really counter each other's super fleet. Seeing how it would be in the best interest to OTEC the s**t out of this I doubt anyone will lose supers running incursions. You would have to be utterly brain dead or make a massive mistake to lose supers running incursions. Smaller groups won't really be able to form the subcaps to fight a fleet of supers. Seems pretty risk free to me.

I think you may be underestimating carriers. They can lock super fast with a Networked Sensor Array, and fighters are pretty effective against cruisers. Frigates could still be an issue, but surely with a group like that you'd have someone to paint and web targets.

Carriers might have issues with their fighters getting owned though, depending on how much the rats want to target them.