Upcoming Feature and Change Feedback Center

Just a friendly reminder on some of our rules:


I have removed a post that included profanity and was off-topic.

OK, I'll try to keep this to the point and short

As far as training goes; Slowcats were bad, new carriers (released 1 month before being nerfed) had an opportunity to change how the class was used by moving away from the N+1 nature of everything Eve. Risk vs Reward, carriers should be better than they were pre Citadel, They aren't.
Disposable DPS that can't be repped and now with limited use against anything smaller than an MWD Battle Cruiser, leaving only 2 classes of ship a carrier can with any sort of reliability shoot.

Carriers and the NSA - Insta lock, insta blap was the main issue - If you can't insta lock a target, you can't insta blap it. Now, you can't insta lock or blap anything smaller than an MWD shield cruiser even with support.

A brand new character has every right to fly his 1 mil isk Thrasher (example only, Talwars are more common) into a nulsec fight if he or she chooses but not with any real expectation of surviving against superior ships and skilled players (skilled as in practiced, not SP). "Meaningful" participation is being there, that's why the original Brave was so successful - They didn't expect their cheap as, low skill, Dessy fleets to do anything other than fight and die in extremely large numbers.
> Sp is no barrier for new players since the introduction of Injectors. There is a guy mines ice in the same systems as my miners - He has 11 characters, all max skilled Skiff pilots and an Orca booster - When I first saw and spoke to him, All his miners were less than a week old. I'm not advocating every new player spend billions on Injectors but it certainly isn't a barrier to flying what you want.

Heading off a shift in a positive thought out way is good - Doing it based on a few weeks of data in one hit, is no more than a knee jerk reaction. Devs could have started by balancing the primary issue, NSA, then waited even another couple of weeks to see what effect that had before swinging the nerf hammer as hard as they did. But that would mean they aren't fully committed to the next project, due for release soon. "Balancing" is not part of CCP's release schedule, so Devs are forced to make rash decisions.
I believe ANY ship regardless of class should at least have the option to make up their own minds regarding Risk VS Reward.
What we had; Carriers due primarily to the NSA, were OP in certain situations.
What we have; Is a capital class ship that requires, EWAR support ships to kill anything larger than an MWD cruiser and DPS support ships to kill anything smaller. N+1 Again.

HAW Dreads; Just for interests sake I thought this worth a mention.

No worries with long posts, I'm not exactly brief myself (this post, case and point), I just don't like to snip-quote people without saying why.

As far as Old Carriers go, no arguments that they weren't in a great spot, they were just always used because they could Triage, and sometimes because they could do that and DPS in smaller fights as needed. I don't think pure damage output should be how we measure the fun and effectiveness of new Carriers though. If we're doing that then in every case that could be called a success Carriers are just in competition with Dreads for DPS slots and since the only real thing Dreads are is "be a bigger stick" (literally in the case of the Nag...) that's not a really great place to be putting the 'success' marker. It's unhealthy for Carriers and for Dreads, never mind what it would do to the relationship between Caps and Sub-Caps if HAWs and Light Fighters were in competition to see who could kill sub-caps better.

As for the NSA issue, I agree but I think both parts were the issue. Not just the insta-locking but also the insta-blap nature of pre-nerf Light Fighters. Easily insta-blapping ships off the field (at least ones that aren't being stupid) is pretty much bad mechanics by definition. It gives the person being blapped no chance for counter-play or response, it's just "press button, remove ship". CCP even seem to have realized this as an issue with Doomsdays and given Capitals a way to avoid getting nuked in the "Emergency Hull Energizer".

If you require other ships for anything close to an insta-blap to happen then you both raise the bar on the offensive side to get it working, and you give the defending side more chances to respond as a result.

It's not that I feel that that Thrasher player should have a high expectation of survival, I think he should have a reasonable chance of participating more meaningfully than just dying, and learn something more from it than "don't get red-boxed by a Carrier", even if that something is that if he gets webbed and TP'd then he's probably about to get blapped. More realistically though is that if he can't be insta-blapped by a big ship he'll get taken down in a few hits by small ones, which shows him that he can contribute as part of a group and the power of teamwork, rather than just "Carriers will remove you from grid, good day".



This I just disagree with entirely, both as a dev myself and based on what we've seen out of CCP over the last four years of ship and module balance changes.

Four years is a long time and we've seen the devs push back the schedule in the name of doing things right plenty of times. I just don't think the argument that this was too much of an over-reaction or that they would have done things significantly differently given more time holds up.

There were two basic components to this nerf, neither of which were going to change given more time. The first was the NSA, which almost everyone agrees was an issue. The second was the secondary weapon alpha from Light Fighters. This wasn't going to stop nuking things in a month, or two months. People might have gotten better at hunting Carriers but the basic facts of this ability weren't going to change given more time, and that seems to be what CCP nerfed it based on, not because they felt Carriers were drastically over-performing by metrics alone. CCP Larrikin says almost exactly this in his post over in the general patch feedback.



I think I either don't understand your definition of N+1 or don't understand how this wasn't, still, N+1. Either we have "It takes N+1 Carriers to nuke a sub-cap off grid" or we have "It takes N+1 Carriers and Y support ships to nuke a sub-cap off grid". There's always that element of "bringing more people is better" but by making ships more effective when synergized with other ships you introduce complex elements of fleet composition into the equation. For example Logi is a force multiplier. A fleet with logi will generally beat a fleet that is much larger so long as they have enough Logi and enough DPS.

In this case, with the changes, you need to balance the number of support ships vs logi vs other ships that you bring. In your example, and based on Morgaine Mighthammer's comment it sounds like that HAW dread played very carefully and used his small support fleet to achieve that result. Personally I don't have a problem with that. The Dread had to siege, exposing himself to substantial risk, and the enemies had to pretty royally fluff up their assessment of what that Dread could tank and whether or not they were being baited.

---

Overall I think there's plenty of room for CCP to do more with Carriers, and I think at this point I agree that they should be improved generally, but not in terms of raw DPS or ability to nuke sub-caps off field, for reasons stated above. Let Dreads be the big beat-stick, Carriers should be a swiss army knife with lots of options and flexibility. That makes them good and fun to use without turning them into steamrollers for sub-caps.

Carriers should get at least 1 support fighter tube. That would give them more significance on the field. I'd go as far as giving them 2 dedicated support fighters, while leaving them the 3 light fighter tubes.
Fighters should also get on grid warp capability, that requires the target (or destination) to be more than 150 km away, and lands them 50km off grid. Nullified perhaps so they can even warp in & out of bubbles since it's on grid only. Obviously the warp also takes some time to align, warp etc.

Between those two you now have a much better role for carriers in a fight, and they can actually use their lock range. It may still not make them favoured in the current meta, but it gives them something significantly unique.

FAX should be able to move while in Triage, again that makes use of the grid size and with selective Ewar immunity doesn't break anything since webs, scrams & points can still be applied while it is in triage. This then allows fights to move. (Siege/Bastion should also get the same treatment)

I logged in to both +1 and quote this post.

I understood you perfectly fine, I just disagree with your assumptions about how CCP works behind the scenes. They've pushed things back a patch if they needed more work, and the whole point of these smaller incremental patches was that things could be worked on for longer without actually needing to hit that bi-yearly patch date.

You disagree with CCP's decision on how to balance Carriers, I get that, but saying that what they're doing isn't actually balancing at all is just ridiculous. There's clear logic, and math, behind their decision regarding the Rocket Salvo, so better to just make the full change and then walk it back (or adjust in some other way) rather than make half the change they want to make and then do the rest later, since the goal of nerfing the Rocket Salvo was very clearly to make them worse at blapping small targets and the math to figure out where that line is for various hulls and fittings is *really easy*.



Different hulls, different roles, I'm not seeing much of an issue here if a role that required tanky-DPS bait can't be filled by a ship that is neither tanky nor a primary DPS role. Carrier Fighters still have more utility though, and if CCP are going to make further changes to Carriers I'd rather see those played up than just have the damage bumped.



Now you're just being close minded, and honestly the conversation is devolving pretty badly.

I never said Capital Logi is less effective, it's just different and from what I'm hearing it is *very* effective. NC. requires their Titan pilots to have FAX alts, and to drop a FAX with each Titan that jumps into a fight. That's not something you do when a class of ship is useless or ineffective.

Capitals have different requirements for balance than sub-caps. They've changed a lot over the years and we've seen the full gamut from barely anyone wanting to use Caps to them being an overwhelming force in Null fleet fights to the point that they overwhelmed everything else.

That alone should show that Capital Logistics *can't* work like Sub-Cap Logi, it wouldn't be balanced.

Anyways, if you want to continue this discussion please leave the "CCP are bad at their jobs" rhetoric at home. You can disagree with their direction all you want, but that doesn't make it bad, it just makes it something you disagree with. Hurling around insults (which is what the last third of that post was, almost entirely) doesn't contribute to a productive discussion and it certainly doesn't help you get what you want. It may get your post edited or deleted though, which would be a shame because you've shared some interesting and useful perspectives in this thread.

If the discussion had been as productive in the first 20 pages as it has been in the last 20 there might have been some more iteration on CCP's initial ideas regarding Carriers.

They didn't even make opportunity to comfortably bind squads what are u want from them lol?

Carrier's still pretty good at dunking subcaps tho.

That akward moment a GAME DESIGNER realize his company has to rely on a third party website to access the technical documentation about their own game.
Pretty much like if secretary of Justice was asking a human right association if by any luck they arent in possesion of a laws codex copy ...

We've had this though, and it just resulted in Caps stomping all over sub-caps. Remember Dread-blapping? That wasn't fun content for the majority of pilots.

There's also a bit of a catch-22 here. If Capitals are absolutely required for some piece of non-optional content (like, required to take Sov for example) at a mechanical level then what about Supers? The current role of Super Capitals is basically to be really good at killing Capitals. They're not bad against sub-caps either, but they're *really* good against Caps. That now means that we're sort of back to Supers winning because the only way to keep Caps alive on grid when the other side has Supers is to have enough Supers or Caps, either on-grid or as an open threat, that they don't want to drop. This pretty clearly undermines the idea behind the sov update which was to make huge blobby alliances less feasible, and make it easier for smaller and newer entities to take Sov.

Per-ship Capitals are still fantastic, what you're saying here is that a few Capitals are vulnerable to a comparatively large force of sub-caps, to which I really have to reply "So what?" Bring your own sub-caps, or even bring more capitals with utility slots or something. The idea that one ship should be immune to a dozen or more smaller ships is just silly and very much not in the spirit of Eve.

HAW guns are basically arrays of Battleship guns, so it makes sense that they can't blap Frigates or Cruisers without support. Again, not seeing a problem here. HAWs already let you put the DPS of ~2-3 Battleships on grid, which is pretty fantastic if used correctly.

I get the desire for caps-only content, but there's a pretty tiny box for stuff like that. It can't be reliant on Sov, for reasons I just went over. If it's PvE driven then it needs to be stupidly rewarding, probably more so than current Carrier ratting (though there's an argument to be made that this is serving the purpose you're looking for just fine), which risks breaking the PvE reward curve or causing inflation issues. A PvE driven incentive also just wouldn't be fun or rewarding to a lot of people making these sorts of complaints.

Honestly I'm kind of left wondering if the solution here isn't a small decrease in the build cost of Capital hulls (not supers) to make them more appealing to fly and less painful to lose, since in almost any case where capitals are deployed you should be ready to lose them.