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Not that I myself have a horse in the race, but could you do something in furtherance of your statement? Since a large part of this thread has been trying to figure out what the role is...and you just said the role changed but they are viable in the right type of combat, could you simply elaborate a little bit on what that precisely is? I'm sure that the other participants in the thread would appreciate that bit of insight, if you could be so kind.

I've been using them in lowsec as part of armour BS fleets.

Since you are going to have logi with you you don't need to pack a big buffer or a self rep. You just need to be high resists to catch reps well from the accompanying Guardians. You can rig and fit the carriers to be about as mobile as an armour BS. You fit cheap, minimise the cost. Resist tank the lows, fill any extra space with DDAs. Drone mods in the mids for damage application and speed, and a AB to pulse into warp and keep up with BSes.. Highs to taste.

You end up with a ship that, if you lose it post-insurance, costs only about twice as much as losing a normally blinged PVP faction BS (ie one with deadspace resists), but which has 3 times the tank of that BS and slightly more hitting power. With support fighters you also get some interesting options to mess with tricky enemies. The webbing and painting that gets done to help the BS fleet apply damage benefits you immensely too.

If you look me up on zkill, all of my kills on Jul 16th and Jul 25th were in a carrier in a BS fleet. In fact, in all of the kills in Nennamaila on Jul 25th against armour cruisers, my carrier applied more DPS to all the cruisers than the BSes were able to do.
Similarly, when a 10MN Bifrost was webbed down at range and pointed, my carrier was able to start applying damage to it much faster than the armour BSes were able to do and I did 60% of the damage to a target with just a 60 meter signature radius, reduced further by off-grid links.

In all of these fights, my carrier was mostly ignored by the enemy because they knew it would have a lot of EHP but presumably they mistakingly thought that it would not be able to apply much DPS.

On July 25th, the only reason why I didn't influct much damage to the Naglfar was that my fighters ran out of missiles as it jumped in and I had to bring them in for rearming. The naglfar did make a nice 16th killmark at the back of the Niddy because my fighters hit it hard when they did eventually arrive.

I'm curious, how do you get High Resists AND Damage mods on a ship that has 5 lowslots?

Cade Windstalker said - What's the story on that Orthrus kill? There's just you and a Brutix on there so it stands out a bit..
Did you miss the carrier not doing any damage to it and the Ponitfex that got top damage and final blow?

To answer the question, swatting Rattlesnake drones with SSFs was faster than any other way of doing it, but still too slow and in future the Carrier would be better used to just kill the Rattlesnakes directly. The SSFs did help to murder the 3 Geckos that the enemy used . Because of their scram/web ability, when the Geckos owners tried to recall the Geckos because they were dying .... the geckos still died.

The Orthrus is misleading , I got one vague shot from my fighters at him on station before he warped out but died to a Brutix I system a few minutes later.

The Nidhoggur has to use all of its lows for tank and cannot fit DDAs while maintaining 70%+ resists, but it gets a hull bonus to damage anyway. The Chimera can't fit any either. The Thanatos can fit 1 DDA. The Archon can fit 2.

Fit up this way, you get the following results

Nidhoggur: OK tank , 3rd best DPS, fastest fighters (partly compensates for DPS)
Chimera: Worst tank, worst DPS, good damage application and fighter speed from many Mids.
Archon: Best tank, 2nd best DPS, slowest fighters.
Thanatos: OK tank, best DPS, ok fighter speed

My question should have been a little more specific - What is the fit your using?

That's ok, I'll just keep an eye on Zkill. It will turn up there eventually.

Yes, the role of carriers is different vs immediately post citadel. They are not solo ships anymore

However, before Citadels (and following the nerfing of drone assits) carrier were not great combat additions to fleets. Yes, they were welcomed for repping, but DPS carriers were generally laughed at, and you would really not take a carrier out solo except for novelty.

Under the current iteration, carriers are shifted to being fleet DPS platforms. They are still bad solo boats, just as they have been since the pre-citadel days.

People had the ship class boosted into being a solo pwnmobile for a month and are mostly struggling to move beyond that.

Frigate sized fighters can hit frigates. For frigate-sized damage. Their giant "whack you in the face" torps are what got nerfed, their main weapons are now more effective at applying DPS to frigates and Cruisers. The change was also on the test server, for almost a month actually, so I'm not sure what you're complaining about there.

If CCP prioritized whining then Svipuls would be a smoking crater where a ship used to be, as would half the other ships in the game. This change didn't come about just because of whining, it came about because Carriers were objectively too powerful in certain situations or against certain classes of ship.

I am not claiming that Carriers are fine and perfect now, I think they should get a further pass or two to refine the class and give it more utility, but I think this past round of nerfs were 100% justified. I'm sorry if that ruined your solo Carrier wrecking ball, but personally I don't think that was healthy for the game, and given that it's something that only existed for 2 months I'd say it's fine that it got removed quickly.[/quote]



Interesting how you state that carrier pilots adapted to a significant set of buffs, as if the chances did not wipe more than a considerable chunk of the guaranteed EHP you get just by flying one. (sure, the other capitals got this HP nerf as well, but dreads/supercarriers/titans didnt get a 40% dmg reduction and 60% tracking nerf after a month).



'Well documented' is a set of examples in which carriers can one-shot frigates or even cruisers. Yes, it was very much the case because most pvpers just go around in gangs and cram as much DPS as possible into their hulls, expecting to one-shot ships with their blob. Stop me if I am wrong, but I do believe that both from a logical stand-point and also a gameplay one... the strategies for engaging a capital ship should change from the standard gatecamp. I've also given examples in a previous post on sets of ships that cost much less than the 2-4 bil which could do an exemplary job in taking down a carrier. People are unwilling to change their stagnant play style and for that, a ship that was finally getting a proper place amongst its capital piers went to **** again.



Carriers were performing ridiculously well against sub-caps because that was the only role left for them which was still unique. Just as dreads are anti-cap/anti-structure platforms.... force aux are logi platforms.... supercarriers are capital killers... and titans are mobile starbases with a big red button... so do carriers need to fill a specific role so that they wouldn't stand in the shadow of other ships, and in this case, they were the capital ship designed for sub-capital warfare.



This would be an oversimplification, ofc, but the way to see it is that carriers have 3 assault frigates at their command. How many solo sub-cruiser level ships can survive 3 assault frigs? Would any ceptor not be one-shotted if attacked simultaneously by 3 Enyos? How about a t1 destroyer...or even a t2 for that matter? And what about cruisers? If a cruiser doesn't go into the fight prepared to fight 3 Enyos, its going to have a hard time... which leads me back to one of my previous statements, that players don't want to prepare properly for a carrier fight. They just want their same copy-pasted fits to work for a ship which was designed to fill in an anti-sub-capital role.
Also... that part with their main guns being better against frigs and cruisers is CCP's failed attempt to not make the nerf seem as bad as it was. I say failed because the main turrets had no trouble hitting frigates or cruisers. So what we ended up with was a huge nerf in rockets and a useless buff in main turrets, just so the devs and people like you could cling to that bit and say "see? its not all bad in the patch notes"

To conclude.... I've never used my carriers as 'solo-wrecking' balls, but I do understand that you were addressing the people who did, through that snarky part of your comment.... and YES.. the nerfs were justified in some aspects, but not applied in the way that they were... and by that I mean the numbers and the mechanics. Dont want solo carriers? Take away their locking speed. That was ALL that was needed to stop that, given how they cant even lock a battleship before that thing warps off. ~ 1 minute for a frigate, ~25 seconds for a cruiser, ~17 seconds for a battleship. That is default + max skills locktime of a carrier. Simply removing the 900% res scan bonus would have made solo carriers useless. Would have allowed gangs to light cynos and actually jump before their point-ship got summarily destroyed. And through all of this, carriers would have maintained their roles as dedicated anti-subcap platforms, but would have still needed a support fleet, just as any other capital... All the while players bitching about being one-shotted for trying to tackle a ship that is 20-30 times more expensive and designed to kill them would have 900% more time to re-evaluate their poor decision. ;)

It's not, because that would be hilariously OP and mess up the Cap/Subcap balance. That's what these Carrier pilots are complaining about with the changes.

Nevermind.