EVE General Discussion

Hello Everyone.

I am sure everyone will be feeling that Assault Frigates are not really a ship to train in because it's role has been taken over by the T3 destroyers.
As such I think it is time to brainstorm how to make the assault frigate a ship which is a viable option and different from the T3D's.

To calculate why and how it should change we have to look at the T3D's different roles.
The AF used to be the small sniper or assault frigate that had a lot of tank. Both roles have been taken over by the T3D.

Although this is ofcourse a shortcut I think giving all AFs the same role bonus as the interceptor (immunity to interdiction spheres) would make it viable to train in it again.

Please let me know what you think of this idea.

This does need to be moved.

how ever my 2 cent is the T3 destroyers are too easy to get into. You can get into a T3D faster then you can train up for T2D or even T2C.

This will hopefully go a long way to redressing the way Assault Frigates were essentially made irrelevant overnight.

In the end, T3Ds are never going away. That cat is out of the bag, so even post T3D balance, I hope CCP look at the AFs and find a way to differentiate them a bit more. Whether through the ability to fit 1 command burst, or some other mechanism, they were always so fun to fly.

*Cough*Ab bonus*cough*

In my 10 years as a capsule pilot, assault frigates have *never* been in a good place.

There has been a lot if discussion on what can be done to correct the problem over the years.

The TL;DR of the entire situation is

-T3ds could use a bit of a nerf, mobility being the main problem. Destroyers should wreck frigates; it's the class role so no problems there.

-AFs need base mobilty that matches thier T1 counterparts. Speed and agilty are the lifeblood of a frigate, take those away and you are left with the weak tanking ability of small modules, assault resists don't help much as frigates havent got enough low slots to fit resists, an active tank or buffer, and damage mods, or mids to do the same thing + propulsion and tackle.

Personally, I think the role bonus assault frigates should get is resistance to cap warfare. A large neut will cap out any frigate in a single cycle. This is a bigger threat to tackle than the applied dps from a T3d, imo.

Balance is heavily based on usage statistics, and EVE is about to have a new dynamic in the way of alpha clones. I think we'll see a shift where a ship might be objectively bad but see more use because it's accessible to alpha clones. If there's a serious problem with ships in the frigate to cruiser range, part of the solution might be in magically allowing them for alpha clones. Including assault frigates, for example.

+ 20 base sig radius would actually do the trick or -10 for AFs.

hah -10 sig radius for assault frigates would be freaking awesome after skills, but I think it's a bit much. Putting T3 destroyer base sig slightly higher than T1 destroyers would seem fair though. So yeah +20.

Tried that, it led to some "interesting" results and was rightly pulled.

i like the idea of electronic warfare resistance: small ships are traditionally heavily affected by this, and resistance to ewar could be a great niche.

I think it would need to extend to webs, cap warfare etc to really shine, but it could give them the role of 'tenacious tackle', to complement fast and heavy tackle.