Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I think most of us can agree that navy battleships are in a bad place right now. Pirate battleships are so cheap they are at the same price point, and many of the navy ships just aren't intriguing enough to create a niche for themselves in the game. While I think the availability of pirate battleships should be looked at, I also think the navy battleships should be examined to make sure they are attractive as well. These are some thoughts on some of the navy ships, but I'll admit I didn't scour them for balance.

Fleet Tempest
Change the ship to allow 8 turret
5% Rate of fire
10% optimal bonus

I think this pushes the ship into a new niche that isn't covered by any of the other current minmatar battleship or the mach.

Fleet Typhoon
Change ship to 7/6/7
7.5% target painter bonus (may or may not remove the turret RoF bonus)

While this may step on the huginn a little bit, the option for a solid target painter option that is armor tanked would be interesting.

Scorpion Navy
Change ship shield recharge to be 2500 s (standard for T1 battleships)
Add 5% shield recharge rate per level bonus

Gives a passive shield tank option for battleships, outside of maybe the rattlesnake.

Navy Domi
This ship has a lot of paper DPS, but I don't think I've ever seen it used for that (or used at all for that matter). I have limited input for it, other than making it more of a heavy drone boat to contrast to the T1 sentry domi, but I don't know that would be welcomed. Just going to leave it as an idea here.

Navy Geddon
This ship is in a terrible place. This ships largest problem is that the nightmare overshadows it with only the role bonus, which is equivalent to having 8 lasers with 25% more damage, 50% cap usage, while having double the utility highs of the geddon, and shifting the other 2 saved high slots into more med/low slots. I don't know what to do with the geddon, since the other remaining laser niche (projection) is covered by the apoc. This ship needs some love.

I didn't cover them all, but I thought it would be nice to address some niches that these navy battleships desperately need to have a place in the game. As I said before I'm not claiming that these are balanced, I am just trying to generate ideas and niches for them.

Not all that long ago, navy battleships cost twice as much as regular T1 and half as much as pirate battleships. Now the pirate hulls are less expensive than the navy version.

I don't think CCP needs to buff the navy ships, it would be better if they end the half price sale on pirate hulls instead. Either reduce the drop rate for BPCs or adjust the bill of material to get the price up to the point where cost for capability is better balanced.

Every ship in the game can't be the best. You can't expect them to all compete with marauders for missioning, snakes for plexing, mach's and Napocs for fleet PVP.


Trying to recall of the top of my head, the one or two that might need a bit of re-work are the Navy Geddon and Fleet Tempest, all the others have their own role they fill/place in the escalation chain for their profession.


The REAL problem you're trying to address here is the balance between BPC drops and LP expenditure. There are alot more things in the LP store that are better to spend LP on than Navy BS.

Just to be clear, I don't farm for BPC or LP. I don't have any dog in the fight when it comes to value or ways to make money. I only do test builds and see if the ship can be of use for what I'm currently doing.

The problem that I'm running into is that the navy ships are never useful for what I'm doing. I either need value ships with high insurance value, or I need good ships for the niche I'm doing. It's never inbetween. That's the problem with "pirate ships are always wtfpwn" upgrades to other ships that they decided when they did tiericide.

I did it in some other thread once upon a time, but lets actually go through the navy battleships and get some opinions on what they do:

Navy Geddon - I covered this one above. It's a disappointment.
Navy Apoc - probably the best navy ship, but is basically just an upgrade to the T1 version.

Fleet tempest - has some extra ehp, but is the second lowest dps of any large projectile ship (only beats out fleet typhoon). Having a low DPS isn't a good when your ship is fully bonused for DPS.

Fleet typhoon - a holdover for the old dual bonus days, but the reasons that it is bad still holds over (you're never going to get the benefit from both bonuses, so your ship effectively has a single bonus). It is just jumbled in there with the rest of the missile ships that don't have an application bonus, most of which are T1.

Navy Domi - the double sentry bonus of the regular domi is nice, but the split bonus of the navy domi feels like a downgrade. It has good max paper dps, but is disappointing in practice. It's like a rattlesnake that doesn't work right.

Navy mega - the extra high slot doesn't really give it much additional utility over the T1 hull, which has the same DPS. Unless your fit is really tight on CPU it's not going to be worth it..

Navy Raven - less DPS than a barghiest, but has better application. I think this is a fair tradeoff.

Navy Scorp - has a tank bonus, but really it performs like a T1 battleship.

So I was just looking for niches that the ships to have. It's less about making them even to pirate battleships and more about differentiating them from T1 battleships.

Fleet tempest having an optimal bonus would be interesting because then you have a dedicated artillery battleship.
Fleet typhoon having a target painter bonus completely changes how it gets evaluated for fleet duties, and provides an interesting armor missile ship that isn't straight inferior.
Navy Scorp having passive tank be a reasonable alternative I think makes the ship more interesting, although I don't really think it will ever be a large niche even with that. I was stretching.

I think the problem that the navy geddon has is that there are a lot of ships that it is competing with. It is competing with T1 battleships, sansha for high DPS, blood raiders for neuts, and SoE for drones, and all of them have the option to use lasers. Hell, maybe an armor bonus + missile bonus (calling it khanid) would at least make it unique in a landscape that is drowning with laser ships.

Yeah I wall of text.

But since you want to keep dragging price into it, if a T1 battleship was 180m, and a navy ship was 400m, and a pirate ship was 1.3b, would it make the navy ships useful?

The domi would still be used over the navy domi.
Navy mega wouldn't be worth it still.
Fleet tempest would still be useless.
Fleet typhoon would still be bleh.
Navy Scorpion doesn't get any better.
Navy geddon is still lol.

You may see an uptick in navy apoc and navy raven as they're used as stepping stones to other ships. The 1.3b vs 400m pirate ships is a figure that null blocs use when making doctrines, it doesn't matter for people that are deciding when going high risk (T1 insurance) vs effective (pirate). The mid ground isn't useful, especially when a lot of them aren't greatly outperforming their T1 counterparts.

Because pirate ships are suppose to be better than their (non-T2) alternatives, the only way to bring navy ships into the conversation is to allow them to exist in niches that aren't dominated by pirate battleships.

Educate me. Which of these ships will suddenly become the bomb if pirate ships go to 1.3b?

Could an interesting idea be to make 'fleet' ships tanky and pirate ships ganky...i mean pirate hulls already out dps the navy hulls but also have equal or stronger buffer tanks.

My train of thought is that in large fleet ops the extra buffer might make them more tempting for surviving alphas... no idea on numbers just running with the term 'fleet' issue...

The suggestions I had were nothing more than examples of niches that ships could exist in. While I agree that falloff bonuses are better for minmatar ships because it will benefit both artillery and autocannons, the idea of the optimal bonus was that it would differentiate the fleet tempest from the falloff ships (tornado, vargur, mach). The idea is to prevent the "both of these ships do the same thing, but one of them is clearly better" problem we have now.

As for the other ships:
Fleet Phoon - if it was a 5% RoF bonus it would be 8 effective turrets, as opposed to the 8.25 we have now. I'm not married to the idea, but again it was for illustration of the idea than actual implementation.

Navy Scorp - The navy ships can't passive shield tank because they pushed the shield recharge to 3390s. It seems like this would be a good candidate to be similar to a "large drake" with the option to passive tank, but it was a stretch to figure out something that it could do to make it competitive at a task, in this case decent tanking under heavy neuts.

Navy domi - I don't see this as anything like a vindi. The vindi is a pwn-mobile tackle and blaster boat, the navy domi is none of that.

The navy mega isn't really much of an inbetween for the T1 mega and vindi. I don't recall the T1 mega being particularly tight on fittings, so you get an extra utility high and 25mb/s extra drone control. Otherwise the DPS is the same.

The big advantage that the navy apoc has over the normal apoc is that it can fit T2 tachs without mods, and has a 1600 plate for free. This seems like a case where the T1 to navy upgrade makes enough of a difference to justify the extra cost.

I've never seen that build before, so it's new to me. If it's a solid use case for the ship than I guess we are down to 5 ships that need some love.

Navy battleships?? Navy frigates and cruisers could use some buffs, but the only thing wrong with navy battleships is the price of pirate battleships.