Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There is a long standing difficulty with rebalancing assault frigates, there are many small ships and with the new TD3s, the role of assault frigates has largely ended.

Many people have spent a great deal of time trying to find a new role and feature, that would give them a reason to exist again, and all fall short, breaking overall class balance or not finding a reason why they should be used.

I suggest an entirely different role.

Make them ships designed and balanced around PVE.

Agile.
Nullified.
High damage
Low signature
Resists to ewar
Good tank
Fast
Large hold for loot/salvage
Potentially Unable to activate cyno (small main hold, large secondary hold)

Traditionally this would make them massively overpowered and murderballs in PVP and totally unacceptable.

But a way exists to make them absolutely useless in PVP

When warp scrambled (not disrupted) the effect is to turn off ALL functions of the ship, make them completely dead in space with all fitting, resists and power shut down.

This would create a valid alternative to Battleships and T3 in PVE, and encourage Active, alert, intelligent and skilled PVE players to travel to ls and null for the rewards, in a ship class that is effective, profitable, but when caught and fought dies in a flash.

Real cat and mouse, where a smart mouse gets the cheese.
And smart cats get the mouse.

You missed the entire point, disruption does not have any special effect on the ship, only scrambling (Rats do not scramble)

The ship would be balanced to a level Far in excess of standard frigates, powerful enough to deal near battleship damage (via fast cycle and bonuses, not high alpha) but with a frigates tactics for avoiding/mitigating damage. They would be a class of ship that is actively flown absolutely NOT one that would benefit from AFK use.

Regarding Ganking this is a valid comment. As this is now balanced as a PVE ship either safety should be locked to green in HS or alternatively, even better, the ship immidiately shuts down when it gains a criminal flag. In lowsec the counter of a complete shutdown by player attack and scrambling would not require this.

It is NOT a ship to fight back in, do mice try to beat up cats? I am sure some will try, but Darwin will decide.

Please do this. I would not dual box them, roam nullsec and gank literally every ratter I could find with whatever your definition of battleship DPS is. (800? 1000? more?). I promise no-one else would do this either. Nor would we start to throw hundreds of them at eachother, since in numbers they'd just blap any tackle frigate or recon that got close enough to actually scram them.

Wouldn't use them to grind structures either. And tying stats to security flags or safety settings doesn't work in nullsec or wormholes, where you don't have those in any form.

A single well flown frigate will not counter them. One guy will get tackled, and the fleet will leave.

If the fleet brings a few interceptors as well, the one well flown frigate will scram one guy, then die to the interceptors.

You cannot counter what you cannot catch. If these things are nullified, fast and agile then they will simply warp away every time someone gets close, like interceptors or slippery petes. (They are basically petes on steroids)

You don't need a tackle range bonus when you have 200 guys doing 800-1k DPS each. They will simply kill their targets before they can warp away.

I do not think you understand the mindset of the EVE player. If a thing can be exploited, it will be. A frigate with a thousand DPS is certainly a thing that can be exploited, especially if it is impossible to catch.



Imagine the tears when people fit entosis links on these things too.

Sure, they are powerful in certain conditions, but you underestimate by an incredible degree how vunerable they are to ANY damage when scrammed. They can be swatted out of the sky by a single grazing shot of ANY weapon, a single smartbomb would kill every ship that was scrammed in a single cycle.

If you wanted to TRY and gank a ship in hostile space, you would be be gambling that it didn't have a scram point, If it did, you would die as fast as you were locked.

Sometimes you might be lucky, after the first few days, luck would be a rare thing.

But if you wanted to whelp a fleet to a single venture, give it a go.

The class would be balanced to be powerful in PVE and helpless in PVP, and that means absolutely no PVP bonuses to counter PVP fit ships, coupled with an overwhelming hard counter I am sure if you spend a few moments critical thought, you will get it. Imagine a bomber without ANY tank or weapons in PVP or covert cloak, sure you can sacrifice hundreds of them, but what universe does that make any kind of sense in.

You still miss the point let me make it plain NO PVP BONUSES.

So your wolf would not be shooting from 20k with full damage, It would not be getting those bonuses.

But ok, passing to CCP to actually balance them as PVE ships, have a go at exploiting it when done, the end goal is powerful FRIGATES balanced for PVE NOT the current PVP ships with a bonus to damage, they will be redesigned for the role, possibly with a range vunerability to points.

The idea is for effective PVE to be run with frigates by active, engaged, players as an alternative to battleships in HS or AFK navy vexors in null. Easily countered by PVP players. A smart designer can easily mitigate your concerns.

We are NOT talking about tweaking the same, We are talking about redesigning the class. It is NOT our job to redesign the class for the Devs, they are more than capable of doing their job. Simply offering a mechanism they can work with.

You clearly have an opinion, everyone has one.

These would be NEW ships, maybe sharing the same name, and flavour, and that's where it ends.

If you choose to extrapolate the current ships with "mor damage" then you will continue to miss the point in it's entirety.

Lets see if the Devs can run with the idea and do something good with it.

If not I look forward to the assault frigate balance in 2021, when they fail to add anything other than swapping places with the Tactical destroyers for a few months.

But who knows, maybe they have some imagination? I am pretty sure they do, and they will see where this can go.

Video not working, but from the comments I gather that is a marauder, exceptions do not prove the rule, But I agree, CCP will need to be imaginative and smart, and I don't think anyone believes marauders are imaginative or smart.

This can be a risk where one tries to make a ship capable of both with no hard counter in the design.

Of course any ship will be exploited, the art is in making it impractical and absurdly stupid to do so. Darwin rules in the long run.

"Don't worry about the hilariously exploitable problems with my idea guys, the omniscient devs at CCP will solve them all. Trust me."