Player Features and Ideas Discussion

1) Rorqual, hauls 100km+

2) No. Nullification is awful, and if it's aligning and moving faster than a blockade runner, it will literally never die.

3) ...Why? It's going to be worse than a combat ship at whatever combat role you want for it. Might as well name it 'blatantly obvious bait' for all the good it'll do you.

Who cares what it's 'intended' role is? I've never used mine to mine in. Base cargo is irrelevant too, fill the lows with expanders and you top 100km3 without even touching your 40km3 fleet hanger.

An orca is also an effective 100km3 hauler, cheaper than a rorq too.

A blockade runner aligns in 2-3 seconds if you fit it right. A faster aligning blockade runner with more cargohold than a dst, interdiction nullification and, presumably, frigate warpspeed is horrendously overpowered and borderline impossible to kill.

How much is your invulnerable t3 mode shifting jump freighter going to cost?

You said it would align faster and be the fastest hauler in the game. I took this to mean it would align faster than a blockade runner, the current fastest hauler in the game. Was that not what you meant?

All haulers have a 90% jump fatigue reduction. Would yours be a 100% reduction, or would getting in thsi ship actually redice your current jump fatigue timer?

And what planet are you on if you think a ship like this would come in at half the cost of a DST, when it is outright replacing DSTs, BRs, T1 haulers, hauling orcas, hauling rorqs, and jump freighters?

Ahh wait nvm, I thought for some reason jump freighters did not have that reduction and I've never flown them before. So nope it would just be the same 90% reduction then by simply being a hauler. And yes I did initially say it would be the fastest, but I am iterating on this idea in real time with you and anyone else. Everything here is simply a very rough draft concept at this point.

If it didn't have a combat mode I am thinking that perhaps it could have a Cargo Mode. It could expand to be just as much room as a jump freighter which could be pretty awesome!

The idea is that it is simply a cheaper jump hauler, with less space, but also perhaps the least cargo space of all modes. And no the idea isn't to be the best at whatever, but less effective then the other options.

If we had a cargo mode, it would have more space than a DST, but less than a freighter, and not be able to jump. It would also be a cheaper ship to invest in as well.

In a Jump Hauler mode, it would have less space than a jump freighter but also be cheaper than other jump options.

The Nullified option would be a new concept however, and probably have a more midline cargo space compared to other two modes. It wouldn't be as fast as an inty, could still be locked, and perhaps not able to cloak as drawback?

So the cargo room shifts in each mode. If you need more cargo room then you simply switch to a mode that has more room, or buy the other ship that does the job better. If you had the ship in Cargo mode and loaded it to max you would not be able to switch into any other mode.

If you delete the cloak, nullification, jump drive and combat bonuses completely, then sure.

If you want a jump hauler that is better than every other jump hauler but costs less than every other jump capable ship in the game, you may have a very long wait.

A sub 2 second align interceptor is as close to invulnerable as you can get. MAYBE you can land a point if your tackle is a hyperactive Londoner and the inty pilot cocks up somehow. A blockade runner is at least possible to stop with a bubble and give you a chance to catch and decloak it.

A nullified hauler that moves like a BR combines the worst of both, and you wind up with something that will not die. It will walk away from smartbombs (barring the occasional hilarious example of a titan pilot smartbombing a gate), ignore tackle, and have the ehp to tank an instasvipul or whatever trying to alpha it.



if this ship were added, especially at the price point you want it at, what possible reason would there ever be to undock in a T2 hauler, a cargo orca, cargo rorq or jump freighter ever again?

So, I'm going to ignore the whole "T3 Hauler" thing almost entirely (also that's Tech 3, not Tier 3) because I don't think CCP will ever do it. There's no interesting trade-offs there and it doesn't fit with the whole specialization vs generalization thing the T3s have. There's just not enough for a hauler to do for there to be a trade-off to it.

That is largely opinion though. Into the numbers!

So, there's basically four different ideas here.

The first and most basic, and where all four fail universally, is on the idea of a hauler that can move more than a DST but less than a Freighter, around 100km3. A Freighter at base holds around 3-400km3 and at max around 1.2m, but the more instructive comparison is on the lower end. Right now if you want to haul more than ~50-60k m3 in one trip you need to use a Freighter. At its safest you tank it for EHP and run the lower cargo variant.

That means that what you're looking for here is a hauler that aligns and travels a *lot* faster than a Freighter but still holds 1/3rd of what a Freighter does. The problem here is there already isn't a ton of room between the align time of a Freighter and of a DST. DSTs do about 20 seconds, Freighters do around 45 at all 5s. So, 30-35 second align time at max skills here.

Also assuming this thing isn't just going to be idiot-magnet gank bait it's going to need enough tank to make using that cargo space feasible, which means at or above DST levels of tank. That means the hauling space probably all has to be in a Fleet Hangar like on a DST because if you have to trade off between cargo and tank to hit 100km3 then you're better off in a DST.

So, so far this thing is just kind of a questionable idea of questionable benefit. The real issue is cost. A DST costs ~200m, a Freighter costs around 1.1-1.2b, seems like plenty of room but Eve generally operates on the principal of exponential cost increases for linear performance gains, so even if this hypothetical ship is slower than a DST it's still hauling twice as much, and 1/3rd of what a Freighter does, at a faster pace than 2 trips, so for a 2x cargo increase you're probably looking at *at least* a 3-4x cost increase over a DST, which puts the thing at roughly half the cost of a Freighter, probably more like 2/3rds.

At that point you're pretty much at the point of "why bother?" the ship isn't going to be an attractive choice at that price point to the majority of players for that level of capability, and if you up the capability the price has to follow or it's OP, and at the same time you're squeezed by the EHP/gankability of the ship. Part of the reason Freighters are big and slow is that it's supposed to be hard to move large quantities of stuff safely without planning and care. If this thing can get to warp faster with an MWD it doesn't matter what the align time is, it's now 10s, which is another balance issue.

IMO trying to squeeze a ship into this area is just inherently not workable unless CCP suddenly decides Freighters need to get more expensive, which seems unlikely.

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So, the other three parts:

Smaller Jump Freighter:

The most likely to happen, because you can already jump a Blockade Runner with a Black Ops BS, this just takes out the need for the bridging battleship. Not at that cargo capacity though. A Jump Freighter already bottoms out around 135k, and a Blockade Runner does 10-15km3 on a good day.

Nullified Hauler:

Only if CCP suddenly decide that hauling stuff around Null needs to get a *lot* easier. Otherwise? Lol no.

Combat Hauler:

As others have pointed out, there's basically no point to this. If it can't beat a real combat ship it's useless in Low and Null, and in High Sec having more tank is the best defense an Industrial can get hands down. There's just absolutely zero point in this besides bait or lol-fleets, neither of which is enough to justify the dev time required for a new ship class.

The problem with this idea is that the entire concept of a T3 hauler is broken. Switching modes makes sense on a T3D because it's a combat ship, and combat situations are diverse and often quickly changing. Having the ability to, say, close into range using speed mode before swapping to damage mode for the kill is a valuable asset. But with a hauler what exactly is changing once you undock? Cargo space is fixed by the amount of stuff you load before undocking, jump drive ability is decided when you're setting up your cyno chain and is pointless to add while in space, etc. The only real swap that makes any sense is if you had some kind of travel speed bonus in one mode and nullification in another, and could swap to bubble immunity if you happened to hit a bubble camp. And that's a lot of complexity to add for something that is equivalent to a role bonus of "this ship is immune to bubbles unless you're dumb enough to jump into a bubble camp with your mode switch timer still active".