Ships & Modules

Indeed. And the reason why folk are forced to one volley targets are excessive RR tanks. But don't worry, the proposed change wont be a problem. It's fairly easy to lift the sig radius of any non supcap (ohh the irony) by a factor of 5.5 with a single Rapier. All you need to do is to read and understand the bonus of said ship.

We're investigating whether it's possible to add some easy way for people to "park" sensibly; CSMAs are supposed to offer this function, but their total lack of security obviously makes them fairly non-viable.

These changes should be on singularity prior to deployment, but I don't have an actual schedule available for that.

CCP Greyscale, I was wondering... what if a new formula was added to turrets?... one that I know will require alot of work and balance, but would also make the rest of the game get even more interresting

Now hear me out here.... Signature res. of turrets vs signature of target effecting the damage the target receives

as an example lets look at a Tachyon Beam laser II which has 400 Signature resolution... what I had in mind was saying if the target this tachyon beam shoots at is only 200meter signature, it would effectively reduce the dmg by 50% (400/200)=0.5

right now the signature only effects the tracking if the target is smaller than the signature of the guns, I realize that would be a huge reduction under current stats of turrets, but that could be adjusted?

But what this would do is... reduce the instapopping of frigates by battlecruisers and battleships (making smaller ships even more useful, specially in large fleets, then the frigates woud have to kill the hostile frigates)

This would indeed be a huge nerf to turrets as we know them, when fightning things smaller than yourself. But I see it as a huge buff to frigates which is very much needed if you ask me.

as I said the Signature resolutions of all turrets could be adjusted to make such a change more balanced, but overall it would be worth it (just like missiles dmg smaller ships less)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Titans were supposed to be very expensive but also very effective strategic force multipliers and as such were working as intended. Smaller entities in nullsec could defend their space by relying on a larger supercaptial fleet. However, after this nerf, numbers will again be everything. A short look at http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/memberCount should give us a general idea of who will be the sole beneficary of this "adjustment"..

71 pages and all i got really from this is

1. Goons cry and get what they wan
2. Greyscale appears to be a moron, and they still let him make changes like this to the gam
3. This change is going to happen this way and no other, CCP say they are listening to alternitives but wont actually make any changes to the idea that they have pulled out of somewher
5. I think Greyscale is a moro
6. After this patch there will probably be a STOG, where thier leader/CSM will annouce he has manage to get CCP to destroy the use of titans and they can now take over EVE, after which they will must a few thousand toons and do so
7. there is more but im tired and can no longer be bothered to try have an idea changed when its known that CCP generally dont give a rats ass about anything other than goons want and will conform to thier needs and only that

Thanks again CCP. Next attempt at a game you should probably employ

CCP doesn't develop this game as their private hobby. They do it for money of their customers. And my money as well.
Every time they forget it - they loose players and this leads to money loss. Remember monoclegate?

As for me, i dont like game trends for last few patches, and i've cancelled today subscription on 12 (yes, twelve) of my accounts. I hope one day i will read about supercaps viable not only for structures hitting, but for actual pvp, so i will be able to get back into game with spaceships not a structures.

But untill that time, all i can say: farewell o/

. In particular, predicating "can survive as a small alliance in nullsec" on "can afford a large supercap fleet" would be extremely silly, because it excludes exactly the type of players who we're most keen on being able to maintain small holdings in nullsec, ie newer, poorer players.

This has never been a stated balance goal in any discussion I've been party to. In particular, predicating "can survive as a small alliance in nullsec" on "can afford a large supercap fleet" would be extremely silly, because it excludes exactly the type of players who we're most keen on being able to maintain small holdings in nullsec, ie newer, poorer players.

You completely missed the point, smaller does not mean "small as in tiny and new". I am talking about well establsihed alliances with 1,000-2,000 members facing a blobs of alliances with 8,000+ members or whole coalitions with more than 16,000 members.

You can't seriously be that ignorant about your own game...

Hi everyone,

We're not happy with the effectiveness of large groups of titans against subcapital ships, so we're making some adjustments to titans and to XL turrets.

This is a quick, surgical adjustment to solve a specific issue we have identified. It's not a general titan balance pass, and we don't consider titans "done" after this change. Titans will require significant further changes, and probably an overall adjustment in role, before they're in a place where we're really happy with them. This will require a reasonably significant amount of work, which we unfortunately don't have the spare resources for right now. In a similar vein, we're not making more extensive balance changes (or addressing this issue in a more technically complex way) because we're allocating the minimum resources needed to resolve the specific issue (titans performing excessively well against subcaps in certain circumstances) satisfactorily. If you have any further questions about this paragraph, please ask away

For the immediate future and until such time as we have the resources available to do a comprehensive overhaul, we want to ensure that titans perform decently against other capitals, but do not represent a serious threat to subcaps. We want titans to have clear vulnerabilities, and as much as possible to have them acting in support of the main capital/subcap fleet rather than the other way round. We've already prevented doomsdays from being fired at subcaps, and this adjustment should continue that trend.

We have talked to the CSM about this, and we're comfortable going forward with these changes in light of that discussion. I'm not going to put words in their mouths, though.


Specific changes being made:

XL turret tracking halved, siege module tracking penalty removed

This should generally make titan performance against small targets significantly worse, without seriously impacting their effectiveness against larger targets, or negatively impacting dreadnaughts in their common use-case (ie, in siege mode).

Titans reduced to 3 maximum locked targets, and base scan resolution reduced to 5

This should make trying to engage smaller targets very inefficient, due to long lock-times and an inability to queue many targets at once. This reinforces the titan's MO as a slow-acting but hard-hitting platform (in line with the doomsday's huge damage and 10 minute RoF). The scan res number is balanced around multiple Cormack's sensor boosters, on the assumption that money is not a limiting factor for titan pilots, and therefore that people will shell out for officer SBs if that lets them continue do this kind of thing. Our understanding is that this isn't standard practice right now, but we have to balance for expected behavior after the change, and for worst-case scenarios.

Expected release schedule for these changes

These changes should hit TQ some time in April. If there is a sizable release in April then expect them to turn up then; if not then we'll announce deployment dates for these changes closer to the time.




Changes considered and discarded:

(I'm expecting at least three people to not read the word "discarded" and make angry posts about something in this section. C'est la vie.)

Titans can't lock subcaps at all

Guaranteed effective solution, but we considered it too hacky and restrictive.

Adding a "minimum sig radius" attribute to turrets, below which damage would fall off regardless of tracking

Too big a change and more technical work than we actually needed to solve the problem.

Changing the lock time formula

As it is, the lock time formula doesn't really scale in a nice way between battleships and capitals (the kink in the curve always happens around cruisers regardless of the scan res and sig radius), but again we decided we could solve the issue without resorting to this sort of technical work.

Changing XL missiles to match

While in a strictly regimented world we ought in principle to nerf XL missiles and remove the penalties from the siege module for them too, in practice they're not actually a problem due to the way missile damage scales against small targets. Leaving them unchanged also serves to differentiate missiles further from turrets, which might make them more useful on capitals under certain circumstances.