Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Gallente are a race with some excellent ships for certain niche situations, but I think that they suffer from some fundamental drawbacks that cause the other races to overshadow them in practically every field.

• Minmatar ships are faster, ACs have better range and better tracking, and they can do different damage types.
• Amarr have better armour tanks and their ships give bonuses to resists instead of repair amount.
• Amarr 'short range' guns have vastly better engagement ranges. T2 large pulse lasers have a 45km optimal with Scorch for the same damage as gamma. T2 large blasters struggle to get past 17km optimal. So Amarr don't have to try chasing ships around to get into range.
• Caldari missile boats dominate all forms of PvE, drones are okay for missions but they can require micromanagement to prevent getting eaten, especially by advanced AI like Sleepers and Incursion rats.
• Caldari ECM jammers are also more useful in more situations than Gallente sensor dampeners

Blasters have the highest DPS in the game but suffer from poor range, poor tracking and being attached to a ship that was built to armour tank. It doesn't matter how much DPS you do if you can't hit anything. The only thing that Gallente really excel at are capitals and supercapitals. My first character was a Gallente specialist, and it was awful, I ended up selling him, so now I advise newbies to train any of the other races first so that they can have more viable choices while skilling up, then they can crosstrain to Gallente later to get the decent niche ships if they want to.

So my suggestion for fixing Gallente. I think for starters they should rely less on armour tanking and have some ships be given more bonuses to shields, along with more midslots as appropriate. Let Amarr be the armour tanking specialists, let Caldari be the shield tanking specialists, have Gallente join Minmatar as the races who use whatever works best for the situation. Specifically I think the Brutix, Talos and Hyperion should have their stats, bonuses and slots rebalanced to become shield tankers. They're billed as blaster platforms, free them from their lumbering armour tanks and allow their lowslots for tracking and damage mods.

TL;DR: Retool some Gallente ships to use shields.

What would you do to improve Gallente?

armor tank on a ship that needs to be fast = fail (and with blasters, you need to be fast)
Active tank = fail in general, the way the game is now
Active tank with only a 7.5% bonus = mega fail (as its basically the same repping power as if you had a 5% resists bonus, + you lose out on bonuses to incoming RR, and buffer)

Gal ships often already have the slots to shield tank, and often are shield tanked.
Drop the rep bonuses from gal ships, and add stuff that increases their ability to apply DPS (ie tracking or falloff bonuses - I'm really annoyed that the incursus lost its falloff bonus - at least the active rep bonus is 10%, so it actually has a tangible advantage over a resist bonus to somewhat offset the loss of buffer and added EHP of RR)

In general, the race with the shortest ranged weapons should be the fastest.

Gallente are often 2nd fastest, but the speed difference between caldari/amarr/gallente is pathetic, the Minmatar are in a league of their own in speed, gall speed should be buffed to near Winmatar levels (if not higher).
- or for "blaster boats" with the current active rep bonus, replace it with a MWD & AB speed bonus, such that at lvl 5, the gal ship is faster than the equiv minmatar ship when both are ABing/MWDing

Drone boats don't need nearly as much speed, and I'm fine with them being as slow as the caldari and Amarr boats

I still feel the existing rebalance needs a little time. They are excellent small gang ships just not great fleet platforms. You perhaps need to reasses DPS at range with the new null compared to Minmatar. My first choice low slot mod is now almost always a TE.

There are still a few gaps with the rebalance though. 

T1 ammo could be rebalancd.
Information warfare needs an overhaul.
Armour rigs and active tanking needs looking into.
I am a fan of the rep bonus feel free to change them all to 10%.

About the Rep Bonus: Should be removed and replaced with a Tracking/MWD/Something (Not Falloff) Bonus. Increase Armor Repper and shield booster repair/boost ammount by 30/40% (Also remove Shield boost bonuses from Minmatar)

About Rigs: Drawbacks need to change. Active tanking rig penalty needs to be Armor/Shield ammount/Cap use/Overload Damage bonus (Like on Shield boost amps)

one thing that I've always thought could be one way to fix gallente and add some interesting factors to the game is for the entire set of ships from one race to have some radical difference in their function from the other ships. something like when a gallente ship has a MWD active, it can't be disrupted by anything (I'm not saying that should be it, just an example) .

the nemesis lost its spot?

although gallente will get a boost from the drone damage mods, drones are still too slow and easy to destroy to be viable as a primary weapon outside of dealing with carriers.

it would take a lot of thought to set it up, but if done appropriately, it could be a very interesting mechanic.

CFC is something like 20-30k people. they could certainly affect something like that.

Alts don't count as separate people. The CFC doesn't field 20K people at a single time or they would be 30% of all players online. EVE's all time record is around 60K people online. You're suggesting 1/3 to 1/2 belong in the CFC, which is a bit outlandish.

The drake is by far used for giant blobs, but it isn't the CFC alone that does it.