Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Not when you are fitting a 1600mm plate designed for battleships and a MicroWarpDrive on top of those 5 medium sized guns...
Back in the days you would have to use small frigate guns if you wanted a 1600mm plate.

So where does this leave the Phantasm, the Navy Exequoror, and the Vigilant?
One might be slightly less terrible, one is still awful, untouched forgotten, and one doesn't even have a 4th mid as a feature for its hull, only the web bonus, when it is already the most expensive pirate cruiser (why IDK).

I hope that arty fitting buff is because the cane's getting an out-of-step PG nerf. Because AFAIK projectiles don't need any buffing.

Stabber:
4 Turrets
Drones (bandwidth / bay): 5 / 5

So CCP Fozzie now that the Stabber is basically the new Minmatar Shuttle how do you plan to rebalance the Minmatar Shuttle into an Attack Cruiser?

Maybe by putting two missiles/nuets in the other two high slots?

Sure but in the current meta 800 plates are laughable. ~28000 ehp just is not enough when your looking at 50000+ EHP (this is a low estimate)battlecruisers the fact that blasters need to be close and the fact that your speed will mitigate none of the advantages a BC has. Sure the rax will be the new frigate killing machine but yay for super niche roles.

the shield fit for the rax looks ok and I am thinking that CCP may be angling towards it for the thorax.

Horrible table layout again. :(

Here's a better version of the updated turret stats: http://i.imgur.com/PsDpk.png

I mentioned this in ewar cruisers, but I think this needs stating again as I just saw the Omen getting a 40m3 drone bay....

"But my question to CCP and the devs focused on balancing. You said somewhere in these pages (and yes I've read all 17 at this point) that you didn't want to specialize for the sake of specialization, but you are inherently taking away what makes Gallente ships versatile....its ability to fit drones and half the time, rely on its drones to actually hit the target and provide damage.

Now you can't with good faith honestly say that Gallente are not the drone users of Eve, so why are you adding "buffs" to all the other ships by giving them drone versatility? Take a look inside starter corps like CAS - a Gallente player npc corp - you'll often find people asking "What ship should I use? What skills should I train?" The almost over whelming response is to train up your drone skills and get into a ship like the vexor or ishkur, then eventually into an ishtar or dominix. Not to mention, almost every ship (pre-winter changes and some that we've seen now) have some form of drone to balance their dps.


Having the ability to field some form of ewar drones and combat drones is what made the Gallente hulls creative. When you take away that niche by giving everyone some "Oh we don't want other ships to make gallente feel left out" 15m3 drone bays or 20m3 drone bay, you take away the role that gallente ships have in small scale fleets. Let's be honest, if we're blaster fit to provide real dps, we usually are the last ones to get dps on the target because we're slow, but we can send webber drones or some other ewar/combat drones and those start going right away to help the fleet out.

With your proposed changes to just add crappy drone bays on every ship because it makes them balanced, you're taking away the sandbox feel as everyone just wants to build ecm-300 OP jamming sandcastles. The fact is that most people fill that joke of a drone bay with ecm-300s and know full well they will get at least 2 or more jams off from 2 or 3 ecm-300s, giving them the safety net of being able to warp off if the armor ship actually manages to catch the kiter. And for those who prefer to always bring combat drones, by adding those small drone bays, you are just welcoming more people to shoot my precious dps and kill it when i fly something like a vexor or arbitrator.

So I'm asking the devs when you consider balancing cruisers and ships in general. Just giving small drones bays to everyone isn't the way to go, it's the easy way out. The races are specialized or else I'd be fitting autocannons on my thorax because they fit nicely and don't use cap, but that's not the case. Each race has a play style and backup play style, so keep that mentality going by not making everyone a drone user. If it so requires, give those ships an extra high slot for another gun, but you should be removing drone bays of most ships that aren't green and made to be in your face brawlers :P"

CCP, quit giving drones out to everyone and their mother just because you hate Gallente!!!!

Just my two cents from a true Gallentean,
Yun

So the real question is, are you guys going to do something about the speed penalties on armor rigs/plates and how they balance out with shield tanking? Because that's really what has been holding a lot of cruisers behind, especially when it comes to the dominance of the shield cane.

Thorax hints to an active armor tanking module buff.

Yeah, that's a quirk of the way it's described in the current stabber description that I left unchanged for this. I'll change it to the same wording as the other ships.