Jita Park Speakers Corner

Something I'd really like to see: points removed from cap ship e-war immunity while in siege / triage. One really annoying game mechanic at present is fighting a dread or carrier in siege / triage. When it drops out of siege / triage, attackers have only a moment to re-apply points before it can jump away. Allowing a triaged cap ship to be pointed will have no effect while it's immune, but will mean that it can't simply jump away when the cycle ends. If you want to rescue it, you need to wait for the cycle to end and destroy the tacklers, just the same as if it were a tackled BS or BC.

Perma-immunity of super-caps is obviously a different story.

But I'll look silly taking a T1 frigate into exploration sites. I want a T2 frigate for exploration. And I'm perfectly happy with the T2 Covert Ops frigates except for one thing: Drone bays are too small (or nonexistent).

wut

The topic is "Ship Balancing"

If they don't have a bonus already, they could be given a -PG bonus to fit Large turret-type weapons. Or if they already have one, make it bigger.

Of course, if there's too much of such fitting bonussing, it ends up being a heavy-handed form of dictating to pilots how they are to fit their ships.

I've just thoroughly read through whole balance section and feel that there's either misinterpretation on my side you inconsistency on CCp's. In one of the older devblogs Ytterbium described general concept, which he intended to follow during ship balancing, and it was confirmed in minutes: t1 is all-round good ship, t2 is specialized version of t1 (but t1 is still better in areas outside of t2 specialization), and t3 is generalization (flexible combination of less-powerful specializations). I must say, i quite liked the idea since the very first words, but release of this minutes embarrassed me.



Actual situation is quite opposite to what described in here. We can take a look at any pair of t1-AFs, let's take merlin/harpy and jaguar/rifter as random example, with passive shield fit:

Merlin, Harpy
Rifter, Jaguar

As we can see, AFs pros:
Have more ehp (harpy has 1.7 times more ehp than merlin, jag 1.96 times more than rifter)
Better resistances for making remote reps more effective
Better damage (herpy 1.34 times, jag 1.5 times)
Jag has extra slot and resources for web
Smaller sig with mwd (1.87 harpy, 1.76 jag)
Better sensors (both ~+30%)

t1 frigs pros:
slightly better cap regen (which doesn't really matter here)
better speed (rifter is faster by a factor of 1.15, merlin 1.28)
better agility (merlin 1.11, rifter 1.18)

Scanres is fluctuating towards both classes. Generally t1 have advantage, but not always and it's insignificant. Same for lock range, though this time AFs are usually better.

Which uses do we have for plain old combat frigates?
1) Fun frig-gangs
2) Solo
3) PvE (up to l4 missions and low-end plexes, fw)
4) In typical gangs for tackling

1) Efficiency-wise, for fun-frig gangs based on close-range weapons (and most of the frigates have to come under scram range, even with LR weaponds - to deal at least some significant damage) AFs are significantly better, they let each pilot to last longer under focus to let others do their job
2) Solo can be different, it can be ab faggotry - like sitting at FW plexes warp-in points, or roaming lesser-populated 0.0 seeking for lone targets to duel, and AFs are better at it. It can be maneuverable PvP to stretch gang and kill off few tacklers, and t1 frigates seem to be better here.
3) AFs without any doubt
4) t1s for placing initial tackle, AFs for sustained tackling

In maneuverable solo t1s still lack both DPS to kill tacklers fast and speed to run away from fast-moving hostiles (like interceptors), thus such metagame puts them on the same level as AFs. This effectively leaves t1 frigates a single role which they do better - placing inital tackle in gangs (given they survive in process).

It's quite opposite to what you've stated: if you have both ships in your hangar, for best efficiency (i'm not considering price factor here) you will pick t2 for most of the tasks you can do with combat frigate, leaving t1 only a narrow set of roles. This happens because t2 has vastly superior tank and damage, sacrificing only minor portion of their mobility, which, in turn, survivability-wise is more than compensated by their mwd sig bonus.

Personally, i like t1-t2 relations of following classes (not all of them are ideal, but still):
--destroyers-interdictors: properly fitted thrasher can kill most powerful interdictor - sabre, but sabre is faster and can place bubbles
--frigates-interceptors: inties are just faster, and easily killed by most of modern t1 frigates in honourable 1v1. Fleet interceptor's role is to tackle, so that's fine, combat interceptors' imo should kill t1 frigates only when these are caught off-guard or with help from intie's mates
--t1 battleships-marauders-blackopses: marauders are usually tight on fitting, have weaker sensors, but have *slightly* better resistances, abundance of utility high slots, and additional (sometimes unique) bonuses - which makes them sometimes better than t1 counterparts in pvp, but only sometimes. BOs are generally weaker, but their unique abilities ensure they have their role, like interdictors (and i'm one of those who doesn't think that BOs need boost)
--frigates-stealth bombers: i think SBs are awesome, tho alittle imba - they took 2 very special roles (small sneaky guys with big guns and bombing runs) when other classes struggle to find at least one. Still, generally t1 counterparts are better - SBs can to little to nothing vs frigates, have agility of battlecruiser, have less base ehp and resources for tank.

I could've forgotten some noteworthy pairs, but most of the unmentioned classes are just bad, and do not follow your tech proposal. My personal opinion - is that boost to resistances for t2 ships makes huge difference between t2 and t1 ships (because it heavily influences ehp and remote rep efficiency), making you always to use t2 if possible. I think only 'assault' classes deserve to have better resistances; difference between t1 and t2 versions of the rest of the classes should be narrowed or even completely eliminated (by boosting t1 resistances or nerfing t2, with any desirable HP changes - it all depends on how fast you want ships to die, how effective local/remote reps to be, etc etc), even ship prices can be adjusted via required materials.

never understood Why the end of covert ops operation ships can't fit the High end cloak module and can't warp cloacked ... really don't get it

It would be very nice to look deeper into the Black ops give them a real role except being a fancy jump drivers ships like old post says

In regards to the command ships and already proposed method of rebalancing:

What we have now are two fairly different lines of ships (fleet and field) that are both called Command Ships, both the T2 version of one of the T1 battlecruiser hulls. The two lines do not have the same exact skill requirements, which separates them from the how Recons are handled, which also have two lines, or HACs, of which there are two per race, though not two distinct lines.

The proposed change, from the recent-ish devblog, would actually make the two CS lines closer in operation. They would largely be different in the weapon system used. That has the two racial CSs being less distinguished from each other than even the two HACs, as they at least use different hulls.

What if, instead, the two CSs were split into two entirely different ship types. Leave the fleet line as Command Ships, and make the Field something like Heavy Assault Battlecruiser. The Command Ships (formerly fleet) could then have their tanks appropriately designed - all of them buffer tank based, even the Gallente and Minmatar, as in a fleet they are buffer tanked anyway. The HABCs can be tanked as they are now.

In regards to the lack of use of the Eos, widening the types of links that it gets bonuses for is a band-aid at best. The real solution is to make Information links desirable, which they presently are not.

A big part of the problem with the Eos has been that for years and years, the only EW worth anything was ECM, and an armour tanked drone boat is not a good match for a wing of shield tanked ECM ships

Okay, so with the new scheme, the vulture will have bonuses to Information and Siege, Damnation has Armor and Skirmish and Eos will have Information and Armor. That means Vulture for ECM-based fleets and Damnation for armor fleets - especially if it remains the only armor command ship with the armor buffer that it has. The Claymore being Siege and Skirmish will remain a popular wing ship for shield fleets.

Have dampening and turret disruption become real popular in fleets? Otherwise, the Eos will remain not being used.

There's also the issue of CCP generally moving EW to EW-bonused boats and nerfing it in non-specialised ships.

EDIT: That said I don't think the possibilities of Tracking Disruptors for fleet use have been fully explored.