Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Aww [blush]

The point of bringing command ships on-grid is that you should be risking something for such useful boosts. At present an off-grid booster risks relatively little, especially if baby-sat correctly.

Skill-Point requirements and ship cost are barriers to entry, they are not the primary metrics of a ships power. That line of thinking got us AOE doomsday Titans and we all saw how that went. Hell, it's still being cleaned up after.

If the only thing your T3 pilot is good for is boosting in your eyes then well, you've already outlined the trade-offs that make that worth using for you, even in light of the nerf. You've also gotten a good year+ out of that T3 boosting pilot and with everyone being fairly sure this was going to change since at least Winter if not before.

What's going to happen to T3s in the future I honestly don't know, we'll have to see. The fact that they're at the end of Ytterbium's balance list says that CCP are going to take a lot of time to figure out where they fit into things and balance them against the state of the game at that point.

Have you ever fought solo against a dual damp kiting Hookbill/Condor? Now have you ever done it with a Loki boosted one? I assure you that it's not simply bringing the proper counter to the fight, there is no fight. Literally the only way to deal with it is to have a clone with more speed implants and an even faster Loki boosted ship that can actually get in range to first of all lock, then apply tackle.



So first up, lets take the mindlink into account. 15% more (shield/armour) HP, giving 15% more EHP there. Now for the resist mod. I'll admit this is before stacking penalties, so the amount isn't as large. But at current a T3 gives 35% higher resists. 35% higher resists means you're taking 35% less damage. So now you divide your EHP by 1-0.35.

This increases EHP by approximately 53%. That's like having a Slave set, by the way. Now you put that together with the mindlink bonus and you have 1*1.15*1.53=76.9% more EHP.

In all fairness the resists are stacking penalized, but I just wanted to point out how big of a difference that actually is. Buy a Merlin. Do it. Fit it up. Now fit up another one, exactly the same. Now have one of them have a perfect Siege booster, and the other nothing. Now what happens? The one with ~77% more EHP wins hands down.

I'd have no problem with this if it were an isolated incident. But it's to the point that half the fights go like this. Hell, even I use and abuse this ****, I have a perfect Damnation booster (I was training the leadership for a while, then when it came time to pick a ship to train I saw the dev blog announcing changes back in winter and picked CS... took a little longer than they said it would) that I use relatively frequently. Also worth noting is the reduction in duration of repper modules also increases the EHP/s repaired by them, which is also amplified by the higher resists granting more EHP for each actual hitpoint repaired. My armour tanking ships are tanking more than twice as strong as an unboosted one. I feel dirty using them in solo PvP.



So many people accuse CCP of using AT to balance... this guy's explaining why AT shows that links are balanced.



What...?

In essence an OGB gives a free module/rig/slot to each and every ship it's boosting. If it's boosting 250 ships, it's giving (assuming 3 links) 250 ships 3 free modules/slots/etc. (in the case of webs, points and props with Loki, it's like giving everyone free faction mods). All this for one ship/toon that between the two probably costs less than the combined cost of all the "mods" it's giving people.

Also, I care if I can point farther when the enemy fleet has more tacklers than I have mods. If I can point/web farther than them I can slow down any tacklers that run the risk of getting close (you know, because I'm outrunning everything thanks to Loki boosts, so I only care about things in my potential paths) before they can apply tackle to me and kill them before they become a threat. Eventually if I get sloppy they might catch me, but I'll certainly take a lot out with me if I'm even semi-competent.

Of course, if my enemies were semi-competent, they'd have their own boosts. It's not like it's hard to get the alts.

Boosts are not the end-all be-all of the game, this is true, however I disagree with your conclusion that there is "no reason to touch them"

There have been a number of reasons to bring boosts on-grid presented by the player base and CCP, and CCP have stated their intent to bring boosts on-grid. If you disagree with these reasons then by all means find an argument against those reasons. Don't just respond with "boosts are fine, leave mine alone".

Unless they balance the Roqual so that it's either survivable enough, cheap enough, or gives a big enough bonus to make that worth it...

Or hell, maybe all three?

I think I agree that a T3 should be like a decathlete, able to do every job but not as well as a specialised ship. This was probably the original intention, although I would find it very understandable if the devs wanted to give them 'something extra' to make them desirable at the time of inception.

This was at the same time as wormholes I think? They were a new thing at the time and there was no way to know whether players would make the effort to explore wormholes and build T3s. One tempting way to ensure that was to give them oversized bonuses.

This is something I understand very well, having spent the first 10 years of my career designing video and gambling games. You always want to introduce something awesome, but over time you realise that less is more. I think the devs unwittingly broke the game with 10%/level repair bonuses, armour amounts, power grid and damage application. Particularly when they all stacked together on the same ship!

As has been mentioned, 5% per level gang link bonuses on T3 actually translates to 5% per level per link (often 3) times the number of ships in fleet. That's such an outrageously high level of effectiveness. Out of line even with the other OP bonuses on a T3.

Another major flaw with T3s (in my view) was not being able to reconfigure them in a POS. Of course at the time, no-one would have predicted that people would set up home in wormholes. The Eve devs were, by all accounts, fascinated and shocked that people would do such a thing.

I think the right place for the T3 is as an advanced multi-role combat ship, able to be reconfigured at a battlefield outpost (POS) in order to bring the right abilities to the field quickly, but not quite as effectively as the real deal. They would still be heavily used because of the convenience, but they would be outclassed by a perfectly crafted specialist fleet. This would give both classes of ship a sensible place in the game. In order to properly take advantage of this, CCP might also be so kind as to allow T3s to decommission rigs without destroying them, or perhaps craft the bonuses in such a way that rigs are not necessary or possible on them.

I think that would make them perfect.

Dug up the flow chart from when this whole ship rebalancing thing began:

http://cdn1.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/8742/1/Shiptech_1920.jpg

T2 Mindlinks need to give a slightly higher bonus to 1 discipline than Navy IMO.

Not going to happen in 1.1 but maybe down the road.

@Mournful Conciousness

I do see where your coming from because that ship does project that 5% per level to everyone in the fleet. However, everybody and their mom has access to these skills so it would only make sense for them to train leadership too if that is what their fleet is lacking. This is almost like a fleet complaining that they can't remotely repair their ships like everyone else. Well damn, train up remote repair and logistics. I believe the main reason why boosters are being singled out is because people don't want to wait for 12 million skill points in their que to be completed.

If CCP made leadership x1 skills then we would see a booster in every single fleet.

When on the topic of skill training you then begin to see why titan pilots don't want jump bridges to be nerfed. Why train an entire year for something so special that can be taken away so easily? All it takes is a bunch of 20-30 mil skill pilots spamming the forms saying "this isn't fair". Eve is about wealth and power if you really want to get somewhere. I'll admit, instead of training characters I just buy a new one. Making isk is what I'm good. You look at most of the things people are good at that complain? It boils down to losing ships and complaining.

This is like a CEO choosing an interns opinion over a 30 year vet.


@Veshta Yoshida

Fitting faction and deadspace does not all of a sudden make someone good. Garmon is a great example when it comes to the best fittings mods, ships, and boosts in the game. Look at his killboard, he still died a lot..... Nobody is perfect in Eve because nobody is perfect in life. No two scenario's can ever be repeated so it is flawed logic to nerf something that hasn't been proven to be unbalanced. Proving that something looks good on paper is not a reason to make it an outcast. Everyday underdogs prove that statistics are just that, compiled information that are easier to read. In relation to Mournful on this I too deal with gambling and racing for a living. Statistics can say all day that a specific horse will win but the realistic people know that isn't always the case. The "fastest horse on paper" doesn't always win.


@Everyone else

Boosts are not overpowered; they are extremely specialized skills that CCP made available to us. If you also crave boosts then do what everyone else did that has them. Train up 12 million+ skill points or pay 10 billion isk for a new toon along with another account subscription! Welcome to eve where only the rich, powerful, and the intelligent prevail.

I do understand the idea of bringing boosts on-grid so they can "see what is going on". But, that still doesn't explain why they are nerfing the links all together.

A few pages back a gentlemen explained that a good FC would alpha the booster off the field ASAP. Boosts don't really make a difference during a blob fest but they help magnify a good players skills to be 1 step ahead. If you have been following since yesterday on what I have been saying then you will also notice that many other ships in this game can provide that 1 step ahead too.

I can settle for boosts being moved on-grid

Anyways my original point on this topic still stands. Boosts should be left alone when it comes to their bonus %'s. If they are put on grid, in their current fragile EHP state, that is enough risk vs reward.

Possible idea: Switch the command subsystem from defensive to offensive. This way booster t3's can't cloak but can fit better defensive mods. Better defense would allow them on grid :)

I direct your attention to this post by CCP Fozzie on their plans for moving Command Ships on-grid.

He's essentially talking about distributed boosts, where you have to lose all your ships with a given link in order for that bonus to disappear, rather than having things relegated to one booster for fleet, wing, and squad.

This means that in any fleet where you have or are facing enough DPS to alpha the boosting ship off the field you also have enough pilots to bring multiple redundant boosting ships. Since these tend to be tankier and harder to hit than most battleships there's a decent chance that unless you possess absolutely overwhelming firepower you're going to kill one boosting ship for every two DPS ships you could have killed, either by splitting your Alpha or DPSing through their weaker tank faster.

In smaller fleets the same trade-off applies since the Command Ship is likely to be the tankiest ship on grid if you go for it as your primary then you had better be 100% sure it's worth it since the Logi are going to have an easier time keeping it up and it'll take longer to burn through even if there are no logi pilots.

Beyond that we've all agreed that T3s need a second look but I don't think you're going to get your way on the boost %s. Maybe when T3s get overhauled and boosts are moved on-grid they'll get buffed to have an easier time fitting more links.

Beyond that, pretty much everything Mournful Conciousness said.