Player Features and Ideas Discussion

On the other hand, if it does less damage than a T1 BS, why PvE with it? I still think that only providing a tanking increase for the PvE T2 BS would be a mistake, since T1 / faction BS (or T3 cruisers) don't really have tanking problems for solo PvE content to begin with. T3 cruisers (the Tengu in particular) already offer absurd combinations of range, tank, and DPS for solo PvE.

I'm sure something could be worked out so that the ships wouldn't be unusable for incursions.

My point is that it's a good example of specialization for PvP-- the hulls have a niche role or two in which they excel, and are pretty awful at anything else. I just think the T2 battleships should be similarly-specialized.

I'm not as offended by his proposal when considered as a dedicated PvE idea (I still don't think it offers enough improvement for PvE to justify its pricetag, but that could be worked around easily). It's the balance teams' idea that the same ship can be useful for PvP that I find mind-boggling. There needs to be a separate PvP ship.

Being myself, I don't really care that much what they call it, but it does seem to me like there should be separate categories for a non-covert, DPS ship and a covert-cloaking support ship. I guess you could argue that either way, though-- HACs and recons are in different groups (one's a DPS ship, one's a support) but Combat Recons and Force Recons are in the same group (covert vs non-covert, both support ships). Either way, as long as there's a Marauder that Marauds, I'll be pleased.

I'll just throw this in here :

~148 days max (no implant) - to fully skill (L5) the marauder hull, sans gunnery/support skills.
~80 days max (no implant) - to fully skill (L5) a typical pirate BS hull, sans gunnery/support skills.

The marauder skill is a rank 10, the last level will take approx 30+days to finish with max implants.
It becomes almost like a holy grail at L5 ... long train, little reason.

Please keep the above in mind when doing the marauder iteration.

My cerb v your caracal, let's do this

Because one of the biggest problems in PvE is damage application. You want to bring tanky ships with lots of damage, which means Battleships most of the time but missions, Incursions, and exploration sites all have frigates and cruisers (and fast battleships in some cases) that you can't apply full DPS to. Against these enemies Webs, Target Painters, and Tracking Computers are very important. Tanking bonuses allow you both tank high damage PvE encounters and potentially fit more damage boosting or damage application modules like Heat Sinks, Gyrostabilizers, Tracking Computers, Tracking Enhancers, Webs, and Target Painters.

Case and point, one of the most popular T1 incursion battleships is the Rokh because it can fit more utility-mids due to its resists bonus and has a range bonus which helps with sniping in Assaults and HQs with Railguns and puts Blasters at optimal ranges against frigates and cruisers in Vanguards.

Plus if given a choice I'd rather see a Mordu's Legion line of ships using Hybrids. The Rokh looks awesome with Mordu's colors

I certainly agree with you here, I'd just like to keep the Bastion as an option though but something more similar to the relationship Carriers have with Triage. It's great and gives them nice bonuses but isn't mandatory like the Dreadnaught's Siege module is (Veldnaught not withstanding ).

I disagree, enough so to the point that I'm working on my own version of a full proposal. If everyone and their corp-mate is doing one I might as well work up a full concept too.

I think that a tanky ship with good damage application would fit the current definition of "Marauder" perfectly. Large tank and cargo-bay for sustained combat. Good damage application for dealing with small annoying threats as well as support ships (which tend to sit away from the battle and/or be hard to apply damage to).

The mobility is not strictly necessary for something to be a "Marauder" and the actual literal definition of "maraud" is simply "To roam in search of things to steal or people to attack." This was probably selected as the name for a set of mission ships as a joke on the money-focused nature of many High Sec mission runners and because it sounded cool.

I'll just throw this in here :

~148 days max (no implant) - to fully skill (L5) the marauder hull, sans gunnery/support skills.
~80 days max (no implant) - to fully skill (L5) a typical pirate BS hull, sans gunnery/support skills.

The marauder skill is a rank 10, the last level will take approx 30+days to finish with max implants.
It becomes almost like a holy grail at L5 ... long train, little reason.

Please keep the above in mind when doing the marauder iteration.

Crimminy still with the "waah waah Marauders will suck at level 4's with Bastion and MJD".

Here's the thing: MJD + Bastion might not suit your style of doing level 4's as you do them now (slowly motor to out gate while blam-blam) and you may need to adjust your play style to utilise them propelry...but how is that 'ruining' the ship class for its supposed 'intended role'?

The idea with designing a ship class should be to give it capabilities and let it loose and see where it ends up. People thought the Tengu was so-so for level 4's, and then they discovered the 100MN fits, and the price of CNR's dipped because you could get equal performance and way too much tank from a Tengu. This shows that what you may think a ship is intended for gets warped and twisted around by the players who find novel and unique ways to use them.

I thought the MJD was a fairly pointless module. Suddenly, there's people mumbling the 3 minute cooldown timer hurts them because they have to jump away from Level 4 mission rats twice which takes them 6 minutes to get back to gate.

Oh, hey, you can do it in 1/3rd the time with a Marauder with the Bastion mode! zomg!

The problem with the line of thinking that marauders are intended for PVE in level 4s (or as now, warped by Incursion bear whining) is that this leads to revisions and rebalances that further force the ship into what "the community' sees as an intended role.

Sure, this may be true of HICs and Dictors and Logi of all kinds, as these are very specialised ships. However, all other T2 combat ships have ship bonuses which give them special abilities and people automagically come up with interesting uses. Sentry ishtar ratting? Check. Blops running 8/10's? Check. Stealth bombers doing level 4 FW missions? Check. Soloing level 4's in Retributions? Check. Oh. My. God. CCP better buff these ships so they are more effective at their intended role of missioning!

Sarcasm in case you missed it.

The iteration 1 marauder changes gave us a niche PVP ship which would solo small POSs (yeah baby), Dickstars (hahaha), totally ruin the lamest "PVP" in EVE (being docking games), allow donut punching of lowsec gate camps (huehuehue). The problem? You can't run incursions. But you CAN destroy Level 4's. Well, shucks.

iteration 2 is a compromise which barely reduces the Marauder's use in PVE, assuming you can figure out MJD missioning style and aren't prone to ridiculously overtanking your ships for missions because you want your AFK Rattler back. It really only increases their use back to slightly worse than pirate BS for incursions. not that anyone uses them in incursions now, nor will they afterwards.

What it does do is destroys its use in PVP in any conceivable fashion. Docking games are back on because if you are going to undock a marauder, you may as well undock a Vindicator. Yay, thumbs up!

Lowsec gate camps won't have to worry about these things permatanking them while their gangmates destroy the pirates. Your sniper mode Marauder is gone, the 80% web being about as useful as bulls with DD boobs.

Whereas before i was looking forward to dropping one into harms way, assured that if I calculated right I'd have a good 10-15 minutes of fun and get a few kills baiting people, now its just a more expensive and less useful navy Faction BS equivalent with a "kill me now" module and no utility.

Be brave, CCP Ytterbium. Maybe fiddle the Bastion resist bonus to being a free DCU, or 5% across the board non-penalised. Keep the active rep bonus so you can actually tank outside Bastion mode (while, eg, hoofing it to gate), and tank in the 2-3K range while in it. You will then have a small gang or even solo boat able to punch hard, tank stronk and be a PITA.

Structure the other bonuses to actually work together to make a formidable long range platform which can protect itself from numpty ceptor pilots, idiots who blow their sig and can't tank 1000-1200 DPS and can't rid themselves of tackle. Leave the web bonus out, it will then be the achilles heel and force marauder pilots to work hard on their fits to counter the inevitable hero tackle Incursus of doom.

Iteration 1 Marauders, piloted by smart people with good gangs who pick their fights were going to be a handful. Well, guess what, an 850 DPS 280K EHP rail Proteus is a handful right now and you don't have any "kill me now" module on T3's like you do with iteration 2.

Was it you who linked that site originally? That site owns. I totally agree-- a Kalaakiota Rokh would own, and swapping the current Ishukone colorscheme for the Mordu's one across the board for Caldari would be awesome (I always loved the urban-camo look of the pre-V3 Ishukone ships).

If they left the Bastion module as a damage application amplifier on the PvE BS, I wouldn't mind. As I said a while back, PvE is not my area of expertise (I've done a fair bit, but mostly in Tengus, which pretty much break all the rules of EVE and tank absurdly well while destroying everything in their path), and I'm way more open to various proposals for PvE features for a PvE-focused BS. Speaking of which...

Your post actually got me thinking about an idea I had for "my Marauders" as a possible role bonus-- leaving them with reduced max dps numbers compared to vanilla BS, but giving them a role bonus that added tracking and decreased the signature size of their brand of battleship guns in order to make their large guns perform more like a midway point between cruiser and BS turrets in terms of damage and application. My initial thought was that this would only be good on a PvP BS (where it would make the weapons more versatile at the cost of DPS), and that ratters wouldn't find it useful since the result would be that the cleartime on trash NPCs would drop, but cleartime for battleship NPCs would go up, largely negating their practicality. Maybe I'm wrong? What do you think?

Regardless, do finish a writeup. I'll be curious to see what you come up with.

I've spent most of my EVE career doing insurgency stuff in hostile space, and to me a battleship with good damage application and ****-poor mobility sounds totally useless. I've used ships like pulse Apocs (old and new, normal and Navy varieties) to pretty good effect before because they give you a combination of stand-off range, excellent tracking, decent DPS, and pretty OK mobility (for a battleship). If they were bigger and fatter I would not use them at all, regardless of how well they applied damage or tanked. In small-gang PvP mobility is incredibly important and tanking ability is relatively irrelevant-- the vast majority of my ships are very light on tank simply because in most cases it's not how much you can tank that determines whether you live or die, but whether or not you can manage ranges and avoid being tackled. In the case of closerange ships, this means having good speed and agility; in the case of long-range ships like a pulse Apoc, speed is much less important but having a low align time is still very much important.

For PvP scenarios that don't require mobility, the existing pirate, navy, and T1 BS seem to do the job just fine. The new Hyperion in particular is an absolute monster for things like crashing (crushing?) gatecamps. The Hyp has active tanking on lockdown, while things like Abaddons can fit pretty monstrous brick-tanks.

Am I the only one that noticed this?

Update here.
Giving a new deployed mode is not enough however, as some modifications need to be made on the hulls themselves. First, we wanted to encourage Marauders to use Micro Jump Drives to move around, and as such have reduced mobility next to their Tech1 counterparts (bit higher mass and lower max velocity). We are also reducing their drone bays as they are primarily meant to deliver damage through their main weapon system. They also keep the resistances they have right now instead of gaining full Tech2 resists, otherwise the combination with the bastion module would be quite over the top.

However, we realize Marauder hulls have a certain number of issues; as such we are significantly increasing their fittings so that they can fit Large Micro Jump Drives plus Heavy Capacitor Boosters with more ease (the Vargur especially needed more fitting options). We also are increasing their high slots to 8 to compensate for the slot allocation of the bastion mode. We also are increasing their maximum targeting range and scan resolution a bit to make use of the increased damage projection, while decreasing their signature radius. They also are receiving full Tech2 resists.