Player Features and Ideas Discussion

How often is this going to be 1v1? The local tank won't mean much when the ship is completely neuted and can't receive RR. Dual XLASB fits are going to be harder to crack but not impossible. PVP is rarely fought evenly in this game so you can't balance on 1v1 only.

In PVE you barely need a tank once your dps is high enough. When your energy skills are high enough even cap boosters start becoming less necessary as well (or cap re-chargers). All the battleships dps cap at around 1 -1.2k (minus the Gallente ships). Your not going to get more performance out of tank at this point, your performance is limited by DPS. I can't personally get better isk / hour than in a cruise CNR with Fury / Precisions. 1x Rigor rig and a single TP on a BS and your pretty much maxed on applied damage. A second TP only helps with Frigs / Cruisers, and then its really not a big difference. The Golem is not going to do more damage than the CNR within either of these proposals without using torps and increasing rigor rigs and using multiple tps. There is no Pirate ship that will do more dps either, unlike the Mach within the Minmatar lines Tempest Fleet and Maelstrom. Most of the other BS in Faction and Pirate can field 3-5 Sentry drones, which will increase damage over the currently proposed Marauders because of their direct lack of BS sized drone bays. I really don't personally like drones, so make the racial weapon system higher damage than the rest of the BS while keeping drone damage low or utility based and keeping a focused difference in what the ship is. They should be the gunships (or missile) of sub-cap ships, owning damage, application and projection, and let the faction / pirate ships be faster and more drones / options for fitting / better buffer setups.

I don't know what direction CCP is going take past this, but I bet they are testing both on the internal servers and maybe a few other ideas. Maybe there is something else going on with the winter expansion that these marauders mesh well with we don't know about. Maybe we will find out next week.

i would find if neat if the bastion module was designed to absorb heat and would thus allow you to perma overheat.

The only thing that concerns me with any change in ship ability, Is whether or not it can still be used as it was before it was "rebalanced." To have spent 1.5bil+ on a ship that is central to my gameplay, and then one day it can no longer be used as such is at the very least frustrating.

The proposed changes sound interesting as long as they don't require me to radically change my style of play, or drop another 1.5bil on a ship that will do what my Maurader used to do.

That is completely different.
Super carriers were never intended to be that powerful back then.

However, Marauders have always been intended for pve, even if they sucked at it.

You should know this is a bad comparison..
Shame on you

This is a completely erroneous set of assumptions. First of all you can make more ISK doing Null sec anomalies than you can missioning, and null-sec rats represent a bigger ISK faucet due to their much higher bounties. Plus there are a number of other ISK faucets to be taken into account such as Incursion payouts, Blue Loot in wormholes, and Insurance payouts. There are also several major isk-sinks already present in the game and CCP has, historically, done a fairly good job of managing the relation of faucets and sinks in the game.

Also no one said these ships had to be awesome at soloing. You could probably fit up a dual web setup for fighting on undocks and hold the Mach long enough to kill him though, and if you can't then oh well he also can't kill you. Plus I never mentioned bastion mode. With a T2 tank these ships can still tank better than a Pirate Battleship even without it. There is more to game balance than raw DPS.

From a game design perspective it's pretty easy to explain why CCP don't want to make these DPS kings. T2 ships are supposed to be specialized with some form of unique bonus or benefit. DPS is not at all unique and making these ships DPS kings would mean they would need to be nerfed in other ways. Far simpler to keep Pirate ships as top tier raw DPS but give these ships better application and tank while throwing a few T2 bonuses like the MJD bonus onto the hulls.

You are, of course, free to use whatever hull you want for whatever reasons you want. Making these the penultimate mission ship for every play-style would remove choice from the game and generally be a poor move.



No one ever said that these ships are supposed to fit these specific niches. CCP gives us tools and we find uses for them. If a tool doesn't perform well enough then it gets adjusted to re-worked. The stated goal was Niche PvP application. If that niche is only really fit for a few small-gang compositions then fine.



You can "Maraud" in any ship in Eve. Balance by word definition is not good balance. I would rather see them change the name of the ship line and come up with a good and balanced concept than try to meet the ridiculous requirement of fitting everyone's interpretation of a dictionary definition.

Marauders seem to have originally been called "Marauders" because they were designed to go into Deadspacee mission pockets and come back full of loot. These have never been intended to be primarily PvP ships.

Agreed. Especially with iteration 2's changes, this is becoming less and less a "Marauder Re-balancing" and more a "Marauder Nerf, New Mod Introduction". Right now, the only advantages the marauders get compared to their current design is slightly better locking range, locking speed, some extra grid, odd T2 resists, and an eighth high slot. What they loose is their tanking bonus, a quarter of the web bonus off the two marauders that already have them (not to mention the very same bonus to the other two that don't need them), speed, agility, cap, drone bay and control range, and they retain the same ****-poor sensor strengths as before. With these changes, the only thing that stands a chance to look good at all is the bastion module itself, not the marauders.

Here's my 2 cents:

Give the paladin a tracking bonus add the cap bonus into the hull keep the old rep amount bonus
Increase the explo velocity bonus for golem to 7.5%/lvl and leave the shield boost bonus same
Turn the kronos into a drone boat,maybe even switch hulls with the sin and give it same bonuses to drones as ishtar has now but 15% to drone dmg instead of 10%
Keep the vargur as is with a 7.5% rof bonus instead of 5%

Lastly reduce bastion rep to 75% bonus and give it a tiny dmg bonus 10% or something to keep all these ships above or in line with the buffed pirate BSs maybe even an energy neut reflect bonus instead of dmg since we are talking about a subcap size capacitor in a cap priced ship
Also increase their agility and add an MJD cycle reduction bonus(5sec?) into the role for fast redeployment
Oh yes and forget about the silly web bonus who you gona web when you cant move and cant be remote assisted?

The Paladin already has far and above the best cap of all of them so if the cap bonus goes it's more than likely you won't get much back on it.

Missiles already have better damage application than turrets so their bonuses tend to be smaller.

Gallente already has a drone boat for every occasion and does not need more. The Dominix is already a fantastic drone boat for missions and a replacement isn't really needed.

I have no idea what you're talking about with the Vargur, which already has a 5% bonus on TQ and the only Battleship that gets a 7.5% bonus to ROF is the Tempest which is split guns.



These are not supposed to out-DPS the Pirate Battleships they are supposed to apply the damage they have better. These ships are also not supposed to be strictly cost effective, as with every T2 ship. T2 makes every individual pilot count more and lets you do things you can't always do with T1 hulls, but they are not supposed to be strictly better than T1 or Faction in every way.

The MJD cycle time is the only time these hulls are really vulnerable to tackle, so it doesn't make sense to reduce both the cycle time and the re-use time and the re-use time is a better bonus.

I agree on the web bonus, just not for the same reasons.

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Seriously I don't get why everyone is so adverse to Damage Application compared to raw DPS. Go into a mission in any Battleship and you'll see that you can rather easily 1-shot Frigates provided you can get clean hits on them. This is even true with Railguns which have some of the lowest alpha of any large turret, under-cut only by Projectiles.

If you can reliably kill Frigates in 1-2 shots instead of 3-4 and Cruisers with a similarly reduced number of hits then your mission completion times go down significantly. No I am not referring to mission Blitzing but you tend to use fast ships for that anyway and often DPS is secondary to speed (depending on mission).

If you're dealing reduced damage to these smaller NPC ships then against said ships you're going to see more effective DPS out of a damage application bonus than you are out of raw DPS since the application bonus is effectively bonus DPS equal to the % of the bonus until you're doing full DPS to a target.

To illustrate this point I fitted out a bare-bones Mega and a Succubus with 2 Nanofibers. This approximates the speed of a Mordu's Katana as its bearing in on you and I picked an approach that was slightly off-center to approximate an NPC diving headlong into your guns trying to reach its orbit radius. Irridium Charges were used since they still have the potential to one-shot the Katana or at least come close and the top range was about where several of the pockets spawn in Mordu's Headhunters.

This is the base-damage with no active Tracking Computers and here's the damage increase from the first Tracking Computer. As you can see that's a fairly significant bump in damage, approximately 31% in-fact. With all four tracking computers we get all the way up to 295, which is almost a 70% increase in applied damage.

In-fact in this model the applied damage increase from the first active tracking computer is greater than the applied damage increase from the first Magnetic Field Stabilizer.

Good post.

My suggestion would be to just drop Bastion idea on existing T2 BSs, fiddle with attributes a bit (plenty of good suggestions in this thread) and then take another BS hull, fit Bastion module (in preferably 2 flavours) and design new T2 BS around that. Surely art department can't be that overtaxed not to be able to slap some dark paint on 4 hulls. Thus we get "rebalanced" Marauders and new ship in winter expansion. Even if new T2 BS won't be perfect, and we all know it won't be , the above still looks better on the PR side than leaving us with some forced hybrid nobody will be happy about.

PVE will retain its 1.5 bil toy and PVP would get possibly decent ~1 bil one. Come up with a name, an associated skill for hulls, 2 Bastion skills and you've also created some (small) additional ISK sink.

How about instead of a regular tractor beam bonus, they can fit a single capital tractor beam mod with a 99.9% reduction in powergrid cost? That means 100 CPU, 75 PG, 200 GJ Activation / 20s. Not easy to fit, but not unbearable either for a pve boat.