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I was noticing the changes and something bothered me - primarily with frigate hulls.

The interceptor is a cheap throwaway ship for many experienced players. It is already a popular hull to use for how cheap it is and adding bubble immunity along with this much faster warp speed... What about the pirate & navy faction ships?

These hulls are expensive and now won't be as valuable for chase purposes. Quite literally you can park an interceptor in a bubble camp - IN the bubble - with no concerns but not other small hulls and making them superior in these ways, without increasing the value of spending more isk on the ships; I think this could use looking at - at least in the frigate category.

Faction ships get 3 rig slots vs 2 of T2 ships. So some balancing...

Anyway, I thought I'd toss this out and see what others think. IMO having both cheaper and superior in the same package will impact the use of the more expensive hulls and I find more expensive use to be more attractive than the less expensive throw away models.

I put this together for someone in another area discussing this topic.

First - price is always a consideration on ships. Not *THE* consideration but *A* consideration of meaning. You don't find people always climbing into machariels vs maelstroms for a BS roam and the like - a mach is superior but the costs tend to dissuade it from common use this way.

So let's look at some of these changes differently but keeping price in mind.

Current warp mechanics, chasing isn't that big a deal with how fast you could chase - it was a chase, not an intercept. You caught up due to align times and such between warps. It's done but it's no where near as effective as it will be with Rubicon.

With the new mechanics chasing and running will be effective based upon your warp speed - "bouncing celestials" style - but only for those ships which move fairly fast to catch-up/keep ahead.

This include *NONE* of the pirate hulls nor faction hulls. They all move the same as the T1 baseline for that class. *ALL* the T2 hulls warp faster than their faction counterparts - AF's in the frigate class, Logistics and HIC's in the cruisers on up to Black ops and Marauders in the battleship sizes - all the T2's warp faster than the faction hulls.

As such, running away or chasing, faction hulls match being the weakest at chasing and getting away of any ships out there. An AF warps faster than any faction equivalent - be that navy or pirate. *THEY* will be a better chase craft than the pirate frigates.

The reason smaller gangs ran with shields virtually exclusive for a number of years was the agility/mobility you got with shields over armor. The same can be seen with chasing and running with these warp changes. Flying faction - you'll be flying one of the slowest warping, most expensive targets by using one.

This is not a good composite to see they keep being used for PvP.