Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If you could put an interdiction sphere launcher at anything other than an interdictor you wouldn't fly an interdictor.

They are incredibly mediocre ships that are most commonly used as suicide bubble droppers. These changes don't do anything to help alleviate the problems with this ship class.

Would it be terribad to give these ships a flat +1 to the warp disruption strength of fitted points and scrams as an additional role bonus? Inties get added range which is helpful everywhere, let dictors have a high/low sec utility role by grabbing warp stabbed targets. This is relevant with the current FW farming meta and especially recent T1 indy hauler changes that both see multiple stabs being fit on agile ships.

"10mn AB plated fleet fits". Are you balancing these ships based on some idiot's idea of an Interdictor fit? Or worse, do you actually believe that people fly armor tanked interdictors?

I kind of like the idea of blasters + rockets for my Eris. Rockets would help with drone control. I can see a lot of gank potential out of the hull... except that it takes two damage mods to get similar DPS out of it compared to a sabre with one gryro....

yes i can fly the heretic and call people heretics and be scary now!

Dual weapon system ugh, and even on a dictor, could have atleast make it possible to chose either instead of just both.

nice changes like em ...till i get killed by one

but the eris seems a little strange i'd rather see split weapons scythe FI style on it if tit must have split weapons

I'm really getting tired of these -re-balance threads: the only decent changes I've seen you guys make in the last few expansions have been the warp speed changes and the blackops BS temp-fix.

I know you probably don't give a damn about my opinion, but here's my opinion on what you should have focused on with dictors, with a few explanations here and there:

First, you should recognize that these ships fill an absolutely critical role in 0.0 combat, and that that very role virtually guarantees that dictors will at or near the top of the target lists in any kind of engagement. Given that these ships wear a "kick me" sign on their backs from the outset and that they fill a key role, they need to have a focus on survivability. Without tackle, fights don't work outside the AT. Tackle needs to be able to do it's job. You guys seem to have recognized this with interceptors and assault frigates, opting to give them much larger tanks than their T1 counterparts and/or tiny signature radii and bonuses to sig bloom. Dictors, on the other hand, get LARGER base sigs than destroyers, can't field appreciably larger tanks, and ultimately wouldn't benefit from "larger, small tanks" due to the fact that their sig/speed ratios mean that they will get absolutely reamed by anything that fits weapons and isn't a Phoenix.

tl;dr: Dictors need a massive sig shrink across the board (and by the way, you're being blatantly disingenuous by even suggesting that a 5m sig radius decrease on the Sabre is "significant" in any way) and probably bonuses to prop-mod sig bloom AND larger tanks in order to do their jobs effectively your brave new world of EVE where a majority of ships (especially T1 stuff) has received large buffs to their combat effectiveness.

Next, what in the name of all that is holy is this new-old split-weapons bonus fetish you have going? Remember all those years frustrated people spent complaining about the split weapon bonuses / slot layouts on the Typhoon and the Naglfar? Remember how you held out for years before finally doing away with those situations and admitting they were a terrible idea? WHY ARE YOU BRINGING THEM BACK? The "new" split-bonus philosophy (bonuses to two weapons systems and hardpoint layouts that allow a user to equip a full compliment of either type) is fine, but this 4 turret / 4 launcher crap is just unbelievable. It's still a bad idea: get rid of it.

Finally, "Minmatar" and "least-agile ship in it's class" do not belong in the same ship description. Newsflash: with the chronic lag present in your game it is hard enough for a current nano-Sabre to delay-bubble and snag a decloak on any remotely-quick cloaking ships. The last thing the Sabre needs is an agility nerf, especially one that puts it below every other dictor on offer. If you want to make the Eris ever-so-slightly more maneuverable (but slower) then so be it, but there's no way the two resist-bonused, "tanky" dictors (I still find this notion laughable) should be more agile than the Sabre or Eris.

PS: are you actually increasing fittings on the Eris and Heretic enough to allow them to utilize their "armor tanking slot layout" and "extra missile hardpoint," respectively? I won't know until someone is kind enough to release an EFT mod that allows me to theorycraft these terrible ships (since you guys continue to provide no way of actually contextualizing your stupid patch note-style change announcements), but in the past the Eris' extra low slot over the Heretic was often useless due to having insufficient CPU to utilize it, while the Heretic never had the fitting to actually field a complement of rocket launchers effectively, much less that plus an additional launcher...

Oh, and while I'm at it: you guys should make the Heretic a laser platform, because that would just be cool. I was talking to a spacebro and he reminded me that we'll now have 3 missile platform destroyers and only one that is specialized for guns. That strikes me as being kind of lame. Also lasers are indisputably awesome.

e: Oh, and you need to introduce T2 warp disruption sphere launchers and T2 warp disrupt probes that have increased bubble diameters for tackling on your heinously-large constellation gates. The current situation where every fourth gate link in EVE is un-campable without anchorable bubbles or some kind of max-skilled hictor (hint: a big tank doesn't make up for the fact that hictors are terrible ships for a small camp, since their combination of expensive hull, being aggroed for the duration of their module timer plus their near total lack of mobility mean that they are prime gank targets and can't decloak cloaking targets, which is what ~75% of nullsec pilots fly around in these days when they're not in a two-thousand man fleet). Regular dictors need to be a viable option for camping at least normal + const gates. If you want region gates to always be bigger than dictor bubbles that's fine with me, but constellation gates need to stop being a free pass for anyone with a covops cloak.

The problem isn't primarily one of tank size or resists: it's dictors' horrible combination of a cruiser-sized sig and cruiser-sized top speeds with frigate tanks. It's really the speed and sigs that need tweaking more than EHP (although a decent-sized EHP increase to keep pace with the tank-creep that's been pervasive among small ships since the tiericide started would also be welcome).

What they'd do if they actually wanted to make dictors into viable combat hulls rather than bubble-and-run mobiles would be to increase EHP by ~20-25% (via raw HP or resists-- I don't think it would matter that much, although at least with resists you could theoretically keep dictors up using remote reps for small gang fights), increase the top speeds across the board such that nano-fit dictors can manage 3-3.5km/s while MWDing, and shrink their base sig radii down to 45-50 instead of the absurd ~75 they're sitting at right now.

Essentially, dictors should really resemble frigates more than they do cruisers: small tanks, high mobility (which helps them mitigate damage AND do their job of grabbing initial tackles / decloaks better) and small sigs.

On a somewhat-related note, I find it hilarious that interceptors-- ships that aren't forced to find themselves inside bubbles constantly and which are the best-equipped ships in the game in terms of their ability to rapidly burn out of bubbles they do find themselves in-- are getting bubble immunity, while dictors-- relatively slow, tankless ships that are forced to drop themselves in the middle of a 20km bubble just to do their jobs-- are stuck in their own bubbles. If anything it should be dictors that are bubble immune (allowing them to not kill themselves by tackling and allowing them to bypass "defensive" bubbles and use their own bubbles on hostile fleets to, you know, do their jobs. But what do I know, I've just been doing small-gang PvP in nullsec since 2007.

Basically these changes do next to nothing to address the fact that the combat abilities of interdictors have become absolutely farcical. Between the speed nerf that destroyed their ability to speed tank damage and the Tiericide-induced power creep that has significantly buffed what seems like every other ship class in the game, the only things that an interdictor can actually fight these days are stealth bombers (assuming they don't have a buddy in another bomber waiting to decloak and bomb you, that is), some scanning frigates (beware ye battle-Helios, however), and some industrial ships. Yeah: some industrial ships: some of those mining barges with 40k ehp and the ability to field drones will probably wreck you. Combat frigates, T1 destroyers, cruisers, some interceptors, all assault frigs, cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships will all completely wreck you if you hang around decloaked long enough to get locked. Our game-designer buddies are acting like they're doing us some kind of big favor by "bringing all other dictors up to the level of the Sabre." Great, except that there's almost nothing that the existing inferior dictors can't fight that a Sabre can. The Sabre is mostly a bubble-and-run machine too, unless you really like losing Sabres...

I'm honestly incredibly disappointed by these changes: while I haven't been enthusiastic about most of the changes of the Tiericide Age, most of them have been things I could work with or around. With interdictors CCP are passing up their best (probably only) opportunity to fix a class that has been seriously underwhelming for years now, and that has only been further emasculated by the tiericide buffs to other small ships. Instead of doing anything to actually make dictors viable and fun ships, CCP are playing it safe by calling the Sabre "good enough" and balancing all the other dictors against it. This is really, obviously not going to do anything to improve the state of dictor-piloting, since anyone with a clue who uses their dictor outside intentionally-suicidal fleet tackling runs has already trained for a Sabre anyway. The only reason people continue to fly Sabres is that dictors are functionally indispensable, and the Sabre is the least-bad of the bunch. That doesn't mean the Sabre (or your new lineup of dictors balanced around it) will be in a good place when your changes go through, and you know it. Shame on you, CCP. I expected more from a team of designers who allegedly spent years playing this game.