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You probably do not want this thread descending into Hybrid balancing but have you considered changing the above.

Assuming given the repair bonuses that Gallente are a Primarily active tanking race then if how would people feel about changing shield and armour to active and passive rig sets.

Passive - decrease speed
All armour and shield extension/resistance rigs

Active - increase sig radius
All armour and shield rigs affecting active tanking

This may help active armour compete with buffer with the current speed changes they would also be faster than active tanked Amarr ships.

there is only one true fix for the blasterboat problem - you may like it or not, but make those blasterboats the fastest ships in game. point.

a bit less radical solution: give blasterboats a massive afterburner speed bonus so their sig radius is not so big while closing the gap to a target...or alternatively: massive mwd speed boost so they can close in the speed much much faster than on standard mwd fit..

plates are plates and will never make up for terrible blaster range unles fitting them miracousely boosts your speed... ;-p

Wow, if you're dumb you can die in any ship? Really? Thanks for the heads up!

Seriously though, the idea for the tier 3 BCs is that they're fast and dish out grape hand over fist when aimed at cruisers and bigger but are fragile and struggle to kill frigs/inties (no drones, large-gun tracking) in exchange. From the few hours I spent flying Torndados/Oracles/Taloses last night I pretty much found this to be the case (they die *fast* if you get into trouble, they dish out a lot of DPS if you position yourself at your ideal range to target, and they (well not the Talos, but the other two) can only kill really small ships if the opposing pilot is terrible (burns at you from range with no transversal).

The not-Taloses were really fun to fly and performed well without feeling like solo-pwnmobiles. The Talos hull handles ~*just right*~ but it's bad slot layout and gimpy weapons make it useless as a blaster platform.

The problems of the Talos, are, are you say, closely tied to the problems of blaster boats in general. Unless radical changes are made to fleet mechanics, active tanking will always be inferior to passive tanking. Blasters contradict the armour tanks of blaster boats.

Therefore:

I suggest you remove the speed penalty of armour rigs. Replace it with an agility penalty. This should give a decent bonus to speed for active armour tankers.

I suggest you give blaster boats an inherent bonus to remote repping (RR), either directly (but you'll have to add high slots to the Brutix and co) or via a bonus to armour repping drones.

I suggest you give blasters a flat 20% increase to range (10% each for optimal and falloff). This will make blasters more competitive combined with the other improvements that they are receiving.

I suggest you strongly consider dropping either rails or missiles from the Naga and giving it a damage bonus instead. Simply adding cruise missiles will not do much for the ship as cruise missiles, like torpedos, have long flight times and it is far too easy to avoid them.

Tiers BCs in general:

They are too fast. They should be faster than BS but slower than BC.

Their range will make whole groups of other ships obsolete.
Who would fly alpha BS if the Tornado can outrange them all?
Who would fly Zealots if an Oracle has far greater range and just as much mobility at a lower cost?
Who would fly Vagabonds if the Tornado can outrange it at similar speeds and lower cost with much higher dps?
Who would fly a cruiser if any of these ships can drop a turret for a medium neut and still do incredibly high dps?
How will any ship survive a gatecamp if they can be alpha'd by the Talos, Oracle or Tornado?
What is the point of a Munnin if the Tornado can do what it does with much higher alpha and range, the same mobility and lower cost?
What is the pont of the Ferox, Eagle and Rokh if the Naga can outrange them all and if even the Talos can do more damge at the same ranges they do?

The tier3 BCs are seriously unbalanced. The only isk/effort counter are the new destroyers which are in turn seriously overpowered.

Stop, and think very hard about this before you introduce these changes.

Meh I hate to see fantastic art and magnificent models wasted on a niche role, whose practical warfare use is questionable.

Am I supposed to read this as "because the other Caldari ships are long range, medium damage, we want the close range bruiser to deal medium damage," because that's how it reads. Please don't fall into the mistake of comparing what is supposed to be a high damage ship to a medium damage ship and a (brokenly) low damage ship. Every other ship in the game gets two relevant bonuses, that are in almost all cases made use of every time the ship is flown. This is so prevalent that in cases where one or both bonuses are consistently not used, we acknowledge that something is wrong with the ship. Why should the Naga not receive two bonuses that it can use when well fit?

Your fears about a missile explosion radius bonus making torpedoes do too much damage against smaller ships are completely misplaced. Torpedoes have a base explosion radius of 450 at smallest and no skills to reduce this number. Even with a 7.5% bonus and battlecruisers 5, this number would only be reduced to a hair over 281, which means that Caldari and Gallente battlecruisers would take full damage if sitting still. Even so, this is fine as the niche that tier 1 and 2 battlecruisers occupy is one of increased damage to cruisers at the expense of increased vulnerability to battleships. Combine this with the simple fact that you can reduce the damage a full bonused torpedo would do by moving at faster than 100 m/s (an easy feat for all BCs in almost all combat scenarios) and you see that this becomes something of a non-issue.

Furthermore, if the ship actually having two useful bonuses makes other ships look poor in comparison, then I think that says a lot more about the other ships being underpowered than it does about the Naga being overpowered. The Talos is, as many others have stated, shaping up to be an extremely underwhelming ship; and the Rokh is one of (if not the) most ineffectual ships in the game.



Cruise missiles can be geared to hit smaller targets reasonably well with proper skills, rigs, and ammo. This is not often done, however, due to the penalties to damage (and in some cases range, though this is less of an issue) incurred by attempting to fit this way. In order to do this you need to be skilled enough to use the T2 precision ammo (which isn't exactly a trivial time investment) and then fit out with launcher rigs (rigs slots which could go to other infinitely more useful things like EHP or speed), and what do you get when it's all said and done? Cruise missiles that can hit some cruisers for an unreduced value of 30 DPS per launcher (at max skills) before ship bonuses or modules. That's not terrible, but it's not exactly something to fear. The kicker though, is the fact that the explosion velocity of these cruise missiles is 106 m/s. This means that to hold down all but the slowest cruisers to apply your average DPS to them you need to double (or in some cases triple) web them, something that no Caldari ship has the slots to do.

CCP, please take a look at how missiles are used in your game. Through posts like these, myself and others get the feeling that there is a disconnect between how you want missiles to be used and how they actually are.

Why a new module? Just give the Talos a bonus for 100MN AB, like cutting the added mass from AB in half or so..
The result would be / should be:

- somewhat slower than 10MN MWD
- slightly higher cap consumption than 100MN MWD
- Acceleration somewhere between 10MN AB and 10MN MWD when active
- no change in sig radius

There's no sense in trying to tighten two different screws at the same time.

Fix the underlying problem with hybrids first, then go about balancing the Talos with its brethren. Any other approach to this problem is doomed from the start.

And you think it would be a good idea to give all blasterboats this bonus?

And how will this prevent Gallente ships from being constantly the fastest ships?

Well, they can be the fastest. That's what everyone is talking about it seems. Blasterboats need to get in range quick and this way they are able to.
On the other side, since it uses more cap than regular size MWD it would only be useful to close the gap so Gallente would be the fast sprinters over "short" distance.
Minmatar would still be the kings on sustained top speed as they should be.