Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Idea: give all SOE ships slight boost to warp speed. Like 2.2-2.4 for battleship, 3.3-3.6 cruiser, 5.5-6 frigate. Would be awesome, especially for a battleship.

No worries.

Well I guess what I am saying is, that the predicted high price is detrimental to the balancing discussion, because naturally people will cry for an overpowered ship since they want bang for their buck.

I do agree to what you and others already said about missing downward pressure and the price it will end up with. I am trying hard to not let myself be confused between a ship that was well balanced into it's envirnment and a ship that had a high price attached - for whatever reason I can only guess - and then powercrept to meet the players expectations for a specific (predicted) price.

Having said that, I think it may have been a mistake to publish the price at all in this early stage, instead of giving room to both a balancing discussion and a price discussion after that.



While I ask myself why not more people ran SOE missions before, I think the new ships are a final wakeup call to those highsec folks. So the market will regulate the price by itself to what the players value such items. This can lead to a massive price drop of Sisters LP, but also stay rather stable. The important thing to argue here would be to keep the ship and item prices in the same relation the other pirate shiptypes have. To that end mission achieved.
Now, the missing downward pressure from the not existing blueprint drops in exploration sites is a valid arguement to desist from the price markup in highsec in my eyes. This balances the fact that you can get a "pirate" ship in highsec - the argument for the markup - and the non-existent bpc drops.

Edit: I want to make clear that any comments on pricing are unrelated to balancing ideas i might have.

Setting aside the price, which will be ridiculously expensive for what you are receiving, can we, for the moment, return to just WHAT it is that you will be exorbitantly overpaying for?

The drone capability of a Gila (setting aside the slightly larger drone bay, which, at these levels, doesn't really make much of a difference).

Less Remote Repair capability than an Onieros.

Exploration capability that falls between that of a T1 & T2 frigate.

A Weapon bonus that pretty much everyone agrees is, well, 'excrement'.

Sub-par EHP capabilities.

To describe this design as "uninspired" would be entirely justified. There was (and still exists) a chance to create something truly unique with this ship class, but, instead, you chose to go with tired, over-worked ideas that lead to yet another 'Dominix-By-Another-Name' end result.

You could have made it entirely dependent upon drones for offense, with no turret or launcher hardpoints, given it the ability to warp while cloaked, provided it with the Exploration bonuses it currently has, added bonuses similar to a Logistics cruiser, and been entirely within the basic concept of the SoE role as explorers and rescuers. Envision it as a ship built around DEFENSIVE, SUPPORT capabilities, instead of trying to gimp it from the start as an offensive design.

A potential fit for that design with those goals:

One Warfare Link slot.
Two Large Armor Repairers
Covert Ops Cloaking Device
Probe Launcher
Tractor Beam
Salvager

MWD/MJD
Target Painter (aggro management)
2 Analyzers
Cargo Scanner

Large Armor Repairer
DC II
Two EANM II
Cap Power Relay II

Rigs to suit, drones to taste.

Yes, this could be modified to be a stupidly long-ranged drone sniper, but, so can any other drone boat that already exists. It is entirely in keeping with what has already been written about/designed for the Sisters of Eve.

Would this STILL be incredibly expensive? Certainly. Would you receive good value for your ISK? Absolutely. Could it be reasonably referred to as OP? Not unless you're biased against Cov Ops ships as a group. Would it create a whole new group of problems? Probably not. Notice that I did not include any mention of 'reduced targeting delay' in the ship's list of bonuses. Only the ability to move while cloaked.

I surely didn't read all of the 60 pages prior to this, so if at any point I use an idea someone already mentioned, please consider it support and not theft.

I like the idea of making the SOE BS a drone boat, I feel that the RR bonuses are interesting, but I feel like it is too focused on being able to perform all the functions of an exploration ship when in reality, no one will ever go gate to gate solo in a ship this expensive without a covert ops cloak. I feel that having a covert ops cloak would make it too OP as well.

Instead what I suggest is making it a sort of exploration command base. Take away its role of hacking and scanning altogether and put this ship in the role of support. I feel like it would be really neat if this ship had a jump drive similar to a black ops BS, but can only jump to covert cynos, and cannot fit a covert jump portal.

This suits it well to a group of explorers who go around looking for sites to run, find something a little more juicy and light a cyno to bring in the BS, or they fill up their cargo so this ship comes to scoop it up and return it back to a station so the small ships with covert cloaks can continue their search for exploration sites.

In PvP this ship as is would become too powerful for black ops hotdrops, so in order to bring it more into balance, you could nerf it's targeting range and sensor strength to make it easier to jam or dampen to reduce the amount of RR they provide.

On a side note, I also feel that the laser range bonus is a bit useless. If I needed dps, I would fit blasters instead. If I thought the targets were going to be at range, I would probably just stick to drones only.

Just a few ideas to expand upon.

I am guessing there is more than one opinion within the team and lots to discuss and then they also run new proposals by the CSM first. But yeah, hoping to get some feedback too. As I said in the past, feedback is a two way street.

I'm suspicious of comments that suggest .5 space isn't high-sec....

SoE only have one agent per system and their systems are a dozen or more jumps apart. This means that you don't get to cherry pick missions unless you're willing to take a lot of standings penalties. They also have a fairly large pool of anti-Amarr missions (I've had three consecutive and different ones in a row) so you have to either be willing to tank your Amarr rep or your SOE rep, or just wait out the 4 hour mission refusal timer. One of the three high sec SoE agents is actually in Amarr space which means that torching your Amarr rep probably isn't such a good plan.

Lastly, the SoE mission systems are traditional griefer and ganker haunts. Of the six people in my alliance that I know have run missions in Osmon four have lost their mission boats to suicide ganks - and the two new agents are in 0.5 space and thus easier for suicide gankers. This means that if you're running SoE missions then it's probably a good idea to run it in a not-very-blinged ship which means that your completion rates are slowed down.

I'm not saying that it is impossible to run SoE missions, or that it is uneconomical to do so just that there are good reasons to run missions elsewhere.

Historically these reasons, coupled with the terrible Concord LP conversion rate and the limited availability of the LP store offerings, have been enough to keep SoE LP well above average.

Well, the first two already have a fast warp speed, and rumor has it that the battleship will have a very nice speed itself

People will always cry for OP ships, it would be funny if they weren't so persistent.

I'm relieved that Im not the only one conflicted between performance and cost. Setting aside price, currently the Nestor will be very useful in RR BS gangs and I'm sure a few players will utilize its hacking and probing bonuses at some point. However, I don't feel that the Nestor lives up to the SoE line up from a balancing point of view. The current SoE ships are highly mobile exploration and combat platforms that benefit greatly from their hacking and scanning bonuses. Calling a BS 'highly mobile' on its own is laughable and before Rise dropped the 'free bonus' bomb on us I supported the elimination of them completely in favor of a mobility advantage. This was back when I naively thought the Nestor would be priced similar to other pirate ships and thus a non-issue.

When you do factor in price, only large power blocks would be able to field these for RR BS gangs and individual owners would be restricted to high sec or would get popped by the first gang to spot it on dscan. The high cost making them simultaneously difficult to obtain and obvious primaries, with the RR bonus not helping in that regard.

The added survivability and speed that a mobility bonus would provide would allow the Nestor to compete with T3s and logi cruisers for fleet positions and justify using them to support exploration missions in hostile space.

On a side note, As much as I hate to resurrect the mini carrier idea from way back when but if the Nestor could be used to increase the mobility of other ships through a fitting service and small fleet hanger, it may be effective as a mobile anchoring point for long deployment Wspace exploration. I'll support anything that makes the Nestor valuable enough for a 'highly mobile' fleet to slow down a little for it.

anything to make medium drones useful