Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It seems like we already have "Assault Battleships". But instead they are called Dreadnaughts.

Or you want to use a Dread for your level 4 missions, is that it?

I'm not going to lie and say that the prospect of seeing new ships in the EVE universe wouldn't excite me, but I don't want it to happen at the cost of something that already exists in the game. CCP is still plying through their current balancing initiative with plenty of unfinished business and repercussions, both current and still unseen unfolding.

Battleships don't really stand out in their own role of subcap heavy hitter particularly well anymore. They are useful in certain circumstances and you do still see them used in PVP roles, but the evolution of the game has beaten a lot of the thunder out of their guns. For the most part they're just far too slow moving, locking, aligning, and warping to be useful against smaller ships anymore. Their DPS margin, for the most part, isn't that high over cruisers when you factor in applied DPS, range dictation, and manipulation of transversal. In a small gang setting, a group of battleships is likely to be mobbed, and support craft (points, webs, RR, target painting etc.) are prone to being separated from the body of the gang. In large gang settings fleets of cruisers and frigates can simply choose the avoid a battleship gang large (or well organized) enough to give them trouble.

Against bigger ships, well, The Mittani himself wrote an article that pretty much summed it up. Why would you bring a battleship to a capital fight? Capitals do everything that a battleship is supposed to do, only monumentally better. Carriers can do as much DPS, with battleship sized weapons, have nearly an order of magnitude more EHP, and can fill multiple roles simultaneously, all while being able to cyno to wherever they're needed.

In EVE everything is supposed to be a trade-off. Power in one arena is bought by sacrificing in another. Battleships are supposed to pay in mobility for firepower and tank, but I don't think the exchange rate was set right. I'd rather see the battleship class as a whole be made more useful outside of pve content before any new classes of battleships are introduced.

I don't think that battleships should be any faster than they currently are, but I do think that they should bridge the gap between capitals and subcaps a little better than they currently do. A little more DPS, possible in form of a role bonus, more EHP, larger capacitors, larger cargo holds, bigger drone bays, higher sensor strength, xl armor reppers, plates and shield extenders would all go a long way to enticing people to use battleships.

I know some people will raise the alarm about one man pwn mobiles that always gets raised during this discussion, but as long as lock time, align time, and warp speed are balancing factors, battleships will never dictate the terms of an engagement. With some changes, they might actually have a role in being able to disperse a gate camp or break up a gang here or there, and actually be useful for smaller powerblocks to field in a fight where capitals are on the field.

Capital ships are very useful against subcapital ships. Tracking dreads and titans were nerfed, and rightfully so, but slowcat archons are still a thing, and fighters were buffed recently. The changes to drone assignment are hardly a bump in the road for slowcat fleets.

Again, its not that I think you're idea would be terrible, its that I don't think battleships as a whole are in a great state right now and introducing a new line of them isn't going to fix any of the old ones. Moreover, I think a few of the principles that you're apply to try to balance your ideas for ships wouldn't work out as intended. Reducing drone bays on battleships is essentially removing half of a battleships offense against other subcaps. Once the battleship looses its drones, it only has neuts (if it has any spare highslots), to put pressure on an enemy and try to shut down their prop modules and tackle to try to line up a shot against them.

I don't think speed as a balancing factor is going to work either. There are already attack battlecruisers in this role to contend with, and as far as ships on the larger end of the subcap spectrum go, they're some of the most well balanced ones implemented right now. They'd have to be so fast, and align so quickly to compete that in the end all that would separate them is a price point, and the cost of a ship is not the way to balance it in pvp.