Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Changing a mechanic everyone uses only harms one side?

so with these changes + the jump bridge ones why would i want to take SBs on a blops roam now they are sluggish and are gong to be popped to easy and taking them means my bridge gains 2x more fatigue then if i was roaming with just black ops (opening a bridge gives fatigue and them jumping to bridge them again adds more on top) so if i need to go more then 1 jump out it's now costing me more time and isk(for fuel) to bring a ship that will no longer preform well in a standard fight

Fozzie, I watched your [excellent] presentation on user feedback and I feel like this post is a prime example of exactly what you are looking for:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=5126202#post5126202

I also want you to know it's never personal when I or anyone else flames your bad decisions, it's usually just venting frustration.
I know you're busy with Vegas but when you get back if you could take a peek I'd appreciate it.

T-thanks
Please respond

I know this concern has been raised above, but I feel it important enough to echo this sentiment.

The change causing cloaked ships to decloak within 2000m of eachother represents a nerf to all cloaky combat. Please CCP, I am a little concerned that for the sake of convenience, you will throw the baby out with the bathwater. Stealth bombers aren't the only ship with a covert cloak, and this change will ensure that other forms of cloaky combat become a bit of a pain in the ass, and less viable.

As far as I understand, your intention is to rebalance bombers. Unless it is also your opinion that all other forms of cloaky combat are overpowered and need rebalancing, please don't arbitrarily harm them as a side-effect of your efforts with stealth bombers. This kind of collateral damage is irresponsible and harms the game.

With the exception of bombers in large fleet warfare (only one specific aspect of this game), all cloaky ships already pay a fair price for their ability to become invisible. Compared to non-cloaky, but otherwise equivalent ships, they all have markedly less DPS or HP. Overall I appreciate your intentions and direction with this change, I just feel your methods are a bludgeon rather than a well targeted improvement to the game

Please if there are any possible ways of implementing this change for only stealth bombers and not other ships, could you put the effort into it? This playstyle means a lot to many players in this game.

We are the people who came up with the instacane and also the biggest users of bombing runs. Where are you people getting this null conspiracy junk from?

Sigres _is_ the end of bombers because it was the one atttribute that made them work in asymmetric encounters for smaller groups outside the big null blocks. A HP increase is not making them survive against anything. You get locked - you're dead. HP increase or not. You gonna get zerged as per usual with every other ship as a non-member of the blue donat. Or what do you think you gonna tank with that HP? And the decloak change ... "Uh once upon a time we worked around that one" - by that time, bombers were **** and they will now go back to being **** in order to fix a problem thats not even directly related. Oh yeah, you can easily set up different align points, pings and warpouts for each bomber in a NPSI fleet of randoms and newbies. Thats totally going to work from now on. You better keep a batch of BLOPS ready because I can see a mild increase in losses while bridging. Hit and runs on jump bridges? Good luck with the POS guns with that sigradius. No, it's not going to work. It's over. Careless wiped like the language channels (which was another thing that made me come back). Victim to CCPs habit of stomping over the smaller flowers that grow in the niche.

If only there was some sort of device to lower turret tracking...

As for the POS, battleships warp in and out before a POS targets them.

But it does, and has for years, EULA section 7.:

This doesn't solve any of the problems. It just makes bombers more annoying to use for everyone, and not much else.

I keep saying this: The biggest problems with bombs are due to their 100% tie to sig radius. Shield BS, battlecruisers, shield cruisers and MWD frigs all melt for this reason. The polar opposite of this is sig-tanked setups like ANI's which can tank an obscene (112) number of bombs with boosts and heat.

At the same time, I don't have much issue with a 50-man bomber fleet pulling off a well co-ordinated run against a megathron fleet today.

So here is what I would do:

*Add explosion velocity to bombs, like torps
*Reduce explosion radius from 400 to say ~250
*Keep bomb HP like OP
*Keep the slower align time like OP
*Remove the cloak changes

With explosion velocity as a factor, more mobile ships have a better defense against bombs due to their higher speed, on top of being more difficult to hit in the first place due to ground zero being static after a fleetwarp is committed. Theoretically, shield ships are generally more mobile. Having MWD on might be a good option to mitigate bomb damage. Armor retains some of their advantage as sig is still a factor.

Obviously the damage formula would have to be carefully worked out, but that's the concept.

This will also reduce the number of target options a multiboxer can feasibly go after with a single squad, which is what the vast majority of them run. They could try to move to two squads, but this is much more difficult., expensive and logistically difficult. If you look at the kills multiboxers get, the vast majority of them are shield cruisers, destroyers and bc's, outside of single-target attacks.

The cloak changes are clunky and widely disliked. You say that bomb runs happened before and they will after this reversion, but that was before people adopted anti-bomber techniques like perimeter bubbles, pre-hic warpins and the like. Or even had the presence of mind to think bombers were on field. This change also severely hurts cloaky gate camps and blops drops.

edit:
Otherwise I like the new combat role potential, and the align and warp speed nerfs are needed. It looks like the Nemesis is still complete crap though.

I am all for these changes to bombers. But changing the cloaking mechanic is regressive and adds no gameplay benefit alongside having lots of unintended side effects to many other areas of the game.

Yes, bombers used to decloak each other, but then we also used to warp to 15km at stargates, and probes had to be individually positioned each time.