Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I guess my statement requires some explanation.

When bombers can decloak one another, it means setting up a bombing run was a tactical decision that took more than 3 minutes to do. "I am going to setup my bombers on this grid, so taking a fight here will be advantageous to me because I have a strategic asset in place". When bombers dont' decloak one another this task becomes rather trivial, letting someone make perches regardless of the system or the grid that the fight is taking place on.

But that's not really all that bad by itself. The real zinger that people have been a bit grumpy over is that bombing is very important in the current meta, and the most efficient way of doing it is not with a ~specialized~ bomber FC but instead with one or two individuals controlling all the bombers. There is an inequality between effectiveness and difficulty.

Bombers being **** easy affects the meta as a whole, because it means that any doctrine you make must be able to deal with bombers in some way beyond maneuverability. Any ship with a high signature must be able to survive the fight without perching - since perching can equal death very easily. Additionally a mid-slot module like the MicroJumpDrive becomes "core" on any ship, to deal with the threat of bombs. Shield tankers, who rely on midslots, get the short end on this one since they more or less need two of their tank slots for maneuverability. Since locking bombers quickly is a priority, many shield doctrines are further erased from contention since the supporting cast naturally has a higher signature and lower lock time (a bad combination for bombers). At least in terms of Battleships and BCs. Tengus are still largely untouched.

When looking at armor doctrines, due to the risk of perching with bombers that can be setup anywhere, the most viable platforms are the ones with a decent projection envelope. If I just sit in once place with my HIC 1 alt bubbling, then I'm at no risky of dying horribly. Finesse ships also become more risky to fly unless you rely on motoring around the field and not perching.

Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of bombers - the ability to wipe the floor with the ill-prepared through superior tactics and coordination is sexy to the max. However in practice they're quite effective in this role without any modicum of difficulty (or manpower). In their current state, Bombers simply excel in making combat stale.

Are you the same fozzie from the WH forums or someone else entirely? I don't quite believe what I'm seeing. If i'm reading this correctly, you actually read feedback and changed something that wasn't a good idea BEFORE it went live on the server?

Wow. Well done- you actually cared what people had to say for once. Now can you please apply the same thinking to the WH forums and other changes you may bring about in future? Two-way communication is awesome and I'm sure everyone here is glad that we got a response this time at least!

careful or CCP will fix this problem by nerfing tengus into the ground.

Also, addressing some other replies in this thread, bombers really are **** easy, if you think they're difficult or it wasn't possible to bomb before the change to de-cloaking mechanics you are seriously deluded.

So a survivability penalty for training up to T2 bomb launchers?

Tell me I'm reading this wrong.

sure you said a whole lot of stuff i agree with, like shield being way easier to bomb than armour and that being really bad for the meta etc

however a global "nerf" (if you can even call it that, all it really does is increase complexity) is not going to change any of those things. all it would have done is make the already super-effective isboxed runs slightly less efficient/quick and completely removed pilot based bombing while retaining the vast superiority of armour vs shield.

the only way that armour would still not retain the huge advantages over shield with this nerf would have been if bombing was so complex that it was completely irrelevant when considering combat. that evidently isn't the case and we've tested isboxing on pheobe with the decloak changes - it's still trivially easy. the decloak nerf literally does nothing to help your shield BC fleet eat a wave of bombs and survive, and is a redicilous change to ask for if what you really want is armor/shield parity

if you want to cry about bombers in general i'll probably agree with you, but don't try to mask it with m-muh shield bs

So out of interest, ive had an idea brewing for a while and wondered what you may think about it...

Most pilots who fleet warp and generally do 'stuff' in space with more than just a couple of others will know any warping to or from somewhere put you in a fairly random position in a sphere thats 4km in diameter. this spaces some stuff out to look cool and adds some 'random' elements to landing locations (it also needs to be looked at and iterated on with fleet warps of caps and supers, as multiple ships inside one another looks weird and broken)

Imagine when warping a squad/wing/fleet when fleet members are cloaked those fleet members that are cloaked do not warp or land in a randomised location on landing but all land exactly on top of each other in the central point of that sphere. When they decloak on top of each other (due to someone manually decloaking in order to bomb) they all immediately bump on landing scattering their direction and screwing with their ability to both bomb in the same direction and re-align to warp out.

This would mean fleet/wing/squad warping bombers to bomb on landing would be a somewhat suicidal method for bombers, or would require bomber squads to deblob cloaked before re-aligning to bomb (and therefore incur a subsequent realignment penalty to warp out). FC's would require another method to pull off a bomber run like requiring a bomber fc/alt/helper to put a cloaked ship in a danger-close position to hostiles to be a warp to point for bombers to individually warp (and therefore not bump) and complete a successful bomber run.

This would add a high degree of pilot skill, finesse, time to prep and a moderate amount of danger in order to achieve a ninja like bombing run.

Nailed years and years of theorycrafting around bombers in like 200 words.

I don't know how you got "m-muh shield bs" from that. I guess if my post had to be reduced into some blubbering nonsense for the sake of ~poasting~ it would be "boo-hoo my sweet anything but t3, navypoc, mega MWD'ing HAC backbone" because really that's all that can exist in the medium-to-large scale meta where it takes 60 seconds to setup a 30-man bombing run. I mean there was a time when bombers decloaked one another. It's not some sort of rose-colored glasses revisionist bullshit, it wasn't even that long ago. They were still deathly effective, but it took significantly more effort to setup. ISBoxer wasn't really a ~thing~, but if you've ever used ISboxer you know how difficult it would be to do. We had dedicated bombing FCs that were revered, whereas now we just have a guy and some alts. I guess you could argue it takes some practice, but those guys have completely eclipsed the individuals who used to specialize in that sort of thing because their brand is the most efficient. Getting rid of that seems pretty d0pe to me. Adding complexity for the sake of it adjusts the effectiveness-easiness scale, which is really the only thing plaguing them at the moment.

This. There is no arguing that the current state of bombers is pretty oppressive to the meta. It all but eliminates shield-based BC and BS hulls from consideration and locks those that are able to reasonably theorycraft optimized fits into a handful of the same familiar fleet comps we've seen for a long, long time now. The BS rebalance was a good way to open the door to new options but most stuck with what they were using (or a slightly new take on it while maintaining the ideology) simply because of bombers.

Fozzie,

1. JF you back down on

2. I was excited about making bombing hard again and watching a good bombing FC change a fight.

3. Why the change back??? Give us your reason. Show us the test server data. With out data then all we can say is you caved for A. B. C. reason with out giving it a try the old way.

4. Why not go with the way you have done things in the past. Make the change and then adjust. Isn't this what you have been doing with BOBS all along ( Hence no covert cloak).

5. If the sig is attached to the launcher then attach the decloak to the launcher also. If you have a bomb launcher you will get a increase sig radius and you will decloack other cov op ship with in 2500. This would effectivly make the IS boxer bomber go away and then make the bomber who are torping not suffer.

6. Stop caving to pressure that isn't there. That is what you stated in your response, saying this is not about subs.