Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So if my math on slaves and a set of 3 t2 trimarks is correct, it comes to a total buffer of 71,609 Armor HP, with an EHP of 419,528.

I can agree with this because I would like to see CCP make those ships. Once BS T3s were out, then CCP would claim they fill all roles and not longer make the T2s.

I do like the idea of mixing racial mods for ultimate flexibility but I think you should stress that it would require those racial skills. I would also love to see the BPCs and only BPCs, no BPOs, to be seeded into the Faction Warfare.

While this may sound like a good way to balance these ships its really not. Lots of people, including myself, have had all four racial BS skills to V for a very long time now. In fact a lot of capital pilots have both Amarr and Gallente BS V from back when BS V was needed to fly capitals and everyone and there dog was training for an armor carrier and then cross training for the other armor carrier to chase the flavor of the month.

Titans take ages to train for and cost a silly amount of time and ISK to make but the large blocs are still able to field fleets of them with ease. Ships must be balanced on their own merits, only once that has been done can you start to work out what the build cost and training time should be.

Now titans are their own special case in many ways but you can't just throw a large training time on a ship and call that a balancing factor to justify that ship being powerful. Ships should be powerful in a specific role or area and weak in others. Tech 3 ships currently violate that principal by being flat out better than their T2 cousins in many roles while still retaining all the versatility that tech 3 is supposed to embody.

I think the current tech 3 ships need to be fixed before we think about adding new ones.

why?

T3 are imbalanced, so will BS be even more.

None of you seem to realize what causes strategic cruisers to be ridiculously overpowered. It has everything to do with overinflated base attributes and nothing to do with being modular. If every strategic cruiser subsystem offered a reasonable and balanced set of attributes such that the raw power of any one strategic cruiser role was no greater than that of tech 1, then tech 2 would be able to compete with them and people would no longer say tech 3 is absurdly overpowered--with of course the exception being scrubs who got demolished by someone who knows how to fly and fit ships properly.

That's the base stats. I'm not talking about the 10 hull HP it has without subsystems. What the subsystems give it ARE the base stats. And what they give is too much.

They give resistances that are too high.
They give too many slots for its size.
They give skill bonuses that are too powerful.

Reduce any one of these three to reasonable levels, and you change it from being absurdly overpowered to just outperforming tech 2 significantly, but only most of the time.

Reduce two of them to reasonable levels, and it'll sometimes outperform tech 2 but some ships won't be marginalized by it.

Reduce all three to reasonable levels and it'll be completely prevented from marginalizing any ship. The only thing that will remain is bringing underpowered subsystems up to usability.

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Another way to put it is to compare with tech 2 roles. To keep this short, I'll compare only with Heavy Assault Ships.

Heavy assault ships rely on several factors for dominance in their field (brawler combat):
1.) high damage output. T3s have higher damage output than HACs.
2.) high resistances to make up for low base hit points. T3s have higher base hit points AND higher resistances.
3.) taking advantage of their small sig radius to avoid damage. T3s have a smaller sig radius and higher agility.

See, the problem isn't that the strategic cruiser can have an ECM fit while running a HAC setup, it's because it beats the HAC on ALL fronts, not even just some fronts--ALL fronts. And then it can get a jammer bonus and 100mn afterburner without breaking its fit to throw extra salt in the wound.

If the t3 had:
LESS damage
-and-
LOWER resistances
-and-
a WORSE sig radius to agility ratio
-and-
LOWER powergrid

then:
It would need that jammer bonus to justify its price tag and compete with the big boys. It would need that jammer bonus to give people a reason to fly it over a t1 cruiser. Do you understand now?

@Posts:
Wow. Thats why i refrain from using numbers in suggestions that focus on an interesting concept. Balance can be made and numbers can be adjusted, after the concept stands. Can you guys read variables?
The Conversation about something being OverPowered (and therefore bad) is useless due to the fact, that everything is indeed overpowered, if used in the right condition. That makes Eve interesting. Unbalance is the Drive of Creative Fits. We just have to make sure, that everything has its conter. (i.e. make defendermissiles more usable and add a gun-variant to it => missiles not overpowered anymore (if they ever have been); and many more.....)

@topic:
Id love to see a T3 that can mix bonuses from all factions to seek out new combinations and boldly fit what noone has fitted before.
Beeing able to adapt to the circumstances and therefor gimping other aspects on the fly could be something very useful and interesting. If ridiculous fail-fits will appear on the killboards, i vote +1.

That's actually false. The 7.5% HP bonus per level will always land the ship with exactly 10% greater total EHP in the corresponding slot (armor or shield) than the -4% resist bonus (both at skill 5) but the HP bonus will not raise resists and thus will not boost reps either incoming or onboard.

Basically, if a ship with the armor HP bonus can get 330,000 armor EHP, then the same fit but with armor resist bonus instead will get 300,000 armor EHP.

As you were speaking earlier of the T3 battleship being capable of getting over 400k EHP:
It doesn't matter how high are the numbers that you come up with because it is always going to be about the same as an Abaddon. The T3 battleship may be able to get an armor hit point bonus but the Abaddon has 500 higher base armor and 1 more low slot. Flexing your math skills isn't going to change the fact that the Abaddon will always be a better armor tanker than the T3 battleship I am proposing.

Because the 10 billion ISK hull (debatable price) can carry your choice weapon bonus along with the armor tank, plus your favorite EWAR bonus, plus an exploration/propulsion bonus, plus a bonus to the ship's construction.

If you can't figure out how to make that do things an Abaddon can't, then don't fly it. It would be terribly game-breaking to allow this to tank BETTER than an Abaddon while doing all of those things that an Abaddon already can't do.

I'm only loosely basing it on the strategic cruisers, and in large part this is an exercise to show the faults in the balance of strategic cruisers. I have designed this battleship within tech 1 attribute limitations; it outperforms not one single ship in any given role by virtue of sheer power alone. Its power lies entirely in its flexibility yet people still say it is at minimum very powerful and highly useful.

Strategic cruisers have all of this flexibility plus higher than tech 2 attributes.