Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'd be more amenable to seeing different versions of this as t2 versions of the mining (sorry, logistic frigates) in the game. The Sparrow is a Lai Dai t2 version of the bantam that a few NPCs in caldari hisec already fly, so I've been scratching my head for years over why they haven't developed t2 versions of them.

Looks like a fun ship, solidly worked out
+1

noctis with an MTU is a beast.

tractor from farthest to nearest with the noctis while the mtu does the reverse (or whichever way around it is, been a month or so since i salvaged anything) and salvage everything in range, then loot it all from the MTU to avoid having to loot all the wrecks/cans individually.

i doubt the lynx could beat that.

You have a point with it being accesible to newer players, although T1 racial exploration frigates do have a salvager bonus... Couldn't they work as such? Well, I'm looking at ninja'ing wrecks from lowsec, nullsec and W-Space too, not only highsec. Perhaps the T2 Venture could work as a more advanced ship that helps in that regard.

Orange? I don't think color is an important thing in EVE, where ships can be so far away we only see their boxes :)

You claim that you have been salvaging for most of your EVE career and yet you know so little about the best salvage tool in the game, it gives me the cause to wonder if you have the knowledge to even consider setting up the stats for a ship like the one you propose. An all skills 5 noctis pilot with tech 2 tractors nets 2,400 meters per second. That is significantly faster than your ship can fly, if you boost the speed of your ship to match how would that unbalance it for all of the other un-intended uses the wonderfully twisted minds of this game would find for it?

With a 96km range and the tractor speed advantage the Noctis would have one wonders if a person flying this ships would be able to get anything of any real value out of a pocket.

Now let's get to your proposed stats. I have not done an extensive comparison yet so these are based on a preliminary comparison to a few of the other frigs in the game.
Shield, armor and hull hp put this near the top in raw hp and then you combine that with one of if not the largest cargo holds and then want to give it a 35m sig radius. Reduce the raw hp in armor and hull by about 25% or so as a design decision to get the larger cargo hold and I could see the 35m sig radius. As proposed and again based on a preliminary comparison and you would have to raise the sig radius to around 45 or maybe 50 to be in balance with raw hp, cargo hold size vs sig radius.

Even if you dismiss all of this as unimportant, irrelevant or whatever we still come back to what others have said. This ship would be a significant improvement over all of the other ships in the game that can be used in this role and as proposed it should not be done as a tech 1 ship, faction or tech 2 to balance the benefits.

While I agree that it is a quite specialized ship for being TI, it will not be able to outsalvage the Noctis, even with the 50% salvager speed bonus for the simple reason that this ship cannot tractor as efficiently as a Noctis can (Noctis also has double the highs so it can tractor without sacrificing any salvage slots)

Standard exploration frigates are "just that", exploration frigates. Perhaps they were meant for salvaging sites along with more regular exploration, but Ninja Salvaging is something completely different than that.

I'm not saying that other ships can't fill this role. It's just that this ship would be better at it, while at the same time not being OP concerning other areas of the game (such as combat or pure exploration).




While the TI exploration frigates do have a salvager bonus, they aren't as surviveable as this particular ship. Trying to salvage wrecks in low/null/wh space is indeed an interesting aspect, but as you said, it's indeed a more dangerous area of operations. In such a case it could be considered to have a TII version of this particular ship to increase surviveability.



While the Noctis may indeed salvage faster than this ship can fly, that's done on purpose. It does fly faster than an MTU can tractor, which is the main source of headache for Ninjas nowadays since it loots faster than you can.
Personally, whenever I'm faced with a Noctis, I sit right on top of it and let him do the work of tractoring the wrecks to me, while I try to beat him with looting through pilot skill and salvage the wrecks as well.

That said, I think that you may want to take a look at the raw HP numbers again. You'll see that just about every single combat dedicated frigate has higher raw HP numbers than this ship.
Exploration frigates have less, but generally speaking the others have more (even some Ewar frigates) while the true combat frigates have a rather significant HP (and slot) advantage over this ship.
A 35m sig radius is very normal and wouldn't harm this ship too much. Do keep in mind that this is a shield tanking ship and fitting an MSE to it will immediately raise the sig to 41m.

But yes, as you said, this ship would be a rather decent improvement over most other ships (faction/TII aside) that could fill this role. But that's why it's a specialized ship meant for Ninja Salvaging.
As a rather silly example: Back when the Noctis was introduced, it was also more effective than any other TI or TII ship available at the time that could salvage was it not?

Well, like I said earlier. The main reason for keeping this TI (even though it is a highly specialized ship) is to remain true to what Ninja Salvaging was/is. It used to be an easy to get into, relatively profitable way for new players (I'm talking weeks old here) to make a living in New Eden.
For this I kept it as an affordable TI platform with ridiculously low skill requirements, so that it's somewhat similar to the Venture as in it's an entry level ship, yet highly specialized and really good at what it's meant to do (a Venture is a VERY good mining ship considering those factors).

Making it a TII ship instantly catapults it into the realm of the more advanced players and making it a faction ship will mean that it could get prohibitively expensive (remember, faction/pirate faction ships are limited to LP and drops, and the Thukker LP store isn't exactly popular to start with, and even if it's marketed as an ore ship, that doesn't improve it much).

That's a fair point, and of course the name and background of the ship could definitely be changed depending on the lore/ship requirements.

Ah, the thing is, the Venture may be built by a different faction such as ORE, but it's actually listed as being a TI ship. The same with the Procurer, Retriever and Covetor.
That aside, I have looked at combat capabilities for this ship, and I can guarantee you that it is definitely not OP in that aspect either.
Sure, it has really good speed on afterburners, about similar to an interceptor. But it doesn't have the raw capacitor, DPS or tank to back that up and really be an effective tackler.

Hahaha, I hope that answers all your worries ^^