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This isn't a balance, it's a nerf. Stop nerfing, and start adding! Yeah, T3's can be quite a tank, but hey, as far as I am concerned they aren't unbeatable, they just take some teamwork. It's fairly simple to create something that can counter a T3, or something. And about the Ishtars, meh. Just seems to me you should create a timer on them so they can't be retracted for so long after deployment. Ishtar deploy sentries, bombers bomb the Sentries, that seems more an appropriate 'balance'. The only thing I see this doing is just forcing to deploy twice the amount of Ishtars to compensate.

Private Chat: Somewhere in a null sec ratting site...

Ishtar Pilot: Hey... Tengu, you want to fight for this site?

Tengu Pilot: We can't! CCP, In their never ending quest to create a "Utopian" Eve universe, have once again determined that our ships are unfairly balanced.

Ishtar Pilot: WTS! When did this happen? I have invested alot of SP que time enabling me to effectively fly this ship!

Tengu Pilot: Read the latest Dev blog for the changes that occured in "Scylla". They say your Ishtar was "too good" and my Tengu "didn't represent the kind of flexibility WE WANT from Tech 3". "WE", being CCP.

Ishtar Pilot: Since when does CCP sub my account and fly my ships? I don't know about you, but this crap has been going on since Incarna.

Tengu Pilot: lol! I remember those days, What a FUBAR'd debacle that was. You would think that CCP would have figured it out by now. Players just want to play Eve! Players don't give a crap about their egotistical dev world.

Ishatar Pilot: Yeah, isn't it funny how everytime CCP makes changes to the game in the name of "balancing", the players always find a way to defeat the very changes that CCP has spent untold resources on to effect change! What a bunch of self centered morons, lol!

Ishtar Pilot: BTW, There's an Archon ratting next system over... want to kill it?

Tengu Pilot: LOL! That's my alt, It would be unfair to attack it since I can no longer "SKYNET" with my fighters.

Ishtar Pilot: Danm! Hey... I have an idea! Want to play Farmville? We can kill each others livestock and burn one another's fields! How bout it bro?

Tengu Pilot: LoL, Come and get some... I have some Tech 3 goats that will rock your world!

Ishtar Pilot: Bring It, LOL!

To Be Continued...

So to explain how CCP thinks
“Tengus are good Tengus are OP
Rails are good Rails OP!”

And to explain how the community feels
‘CCPLEASE!’
So in short cause this ended up quite long:
Remove drone assist now this solves carrier and Ishtar issues
Don’t nerf Tengu EHP directly and DPS indirectly this is madness!

WHAT ABOUT OFFGRID LINKS! THIS IS WAY MORE IMPORTANT!


Firstly addressing this carrier fiddling,
Please remove drone assist.
And at least rebalance them so heavies are actually used. Fighters need to be pointable, you can insure a carrier but you can’t insure a fighter. They need to have a longer align time when warping back to the carrier. Obviously the carrier will have to target the drones on grid with drone assist removed or maybe make a new module or something like a fighter cyno? It would be sad to see carriers only used as logi though. I died to a carrier assisted gate camp but I'm not even mad about it.


Also CCP says rail tengus OP then nerfs all rails ccplease!
In my experience of the game offgrid cloaky tengu links are the only problem I have with t3s.
The only problem most people have with T3s is offgrid zero risk boosts making garmurs slicers impossible to catch in fw plexs. Do you even know this exists? I’m certain this is resulting in way more imbalance than whatever those jokers with carriers are doing in no action sec.
And you seem to have maybe accidently made them easier to scan down?


So medium hybrids yes they are big on the KB...
but could this to just be to them being the most popular weapon system outside of drones
Also giving away economic secrets MH-805 the only % boost to a weapon system not selling for over 100M... I’ve given up on implants pretty much cause it’s better to get podded and get back in a ship (something I did before cost reductions).


This is not scientific mate anyone worth half his salt knows tengus use rails
200mm rails to be precise!


I bet if you exclude 200mm rails it will look like medium hybrids need a boost
Everyone knows the tengu is the number 1 t3 because of pve but this means its gonna get used in pvp more too, now your changes to the tengu may or may not affect its use in pve, but the trickle on effects of people switching from pve tengus to pvp tengus is going to take time.
Or whatever those derps out in null do who actually wants to do pve all week then join a 100 man blob on the weekend the mind boggles. And who cares I don’t use T2 stuff that’s to expensive!


So I said 200mm rails are big on the kill board (in lowsec this isn’t because of tengus (I don’t think people only use T3s for off grid boosts, which is way more of a bigger problem than carriers), could this be simply because ships that use rails are used more? Or simply because of the 5% implant? Maybe you could fix the market for these implants (I haven’t brought a ton I swear).

And so this balancing won't actually be a real balancing even if it shows some sort of result
Mainly cause Tengus = Rails but also other reasons (tm)
Did I mention you are nerfing the rail using tengus EHP...at the same time you are killing its DPS, seemingly with no idea you are actually doing this? (CCPLEASE!)


Now... Tengus use 200mm rails you know that CCP?


Also from what I have heard rail tengus are used because theirs nothing else that can compete with drone assisting sentry ishtars?
Please don't kill all Caldari ships we have nothing!
Manticore rubbish
Moa about to be rubbish


Caracal PLEASE NOOO DONT TOUCH IT AGAIN NOOOOO
ALSO HELP CCP SCOURGE BONUS WUTTTTTTTT ISSSSSSSS THIISSSSSSSSSS

For example I rank the Purifier as the number one BLOPs bomber, Hound #2, Nemesis #4, and the Manticore is like #6 its utter garbage maybe it’s better for doing missions in IDK don’t have time for that and we have been at teir 1 forever what is LP?
Us in the Caldari Militia can easily attribute our poor results on a lack of game balance, and I don’t think this is good for local chat balance (the most important thing after gifs). Because offgrid tengu boosts OP, because drone assist OP.

Minmatar ships are the least popular racial class in everything even if they are way better... you are clearly not taking into account A) what people can fly (some people haven’t been playing the game for the last 5 years) B) what people do fly (o look at that across the board minmatar ships are the least brought race in Jita.

O look I found evidence of why changing a system in two ways and hoping for a decent result is dumb , somewhere here also basic scientific experimental principles might apply? I think I see a pattern developing in your (not scientific) ‘sensible’ balancing.
Also in regards to upcoming changes all you seem to be doing is nerfing everything until all we can do is trade gifs in local chat. So judging by the graph your want cruisers all doing about the same damage?

IF YOU TOUCH MY RLML CARACAL AFTER RUINING MY MANTICORE AND MOA
BUT LEAVING DRONES ALONE I WILL BE SO MAD!

Forgot to add Caldari ships are so neglected by CCP that the stickers on the Ishkone ships arn't even stuck on the ships properly. (Look at the Ishkone sticker on the Eagle etc.)

[EDIT: actually it turns out it's not 200mm rails but 250mm rails, if you insist on nerfing medium rails maybe try only nerfing the 250mms because I believe thats what tengus and eagles use? You can't fit 250mms on a moa or a thorax easily]

Can't like this enough, well played - also I like your changes thus far - and the explanation on the graph segmentation makes more sense now.

The primary reason behind bomber use imbalance is due simply to damage type. Purifiers are best used against armor tanks, as EM is usually the resist hole for these ships. Conversely, the Hound is best for shield tanks, as Exp is, again, usually the resist hole. Kin and Therm are generally the higher resists on any ship that is actually fitting a tank, because they often get specific resist mods and also have median base resists for both armor and shield.

This.

Fix bombers, problem solved.

Scrolling down this devblog page was quite the climax!
Nerf to ishtars
Nerf to t3's tank
SKYNET removed altogheter O.o
Nerf to med rails
.
.
.
BS and Bc viability?! - Couldn't believe what i was reading.

Too bad the last was there for you to say you are happy with it. (I don't really like the high-speed eve of today, would appreciate toning down mobility across the board and changing how taclke works, but this is not the place etc..)

Tl dr:
Great work

Nerfing buffers on T3s - cool idea.
Nerfing Ishtar DPS with sentries - not liking(I fly one:P) but I guess it's neccessary, those were OP.

Why not remove drone assist altogether though?
Solves *soooooo* many problems at once without touching much.

Nerfing rail DPS - oh come on... rails are good, but the tracking's rubbish, any transversal makes them very bad, and as such damage mitigation starts being a problem too. Leave rails alone, they were in a good spot before. Maybe do a 3-4% nerf if you think they *need* one.

BS/BC viability -
I'd just make BCs buffers 1.5x what they are now and BSes 2x and it'll be nicer from "how it should be IMO" perspective. Probably a bad move for balancing though so meh. You do what you want with them - won't be flying those much anyway:P

A few underlying questions.

When balancing ships, and trying to incorporate useful input from the community, I believe great care should be taken to make a difference between genuine earlier design flaws on the one hand and the inability of certain groups of vocal players to adapt to new tactics on the other hand. After a couple of years of going through the ship rebalancing it kind of feels like a wire act and not so much the implementation of a defined plan for the entire fleet. Add numerous nerfs and buffs to turrets, launchers, modules, introduction and changes of mechanics and it makes many of us wonder if there is oversight. Top it off with piecemeal introduction of changes to parts of the fleet, and fresh community input focused on these changes and you have a packed rowing boat full of shouting people (players and devs) rocking the boat even more (as in rash rebalance tweaks).

Examples: 1) Ishtars undeniably warped the meta. This would be under "design flaw". As usual I am x-skilling up to fly one, just to be in time for the nerf bat, of course. 2) The ability to assign drones to another player, falls into that same category as well. In my mind it is of the same power as a solo ISboxer piloting a squad of bombers 3) Battleships were doing fine for many years, regardless of bombs and torpedoes, although there were favourite hulls in the BS group (as in any class). Stealth bombers can hardly be blamed for the earlier success of battleships, so they can hardly be blamed for their apparent absence now. Something else was lost in the changes... Flashback: shield vs armor doctrines, with shield in favor, because of ... agility of shield battleships 4) Revisiting classes of ships multiple times, like stealth bombers who were already nerfed last year, while other classes of ships have not even been touched at all (hello carriers, supers, rorqs and tech3s) in the last couple of years is not reassuring that there is balance in the rebalancing or a plan behind the vision or vice versa. 5) Cloaking mechanics changes did not result in lower use of battleships at first. I'd put this one under inability to adapt to new tactics. 6) Now where to put things like dscan and bubble immunity ?

If devs create a sufficient number of ships for each race to do particular tasks, if any player can pick a different ship for the job at hand (pvp/pve), and FC's are enabled and proficient in developing/chosing a doctrine for fleet fights, then there are no real issues. The reality is that races have different focus in their design, and they should each have the possibility to fight any other racial fleets, with the outcome solely based on piloting skills, outsmarting tactics, typical eve shenanigans etc, not on individual ship parameters. But we all know the true answer to this universal question is 42.

Eve is about flying and blowing up ships first and foremost, and the rebalancing should be the single most important undertaking with the most resources, the highest urgency and the best plan. Flying ships is what is common to all of the players (with sov a strong contender for second place). Ship rebalancing should be translating into the creation of a rich, highly flexible meta. How do we stand sofar ?

Good luck devs, with focusing on undoing design flaws, having an overall plan and vision, and not allowing the boat to be rocked. Credit is already due to you for many excellent changes.

Just yet another CCP nerf to look forward to. hey guys look,. I see you are all enjoying using these ships because they are pretty decent so we are going to make them average and blend in with what this game is becoming. Bland and average is clearly the way to go.

Now I know that many of you enjoyed the Rattlesnake nerf a while back but we thought youd love an additional nerf to your bouncer range. I hope you enjoy the more varied tactical gameplay this brings as we take aways some more versatility.

Now to Mdedium Railguns, we see too many people using these, probably because they have longer range and you dont have to get close up when running missions or any other combat style and we know getting close makes you very vulnerable and prone to take more damage so we are going to f**k them up. We hope you enjoy the more varied gameplay that we think screwing around with something that you use because, well its useful and make a whole series of your favourite ships less capable on the field.

Now while we are on Gallente weapons as well as nerfing....errm balancing Medium Railguns we are going to f**k up.......errrm rebalance the Proteus, because well, we feel that a strategic cruiser that takes a fair amount of skills to train and has this weird mechanic we built that makes them a little more effective (in some configuations) than a standard cruiser , and lets not forget that if you get one blown up your lose a whole lot of skill points.

Anyway, as you know we cannot have any above average ships or vaguely useful weapons so we are at our favourite part of the game where we pat ourselves on the back and make the game just a little less fun to play while we try and sell it to our customers as more amazing things we are doing in the Eve universe.

We are wonderful, we are never misguided in what we try to do, any feedback is welcome especially from those that agree with us and validate our standpoint (probably because youve been blown up by an ishtar or strategic cruiser and dismayed your poor tactics and understanding of the game meant you didnt have a chance) and of course any feedback that takes a contrary stance to our attitude of making all ships and weapons in Eve bland and average will be thoroughly ignored, especially when one or two CCP fan boys jump on quote your blog and say what an amazing job ccp are doing and its about time these changes were made.

All I know is already all the people I talk to in Eve are refrring to Scylla as the next Nerf, not the next rebalancing. Nerf Nerf Nerf! Woot Woot...Yay.......Great update we are all loooking forward to........errm, but heres a thought, could we maybe make the game more fun instead or less fun.