EVE Information Portal

Sounds very interesting, looking forward to see the changes

Really excited about the changes and caps again, so good work!

Some hopefully quick questions:

1. Carriers and Supercarriers, would it be possible to have some kind of anti ship/fighter weapons on them, flack cannons or something similar?
2. Is there any thoughts as to making the fighter types for the new squadrons similar to the fighters found in Valkyrie, because even if there is no actual connection yet it would be a cool addition even if it is faction squadrons?
3. Also will squadrons be available to use with Citadels?
4. With the addition of Citadels and the other structures, how long till we can have and use Capitals in Empire?

An XL citadel has a DPS cap of 60,000. That's 40 battleships worth of DPS, or six dreadnoughts. Hardly insurmountable.

What happened was we all didn't want entois links taking out our structures. So this new damage mitigation thing has been introduced, and its pretty cool.

It will be hard to get anything bigger than a medium in C4s and down, since you will need to build them in your WH. Note that 50 odd T3s will be close to the mitigated damage limit of an XL. It will take just 30 mins at that level.

Also lots and lots of questions asked here are answered in the dev blog. Try reading people.

As a Titan pilot, there is nothing more fun than locking and shooting a Triage Carrier with the current Doomsday. I don't need to have a more interactive module to have more fun with it.

Guess it sounds good if you fly capital ships. I won't because of the outrageous price tag and I am space poor. I am sure Eve Welfare won't cover it....

So now if a carrier pilot wants to do DPS to anything other than frigates/drones/other fighter squadrons they will have to train a 3million SP skill up to 5 before they're allowed. Great design.

First, CCP can read my blog.

overall, I am excited by the whole thrust of the capital rebalance. I think that it's a direct attack on the current meta, which is overall a good thing.

There's nothing wrong with the current meta of EWAR-immune triage carriers and RnK-style refitting on the fly, however it IS hard to balance capitals and introduce different gameplay options when the current meta still exists - why would you try being a mobile capital with MWDs when you are better served glomming up with your buds for refits?

Weapons timer / siege and triage
Overall I support this. However, it is worth considering whether the FAX and Dreadnought siege time should be 5 minutes, or whether it should cause total immobility. if the goal is to break up the giant capital blobs we see now, and create mobile carriers and dreads playing a positional game in space (and trying to avoid doomsdays and remote EWAR weapons, etc), then it is worth considering whether immobility is necessary, because this will still encourage static deployments.

One option to consider is reducing siege timers to 1 minute with a cooldown; to make them essentially a capital class Bastion module (the Marauder's Bastion is a very, very good model here for how Dread siege can work).

Another option is to have Siege and Triage impose a 50%, 60% or 90% speed nerf on the capital using it, and having a short cycle time.

EWAR vulnerability
I am a bit 50/50 on this. Your capitals are going to become vulnerable to Falcons and EC-300's. I have previously had great success jamming slowcats with EC-300's from time to time. That's 5 light drones wirth 15K ISK jamming a Chimera or Archon. Now you'll have this happening to probably static Dreadnoughts in siege.

Unless you are unaware, Dread scan res is so abysmal that if your dread is even 10% vulnerable to a Falcon or a flight of EC-300's, it will lose lock and take 30s to reacquire a target. The jamming drone or Falcon will get 2 more stabs at jamming the capital before it completes its re-lock.

Damps will make this even worse - you don't even need to jam, you ust put 5 resolution-scripted damps on a Capital and it will take 5 minutes to lock something. It will be the easiest way to take capitals out of the fight permanently. Even a 25% reduction in scan res will trash Dreads, let alone TDs, Missile Disruptors, etc.

EWAR immunity is a difficult thing to countenance, but it has its place.

HAWs
Firstly why not rename this to Point Defence Battieries? High Angle Weapons as a name makes absolutely no sense. I mean, i'll take Force Auxilliary on advisement, but HAWs? Haw haw haw.

Secondly, 1K DPS is a no. it's a Dread, not a fat BS. 2K DPS needs to be balanced against Carrier DPS, basically. Currently a gank Thanny can top 3K DPS, and whilst this will change after the Citadel expansin, carriers will (obviously) gain amazing force projection with whatever DPS they have per squadron. Like, they just drive their fighters 500km away, they do 1500 DPS @ 500km.

This leaves Dreads in a terrible place if their subcap DPS is nothing, or a fraction of a carrier's DPS. So this needs to be balanced. Yes, you are obviously trying to get rid of blap dreads, but there isn't anything intrinsically wrong with blap dread balance (+/- phoenix edge cases) at the moment. If you have to use HAWs and you have 50km projection @ 2,000 DPS and are totally immobile while doing it, you could be unable to wipe out a carrier before it slowboats out of your range with its capital MWD. In which case....why even use Dreads?

So, yeah, i think you have to explain why no blap dreads a bit better. To properly blap dread you need multiple characters on grid +/- OGB's (+/- OP Phoenix edge cases in black holes). Enemies generally know how to avoid being blapped or how to counter it. If your capitals are moving around grid now (i hope so) and carriers have amazing damage projection you really need Dreads to actively hunt carriers down.

Restricting dreads to shooting structures or just having wet paper towel DPS ignores their use in killing supercaps. I wonder how you'll go balancing Dread weapons along a binary choice of "can ONLY shoot structures" and "can shoot subs" because the blap dread mechanic relies solely on maths. The only way you can mathematically deal with capital guns so they cannot hit subcaps means that they won't be able to hit even slow-moving capitals or supers effectively (ie, basically zero tracking, ridiculous ER/EV stats) or capitals at the edge of falloff.

If you screw dreads over, it'll just be carriers everywhere. I mean...from the looks of it carriers won't suffer from having to triage, so they will MWD about the joint at whatever speed (200-30m/s?) laying about with squadrons of fighters at 500km range, doing 1,000-3,000 DPS against totally immobile Falcon-jammed, celestis-damped, Sentinel-disrupted Dreads.

That's not such a great way of getting rid of Slowcats. It'll just be Fastcats.

How about this idea: Players could contract carriers with triage fitted, to a special CCP character just for this purpose. On patch day, a script runs to check that the correct items are in the contract, and returns a Force Aux ship (with all fittings, rigs, etc) to the character making the contract. This should ensure the most players have the best chance to request a swap, no unwanted swap is automatically done. If the special script and character could be maintained for some length of time beyond patch day, that would help other players who "didn't get the word" in time, to make the swap, if they want it.

Edit: As I posted, I realized I made the common mistake, "what about WH?" sorry. Lower class WH would be unable to put a carrier up for contract :(

I would like some mechanic for players to request the swap, versus it being automatic, and some players get swapped out without really wanting it.

Some good idea, but the part on the refiting for carrier is total bullshit.

It's just a "blob win" now, the first who engage their carrier will just die, and the first who will engage their MS will die too, even if the trap is not perfect.
Just a "batphone" move, brainless.