Ships & Modules

What I was saying there is that autocannon hurricanes will be replaced by tier 3 battlecruisers for quite a lot of small gangs.

edit: they're obviously not going to get replaced by brutixes and myrmidons

Oh, hey, Lachesis with res damps does this already.

LRN 2 GALLENTAY

Yes, but i wanted to point out that even if by whatever method that ever should be solved -the next problem that makes blasters useless in fleets is already in the pipeline. And of course i won´t miss the chance to point out that -again- making Minmatar the close combat race -and giving Gallente other roles in combat- would be the solution.

Right let's all fly Drakes Hurricanes Maelstroms Abbadons...

Ho w8 !!

Hey, sorry I just saw this (again). I thought we'd come to the agreement that you were a clueless moron that keeps saying stupid things like better tracking and more physical DPS and similar sized tanks don't matter. Hell, I went through and made an entire post (and blog post!) about how ******** your assertions about brawling were.

And the funny thing? Popular opinion was "lol, news at ******* 11. Blasters are better in a brawl".

-Liang

Ed: BTW, I'm not paying much attention to this thread anymore. Its totally full of people who either don't PVP or are angling for a WTF OP boost or a WTF unnecessary nerf. Or just a general rewrite of the game for no good reason. Either way I'm confident CCP is ignoring the morons so /shrug.

Just because you are too chicken **** to get into a brawl (or PVP at all) doesn't mean that they don't happen frequently. Also, even after all that smack talk about how awesome you are with a Vaga, you never did come by Amamake and show me how awesome your Vagabond was. :)

-Liang

Yeah I think it's pretty obvious that blasters are much better than ACs at point blank after the patch, although I don't agree with Liang's inductive conclusion that neuts don't matter cause he lost a fight against 3 ships. But it's pretty simple that better tracking + better dps = superior point blank performance. All that said, canes are hardly useless in a brawl, and the neuts do make a big ******* difference, as do capless weapons.

All that said, the underlying point is still that it is impossible for a hybrid ship to get into a point blank range fight of his own accord, barring some mistake on the part of the other pilot. Until Gall ships get the best speed, or the best range (which would kill any sort of variety in this game), they'll always be second choice for small gang pvp (to say nothing of fleets) unless you've got an alt or a buddy who can help you control the tactical situation as you see fit. If you go out for a week in only blaster ships in low sec, I guarantee you will be able to count the number of "brawls" you get into on two hands, very few people are that stupid anymore that they can't figure out how to keep range on a blaster ship.

I didn't say that they're useless - I said it takes a back seat to being able to put the hurt on someone. Neuts win through attrition and are more of an ewar/CC than anything else.



You don't need to be "the fastest" in order to get into a reasonable range reasonably quickly. Furthermore, you only have to get in range once - unlike kiting ships which must perpetually maintain range through constant effort. Really, if you think about the way kiting works, you tend to have the kiting ship on a semi right angle to you while you are approaching (either via "approach" or manually) with an overheated MWD.

The only time that the kiting ship should have an advantage over an overheated MWD approach is when they're running directly away from you - which usually means that you have a golden opportunity to leave. While the ability to leave the field at any time is commonly cited as an example of "overpoweredness" in favor of kiting ships, it should be remembered that sword cuts both ways.

Also, all I have to do to find more brawls than I can count on two hands is to log in for a day. :)

-Liang

An overheated point will keep most ships from being able to escape from a kiting setup before you can warp off. Plus with the way people fit their setups these days, you would have to have caught a kiting setup within a certain window from the time the engagement begins in order to be able kill him before he kills you. If you're already half way through your EHP, catching a kiting ship isn't going to help you, since they're not fit to have zero tank these days (unless he's arty fit or some ****, in which case you can outtrack him easy).

The point I keep trying to make is that taking two players with equally good skills and knowledge, one in a blaster ship and one in a cane like the one you posted, the blaster pilot has to rely on luck every time, i.e. where he lands in relationship to your ship at the outset of the fight. If he lands outside web/scram range, he's ****** up the ass. If he does, you're ****** up the ass. The situation gets even worse the more ships are involved, since the amount of dps coming in against the blaster fit ships is multiplied by however many ships are in point range, but the blasters ships still have to rely on tackling their prey to apply anything. There are certain fleet comps that can alleviate the blaster ship's inability to apply dps of its own accord, but they are skill intensive (not just SP intensive), rely on lynch pins, and can discourage fights because no one else would want to engage.

From a solo stand point it may seem like giving blaster ships the best speed would be OP, but from a small gang perspective there is really no other way to give them a fighting chance, short of giving them the exact same range as the other turrets. If they don't even have a chance to catch their opponents, even while they're getting pounded by all that extra dps, there really is no way they'll ever be viable outside of an engagement where you can fool your opponent into trying to gank you and then turn on your reppers.

My experience with blaster ships says otherwise. If the MWD speeds are less than 100m/s apart, you have a decent chance of catching him in an agility trap, but if he overheats at the right time you'll have an extremely difficult time trying to keep at him. All this while you continue to take damage and he's had nothing but your drones on him.

But lets accept your premise that in a fight between two equally skilled and knowledgeable pilots, one in a cane like you posted and one in a blaster ship, the blaster pilot has a reliable way of catching his opponent a majority of the time. Lets clone those same pilots and take 3 canes vs. 3 blaster ships. Who do you think is going to win? I seriously doubt anyone is going to come in here and credibly argue that the blaster ships have a good chance of winning. They'll be picked apart at range by the other canes, and if they do by some miracle happen to catch one of them, the tackler can be easily neuted out and killed (if he hasn't popped already), effectively robbing the blaster side of any dps advantage they would have had otherwise. It's completely unreasonable to take a method of grabbing tackle while flying solo, and expect it to apply to a gang situation (even a small one like this, it's 3v3 for Christ's sake) in a way that will allow the blaster ships to win a good percentage of the fights.

This is the other part of the balance argument, one that I haven't seen addressed as often as I think it needs to be. If blasters have to expend so much effort and use a lot of skill just to get tackle on someone, they are not able to scale basically at all in a small gang situation. Yes I know that close range ships are not good for fleet warfare, but this isn't 100 v 100, 50 v 50, or even 20 v 20 we're talking about here. Blasters should be able to scale in gang warfare farther than just solo engagements, where they barely have an advantage at all (and that's if we accept your argument to begin with).