Player Features and Ideas Discussion

At Eve Vegas CCP Fozzie indicated at a roundtable that they are still working on what their design philosophy for Assault Frigates (AF) will be when that change comes. They are current eclipsed in nearly every respect by the Tech 3 Destroyer class. The versatility of the T3Ds makes them more than a Jack of all trades but a bit of a master of all trades.

So, To fix this I think the AF class needs to go the opposite direction and have a laser sharp design philosophy and be focused on filling their role precisely better than any other ship.

Tank stats and bonuses

I propose that for this redesign we look at some conventions in Eve ship design that may need to be modified. Nearly every, if not every, ship in Eve has a resist profile that follows their racial pattern that is improved by T2 resists. But why does EVERY Ship have resists for their non-racially favored tank type (e.g. armor for Caldari or shield for Gallente)? I suggest that there should be ship types, in this case AF, that might not have any resists to their non-racially favored tank, but in exchange their base resists get 10% improvement on their base stats. So, a hawk would have:


Hawk


shield

EM: 5% TH: 88% KI: 76.25% EX: 60%

armor

EM: 0% TH: 0% KI: 0% EX: 0%

hull

EM: 33% TH: 33% KI: 33% EX: 33%

This would mean that there would be no viable fittings for an armor tank hawk. Well, there isn’t anyway. But the extra EHP for the shields comes at the cost of a 10% EHP loss at the armor level. For a net gain overall. And it fits with the specialization theme that T2 ships should have.

Propulsion

Another change I would make is that the current MWD signature radius role bonus is a little weak IMO for a frigate class. I would replace it with about a 100% bonus to Afterburner speed role bonus. This would put the speeds that AF could achieve with AB still less than MWD speeds but still fast enough to be a clearly superior choice to a MWD. Though there would still be some niche fits that use MWD.

This has some significant effects on the ship. One of the most obvious to me is that with those speeds and a small increase in EHP (outlined above) this class would be very survivable especially against heavier ships. With it being the fastest AB ships in the game it would make for some very brawl oriented ships that can get on top of something that was slowed down, by interceptors say, and burn them down. They would likely out pace the T3D at holding ground on the field of battle. They would be a strong choice for defensive fleets covering strategic locations in Null and low sec space. They would be a good counter to interceptors, but not perfect, since they would have trouble engaging the inteys. They would be excellent against large numbers of large ships and might even be superior to bombers at killing lone capitals, but, they can be caught and killed.

This would make a fun class and I think would blunt the T3D menace somewhat and make for some interesting uses for a class that has historically been a lot of fun but has fallen on hard times.

A more interesting direction could be to keep the MWD bonus as is, but in stead bonus them for oversized guns. This is similar to the bomber design, a frig sized sig tanking platform with guns designed for battleships and a speciality function (bombs) to compensate for tight fitting resources and bad tank.

Now take an AF, with bonuses specifically designed for sig tanking WITH resources to mount a decent "real" tank like other frigs... and give it bonuses to fitting and use of cruiser sized close range weapons. You could even go so far as to give it a massive damage bonus along with a massive cycle time penalty to encourage its use as a "bombing run" style of alpha striking hit-and-run craft for these engagements to encourage active player rather than sig tank orbiting at gun range, making AF piloting have a unique and somewhat interesting flavor that functions as a mix of kite and brawl.

Alternately, you could scrap the MWD bonus and give it (gasp) immunity to webs, making the interceptor its natural hard counter as an extremely small and mobile ship that it can't hit well with med guns, and that it can't outrun with web immunity, which would nicely create more combat roles for intys.

This gives it a pretty unique role in combat as a frig that is primarily countered by other frigs, but primarily designed to "fight up" to larger ships as a combat vessel rather than a tackle in a way that no current sig tanking ships do, and that is highly disruptive to subcap escort fleet patterns.

Its very existance in this role could make interceptors of various types desirable for fleet combat roles as such a ship would be fairly well equipped to engage a and possibly win dps-vs-tank race against destroyers that usually keep frigs off the field, a viable DPS option against cruisers, and a superior nano-dps option when fighting battleship and larger vessels.

Its an idea anyway. I'm sure it has problems.

to be fair if that was the case AFs becoming the anti inti ship class would not be a bad thing

T2 ships don't so much trade flexibility as they do fitting space and wiggle room. With the Tiericide CCP have actually been getting away from mandatory fittings like the MWD on the old Deimos because of it's cap-penalty reduction. T2 ships tend to have more slots and more actual fitting options than T1, they just also tend to be specialized, so you end up with a ship that has more it can do within a limited slice of the pie as opposed to a T1 ship that's less specialized and can do more.

As for the A-Hawk I don't particularly care if you don't like it, I don't care about it specifically one way or the other, but I don't believe in these kind of arbitrary restrictions limiting other's options just because I don't personally have an attachment to a particular off-kilter fit.



With logi, sure, but most Frigate fights (and especially places where AFs get used) don't involve logi. They're small affairs involving a squad at most and quite frequently single ships. In a one on one frigate fight absolute tank value doesn't matter as much as tank over time and quite often the little bit of wiggle room armor buffer or shield regen gets you is enough to pull range or let your repper cycle a bit more.

Also something I forgot to bring up last time, that doesn't even get into Gallente and Minmatar ships which are generally able to run either armor or shield as part of their racial flavor.

Beyond that you're looking at something that's either going to make it very very easy to brick tank, because of the increased resists, or something that will only reduce fitting diversity but just shift buffer from both tank types to a single one. This is especially true because of how resist stacking works and how powerful strong base resists are. I've got a shield Harpy that's already able to just sort of troll-passive tank most single Frigate attackers, with what you're proposing I'd probably be able to fit a fairly minimal tank in terms of mods and just laugh at half the frigs in the game in a 1v1 fight.



That's not how speed tanking works or the point I was making about the relative utility of a MWD vs an AB. There is no decreasing marginal return for speed tanking, at the same sig 2400m/s is *vastly* better than 1600m/s. In practice we only observe this because MWDs have a sig bloom, given a choice between 100% AB and 50% sig bloom reduction on a MWD I'll take the MWD every day of the week.

This is demonstrated quite clearly on the Sansha ships which get an AB speed bonus and just aren't terribly popular, not even the frigate which gets a 20% per level bonus to AB velocity and still gets outrun by a Harpy with an MWD, a ship with about 100m/s less base speed (with 5s).

The extra speed of an MWD lets you dictate range, avoid getting scrammed in the first place, run away from bad fights, and is just generally amazingly useful.



Few problems with this, first off that AB is only worth anything until the enemy gets webs on you or can otherwise track you, and that's not so hard to do that you can actually rely on that AB bonus. Second the T3Ds are still going to be able to run you down and nail you to the wall, as will any Inty and even an EWar Frig with an MWD bonus. At that point you don't punch hard enough to fight your way out and your idea doesn't give the frigate any other tricks because you've stripped it's fitting versatility.

I feel like you're missing everything these get used for that's not small fleet engagements and you're trying to shoehorn your own ideas about what class balance should look like into a single idea and ignoring the realities of the game as it stands now.

AFs already tank well in a fleet role, the problem is that's not enough for them to be particularly good, useful, or unique and buffing that significantly makes them OP, as the old brick-tank T3D fits amply demonstrated.

Well, oversized guns might be one way to take it, but if this were to occur, it would only be to one of the AF per faction. The suggestion to fix up the other one, or even both of them, I think should be MWD immunity or resistance to scrams. They are already getting a bonus to MWD so why not take it one step further. If this is also not quite enough, a 25% reduction in web efficiency against them to top it off.

A frigs defense is their ability to out maneuver their opponents. I think fiddling MWD scram resists and sig bloom or web resists really could be a solution, though finding the balance and the proper mechanic may take a bit.

The stats-magic is more or less what I was talking about with the damage/ROF trade on smalls, the issue there is that you're likely to end up with something broken in there somewhere because each size of small weapon doesn't directly translate to the same size of medium gun, so a percentage change on the largest Small gun might be balanced but that same percentage on the smallest gun might result in something broken or completely unusable.

The cloak analogy isn't a bad one but it also does a good job of pointing out the inherent problem here, Cloaky ships trade a lot for those cloaks. They're squishy, they're slow, and with the exception of Bombers they tend to have lower DPS as well. AFs have none of those drawbacks, in fast they tend to be one of the tankiest Frigate hulls and they have the slots and fitting to fit a dual prop in many cases, so if you give them web immunity you're very likely to end up with something that you really really can't pin down or effectively kill, which is intensely frustrating to fight. As various other ships or classes have shown, something doesn't need to be effective at killing you to be frustrating to deal with, frustration is its own kind of damage, especially if the ship is capable of harassing an objective like a FW plex or an Entosisable structure.

Honestly it might be viable to just make AFs have a pretty good buffer for a Frigate. Cut the passive regen and what-not and just give them really thick tanks so they can pull high EHP numbers and outlast opponents. If what AFs are really missing is just staying power (and I'm not 100% convinced that's all they need) then why bother trying to outsmart yourself with a clever solution and just fix the most obvious stat associated with staying power, raw HP.

Hey guys I stick my neck out there too since I love flying the Jaguar

What about overheating bonus like 5% to heat reduction and additional 10% for the bonus that the equipment gets when overheated.

the overheating bonus is like 15% for most of the equipment and it will end up 22% with that 40% or 50% but it will be a special bonus and a signature that will define the Assault frigates

So a Succubus with t2 resist, yeah I'm down