EVE General Discussion

At this point, I've flown the rifter quite a lot. It's not the best for sure, but I'm not sure what it is exactly that makes it apparently bad. is it just a case of other t1 ships being op?

None of the PVP'ers I know and fly with claim the Rifter is bad, but for those that do it might be one of those cases where 'bad' becomes synonymous with 'not good enough for me'. I am of the philosophy that there is no such thing as a bad ship in the hands of a capable pilot.

Once upon a time, before Tiericide (aka 'rebalancing'), most of the ships in EVE were...shall we say.........the suckage in PVP. Minmatar ships had the best advantages in PVP combat, and so most people flew Winmatar...um...Minmatar. And the best PVP T1 frigate in the entire game was...The Rifter.

So good that it was common to simply set orbit 500 meters, hit the microwarp, and push F1. Go make a sandwich, drink coffee, come back and scoop the loot.

The list of PVP-capable ships, in fact went something like this:

Rifter.

Drake / Hurricane (big argument over which was better)

Tempest/Maelstrom/Apocalypse

The rest were...suboptimal.......mostly.

Altho Sentry Dominix's were sometimes used as well.

AND THEN THE REBALANCE OCCURED.

The Rifter, while still Very Very Good, was no longer an 'I Win' ship.

Thus the tears began, and continue to this day.

Much the same thing occurred when the Drake and the Hurricane were nerfed...um...rebalanced.

Altho you can still get the Old Hurricane, it became the Hurricane Fleet Issue..>:)

This is nonsense often claimed in games.

Ships are categorically defined by their stats.
They exist as their stats. No stats = no ship.

When a player flies that specific ship, it is under constraints of those stats.
Ergo, player capability is secondary to ship stats.

It is patently impossible and irrational to claim there exists perfect ship balance in EVE.
That would be the only premise where player capability would become primary, as all ship stats would be equal.

Given two pilots of equal capacity, ship stats decide.
This further reinforces that ship stats are primary, player capability is secondary.

No amount of capability of a player, can turn a "bad" ship, into a "good" one.

Being underestimated can be very good.

I was under the impression that EVE PvP is more of a rock-paper-scissors kind of thing, is that wrong ?

At the risk of our dear lord and saviour Max Trix locking this thread and saying this should now be in the feature suggestions forum, is there way of making the rifter stand out from other t1 frigs? as far as i can see, the rifter really has no stats that another t1 frig can't come close to, and then make up for in other bonuses. please correct me on that if i'm wrong though.

My killboard, up against yours, shows who the expert on ships and their capabilities is. You are also strawmanning me. I said, "there is no such thing as a bad ship in the hands of a capable pilot". Just because a Rifter loses a fight to an Ishkur, it doesn't make the Rifter a bad ship. The Rifter is EXPECTED to lose that engagement. If the Rifter, however, beats the Ishkur, that means either the Ishkur pilot is bad, the Rifter pilot is very good, or maybe a bit of both. Maybe, they're both good, and the Rifter pilot was just that much better.

Salvos, have you ever seen a Magnate kill an assault frigate? I have. Have you ever seen a Jaguar flying through the middle of a cap battle, in amongst smartbombing battleships, taking out fighters, and coming out if it intact with a few capital kms it whored on? I have. I've done those, and a lot of other things with ships that people wouldn't expect to be capable of doing what I've done with them.

No, Salvos, you don't dictate PVP to me, or anyone else, with your kb, you just don't. You have absolutely no demonstrable authority on the subject, and I can tell you from first hand experience that no single factor, be it piloting ability, or ship stats, or how many ships there are, is the deciding factor above any other factor in any engagement. All engagements are highly fluid, and two equally capable pilots are just as capable of making mistakes as the other, and if one in a 'superior' ship happens to make one, the one in the 'inferior' ship can use that to his or her advantage, and take the fight.

Again, though, my statement was, there are no bad ships in the hands of capable pilots. That is to say, there are no bad ships, and the best PVP'ers will agree with that statement. Even corvettes can do some scary stuff, especially in numbers, but think twice before messing with that solo Velator who just sent you a dual invite.

It could be my corpmate Brutal Wyrm, who has more than a few killmarks on his Velator.

We're not going to argue about this. Any replies will be ignored. Anyone can look up our kbs, Salvos, and see who the real expert is here. So I'll leave it at that. TL;DR I'm right and you're wrong, and I can prove it.

Do the other frigs have stats that the Rifter can't come close to? Off the top of my head, the Punisher's tank potential comes to mind, but you have to take a pretty big hit to dps to achieve that. Maybe the dps on the Incursus, but the Rifter can hold it at range outside of an Incursus optimal and still maintain good dps at optimal, because it still gets its range bonuses. On that note, a Rifter uses guns that don't require cap, so you can throw a neut on that util high, buffer tank it (hull or armour, either is fine) and be much more effective with it than any other racial gun frigate. That's just some thoughts off the top of my head. The Rifter is also still the fastest T1 frigate out there, apart from attack frigates, despite the fact that the others were made a little faster way back in the day.

They all have their pros and cons, tbh, and the Rifter is probably the most fragile T1. It is a good stepping stone into a Jaguar or Wolf though, which are both exceptional assault frigates in their own right.

Uhuh. Come tell us all about that when you've had a 1v1. It's funny, though, you keep confirming what I'm saying, that basically superior piloting makes the ship type redundant. You can talk about 'both pilots being equal' all you like. Tell that to the Talos I killed with my 8mil SP alt in a Slasher a couple of weeks ago, due to superior piloting. Salvos, you're quite simply wrong. The pilot ALWAYS makes the ship. Yes, both pilots being equal, the ship will determine the outcome, but both pilots are never equal, and the fact is if you put a bad pilot in a 'good' ship, and a good pilot in a 'bad' one, the good pilot will win.