EVE General Discussion

I really wasn't attacking you, I was offering some friendly advice on how you could improve your suggestions here. If you treat the goal of feedback to CCP as you "winning" you're not gonna get very far in my experience.

As to the rigs thing, I disagree that it's more rational to remove rigs. Making it so the ship flat out doesn't have something every other ship has defies player expectations and, as I explained previously, actually makes them harder to balance not easier.

The purpose of these changes is to make T3Cs useful but not overpowered or smothering to a lot of other ship classes, especially HACs. The RIgs have always stood in the way of T3 customization, people have been saying things to this effect for years. That leaves CCP's options at removing rigs or making them swappable. See above for why I feel swappable is the better option and why I suspect CCP went with that over removing them entirely.

"This ship has too many things that are special about it" isn't really much of an argument, especially when there are ships that have 2-3 unique or semi-unique modules that only they can fit. Besides Eve is nothing if not a game of planning complexity.

Not really surprised you don't care what CCP thinks, you seem to care very little what a lot of other people think. I don't think you're going to be very successful convincing anyone with that approach though.

Again, as I've already stated, removing rigs makes less sense than trying to replace them with a subsystem. Rigs provide a lot of small bonuses and have a lot of potential combinations, many of which are desirable. There's no feasible way to incorporate all of that into a single subsystem slot, and attempting to incorporate it into subsystems at all would massively increase complexity in that area while making the ships less comparable to ships with rigs. As opposed to being able to look at the various possible combinations without rigs and then look at the known values for what common combinations of rigs can add, which is *much* easier.

I can get behind this.

I am not opposed to this either.

Someone worded concerns about having subsystems and rigs into the Cargohold being messy and/or impractical: What about having a special Cargohold that can only contain Subsystems.

The code already exist in the form of Fleet Hangar, Fuel Bay, and various dedicated cargo bays for indy/mining ships.

Before I begin, I want to say that you'd be correct in pointing out that I haven't watched CCP's presentation on what they plan to do with the T3C. "Setting myself up for disappointment", as I think you wrote earlier, isn't the point. We aren't starting off with what CCP has in mind and going from there. We are starting from what we, as individuals, think will be better balancing, and occasionally referencing CCP's plans when we deem those ideas to be a good solid point unto themselves or at the very least a good launching point to further refine the idea.

CCP's opinions, while obviously the most important because they're going to be the people re-coding these ships, are not the gold standard. They've been dead wrong on many ship balancing issues many times in the past. They're only human. And it's entirely possible their think-tank didn't come up with every possible solution to the myriad of problems before them. To treat their presentation, plans, or ideas as divine inspiration is extremely silly. Titans, tracking Titans, remote doomsday Titans, Svipul, rigs on freighters. Not to besmirch the good people that work at CCP, but they're human, they err, and they're not and shouldn't be expected to be perfect. They've missed the mark before, they've listened to player feedback and incorporated it before, and it is in that vein that we continue to offer feedback, ideas, and insight. The same as Baltec1 insisting that cov ops/nullification be separate abilities that cannot be combined (I happen to agree), despite CCP apparently already signaling that they want to combine them. Now, if they want to make the cov ops/null combo ALSO have the 0% resist penalty of polarized weapons to offset the power, I wouldn't mind so much.


That said, your statement quoted above presents a false dichotomy and implies something I don't think we've said or indicated. You're starting with a premise that on top of all the other bonuses T3C already get, they need to get three more sets of bonuses either from being baked into hulls (the first part of your statement) or somehow getting three sets out of one rig slot (the second part of your statement).

This is where I feel we are not fully understanding each other and communicating effectively. Although I can't speak for Salvos' intentions, I think he and I both made the point that maybe they should only get one rig or none at all. Full stop. I certainly never meant to imply, and I don't think he did either, that those bonuses then should be baked into the hull. T3C are very versatile, and they have some drawbacks as all ships do. But as they have subsystems to fine-tune their ship in a way no other can, that means they already have ample opportunity to cover up or reduce any drawbacks in their ships.

For example, I fly marauders. I love 'em. One big intended achilles' heel in them is their capacitor. That's fully intentional. They're high-energy ships. So, you can rig them to have extra regen, cap buffer, or something else and just use a mid-slot to carry a cap battery. What I don't have the option to do, is switch out my engine block to one that natively gives me extra cap regen. In the case of T3C's, since they have the option to switch out for a subsystem that has extra regen, or reinforces their primary defense layer, or gives them ample powergrid and slots to fit things, they already have the spirit of rig benefits in their hull before they ever apply a single rig to them.

So, I think it's perfectly fine to remove rigs entirely from T3C. If they have a flaw...then they have a flaw. They don't need the spirit of an EM screen rig baked into their hull when they can switch out for a subsystem that does all that and more, or gives them the slots and fitting capacity to do so.

Balance them just like any other ship that has rigs, but just skip the rig part. They have the spirit of four replaceable rigs already. They don't need an additional three atop that.

As I sort of touched on above, having something that is spiritually similar to another mechanic is not the same as having access to that mechanic. Rigs and Subsystems are somewhat similar but only somewhat, and when looking at them in any kind of detail the similarity is passing at best.

To use your specific example there is a *big* difference between getting 5% resists per level and fitting a T2 Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer when you're a shield-tanked ship and someone's pounding you with EMP L.

With how rigs work and how important they are to so many fits in the game at this point in Eve balancing the hulls to the standard of any other ship without rigs would just leave them horribly gimped and not able to measure up in terms of tank, speed, agility, or even specialized functions like EWar, to a point that there's a very real chance of them being next to worthless in many engagements.

The tank example is probably the best and easiest to understand here. A ship with two T2 Shield or Armor HP rigs has 40% more HP in its primary buffer tank than one without those rigs. Think about any ship effectively losing 40% of its HP and how hard it would be to make up for that in a balanced way on any ship without just giving that ship the same thing that lets every other ship get that HP.

See my point now?

T2's were designed to be the direct improvement upon the base hull. Fine tuning the attributes of the hull to fill a role.

T3s are not based on any hull, they are based on an entirely different tech but are classified as a cruiser.

That is the reason why T2s are expected to be better than T1 in every way. Added cost and training allows for better performance than their T1 counterparts.

There is no such comparison for T3 to T2 or T1. However, since they are a cruiser and don't take significant training over that of T2 they don't get a free pass to just walk all over the other cruiser hulls in terms of power/viability.

T2 is supposed to be a moderate improvement over T1 with a focused specialization rather than a general and blanket improvement. For example without using ECM a Rook is going to have a hard time beating a Caracal.

The other thing you're missing here is that T2s are only around a 20% improvement over T1 (often less) for which you pay a roughly 2000% increase in base hull cost.

Compared to T2 Cruisers the T3Cs represent at least a 50% increase in performance for at best a 50% cost increase for the base hull. Going by the same kind of exponential increase T1 to T2 sees at the Cruiser level the T3Cs would need to cost something like 4-5b just for the base hull (that's 4-5 times what a Carrier or Dread costs) in order for their performance to be even remotely justified by cost, and even then they probably still wouldn't be very good for the game.

Also in a less quantitative and more qualitative way you can bring a Cerberus to a fight and I can bring me and a friend in Caracals and we'll probably win because while we have worse ships we have a numbers advantage and the things your ship can do aren't enough to make up for that.

If I bring a T3C and you and a friend bring a couple of Cerberus then you have a very low chance of killing me and, I would say, even a lower chance of winning than I do.



Yes, but specialized means marginally better than as well. A Cerberus is a Caracal hull with the things that make the Caracal good refined and improved on.

Though even CCP admits that the HACs are a bit of a weird case that was carried over from the old T2 design, where a lot of T2 ships were just T1 but better. The "T2 ships are specialized" thing kind of came later, but was born out of a place where a lot of T2 hulls were already sitting.

All of this comes down to the health of gameplay, relative ship costs, and what's fun for the playerbase. T3Cs aren't fun to fight against, they take the fun out of a whole bunch of other ship classes and then just kind of hoard it because if you want to fight T3Cs you either need massive numbers or your own T3Cs.

Cost has always been a factor in the power of a ship, just not the defining balance point. CCP have said that themselves many times. People just like thinking they say it plays no role at all because it's not a primary point. If it wasn't why don't all ships cost 1 isk or 100b? The reason is because it does play a role to an extent.

Pricing aside, who are you trying to fool saying skills have never been a factor in something being more powerful? It's a factor even in play with your precious T3Cs. The higher your level in subsystems the more powerful your ship will be overall. It's always been that way. Skills have always been an increase in power, either through fitting, base stats, or bonuses. That is the only tier factor that even exists within EVE. Each tier doesn't completely trump all below it, but you do see an increase in power as you skill into larger ships which take an increasing amount of time to train into. Until injectors were released, how many 1 day old toons did you see flying carriers? Are carriers suddenly equivalent in power to a frigate? If skills and cost don't play a role I'd love to know why they aren't. Why should your T3 be any more powerful than a T1 hull if none of these should factor into the power level of a ship?

Oh wait, it's because CCP decided to arbitrarily call it a T3, rather than leaving it as a T1 classification and calling them strategic cruisers instead. THAT is why you feel entitled to it being OP to all other cruiser hulls and even over most BCs. I understand now!

People try to slice and dice this in different ways. We could talk about how T3s aren't a continuation of a hull class, i.e. 'Caracal < Cerberus < Tengu' (NOT!). We could talk about generalization vs. specialization. We could talk about cost, skill, etc. And while there IS some truth to all of these ways of slicing and dicing, there's also holes that can be poked into these explanations by clever persons such as yourself.

The real truth is this: T3C are just massively overpowered and out of balance in such a way that they step on or invalidate too many other ships in the game, and they don't just invalidate too many other ships in the game sometimes, they invalidate them often, or too much of the time.

Having said that, lets shed some light on something that is confusing you and others.

We seem to accept this as being a legitimate and fundamental pattern in the game:

T1 < T2

Another (perhaps better) way of viewing it is this:

Entry Level < Ship of the Line

This is where your 'Caracal < Cerberus ' example fits. But the point is, we accept this sort of fundamental 'tierage' pattern, despite claiming that we've gone through a 'tiericide.' So, sure, a Cerberus is better than a Caracal in every way except cost, availability, disposability, and skills. IT'S A HIGHER TIER. But... is this the same as a Tengu being better than a Cerberus in nearly every way?

Answer: NO. Why?

1) Because a Cerberus IS a Caracal, just a better one. So the ONLY ship it steps on is the Caracal. So you end up with a cheap, entry-level Cerberus, and a more expensive, ship-of-the-line Cerberus. So if you really need to win a fight, and you need a ship with a Cacacal hull, and money/skill is no concern, you'll use a Cerberus. If you don't really need to win the fight, if money is a concern, if you don't have the skills, or if there's some nasty gate camp you might run into along the way and you need something a little more disposable, you'll use the Caracal. But at the end of the day, to whatever extent a Cerberus steps on anything, it only steps itself - a Caracal.

2) A Tengu is not only not a Caracal and not a Cerberus, EVEN IF IT WAS, it doesn't just step on the thing below it in tier that we accept it is allowed to step on, IT STEPS ON MUCH OF EVERYTHING ELSE AS WELL (or, at least too much of everything else).

By the way, you see PLENTY of Caracals being used in-game. In fact, I'd wager (just a guess) that there are more Caracals being used than Cerberi (what's the plural on that? heh), and nobody complains 'OMG! These Cerberi are so OP! You don't see anyone using Caracals!' The point being, even if we accept that due to tierage Caracals and Cerberi can step on each other, the balance seems to be good.

By the way, this isn't a 'thing' in game:

T1 < T2 < T3

It's actually this:

T1 < T2
T3

Bottom lines [TL;DR]:

1) We accept some fundamental level of 'tierage' in the game. And that level of tierage is 'T1 < T2' or 'Entry Level < Ship of the Line.' The point is, higher tier is allowed to step on lower tier (within its line).

2) If there is some level of T2 stepping on its T1 counterpart (see #1 above), we accept this as fundamental and fine. But in fact, balance seems to be fine because nobody complains about Caracals stepping on Cerberi or Cerberi stepping on Caracals. But if they did complain about it, adjustments could be made, and even if they couldn't, what part of #1 above did you NOT understand (we accept some fundamental level of 'tierage' in the game)?

3) If T2s step on anything, for the most part they only step on T1s, and vice versa (and to whatever extent this occurs, it is accepted as 'fundamental' and 'by design'). But they, for the most part, DON'T step on anything else. Nobody complains about T2s invalidating whole other ship classes and lines, and being used or usable in nearly every situation known to man, with no drawbacks. But T3s aren't constrained into stepping on a ship one tier beneath them (indeed they aren't in a tier). They step on all sorts of things, they do it too much, and they do it in a way that is not fundamental to the game or accepted (i.e. they don't do it within the confines of a tierage system).

4) This isn't a 'thing' in-game: T1 < T2 < T3