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Dear CCP,

first I would like to thank you for giving the AFs attention they needed.

Having the extensive experience in flying Jaguars and combating the other AFs in it, I believe I am competent to give you some criticsm on your proposal.

1) Proposed changes are too powerful - slot layouts of all AFs should remain as they are; with the exeption of Retribution which should get its 2nd med slot but at the expense of one low slot. I can see no need of adding more slots to any of AFs (they are small ships after all) and you can find no justification of whole pack of balance issues it may have brought.

2) MWD signature reduction - This bonus might be viable for 0.0 AF pilots, where MWD is nessesary for avoiding bubbles and such but will not help to increase AF s survivability in actual fight. Quite the contrary, MWD will become a burden while you are webbed and trying to keep close orbit of, say, Hurricane which is scrambling you, neuting you and having a flight of pesky small drones shredding you appart. The main problem of AFs are webs - you got more than one on you and you are dead in the water nomatter what. So if you really want to help AFs some sort of speed boost or web effeciency reduction would be in order.

But as somebody mentioned above, AB boost might be a litte too much. MWD sig reduction on the other hand is so insignificant for close range AFs that I doubt it will bring much of controversy. However I cant say how it will influence long range AFs - can it make them viable?

3) Fitting slots again - in the most cases +1 med slot is not equal to +1 low slot. Therefore Hawk with 5 med slots is simply ridiculous - only not-ewar frig which has that is a Hookbill and that ship is quite overpowered if you ask me. And now imagine an Hookbill with AF resists... Also i dont have any good feelings about 3 med slots Enyo. Iam afraid you are breaking balance a lot here...

CONCLUSION

Leave the slot leyouts as they were (with the exeption for Retribution), add the bonuses and armor/CPU increases as you are proposing and AFs should be just fine. If you want to add the role bonus for Afs (which I would not recommend), I would suggest something boosting AFs combat survivability more. But if you insist on MWD sig reduction, go for it its at least non-game breaking in any sanse i could think of:))

Better role bonus: +2 microwarp drive core scramble strength.

Let them be able to run a MWD while hit with a standard scramble. This can be explained away by the fact that AFs are much more massive than their T1 counterparts. The weight can be said to come from A: the increased protective capabilities, and B: the shielding used to protect the MWD.

Suddenly you have a ship that can determine its range but by doing so has the drawback of having a super-huge sig radius. This makes you need to play with your MWD, since if you simply leave it running some bigger ship is going to eat you alive. What it does allow however is for a heavy tackler that can keep a point on nearly anything, as being scrammed doesn't instantly kill your ability to keep a target in range. You're an AF, you're slower than most other frigate targets.

It also makes it so that you don't necessarily need dual prop to deal with being scrammed.

Sure i did



Overpowered in relation with what? Overpowered in relation to bigger ships? Sure they are not.
Overpowered in relation to each other? Sure they are.

Enyo with 3 mids? Good luck to any Wolf pilot taking that down...
Rocket Hawk able to fit 2 webs? How do you want to kill that? ( assuming you are in AF)
Another hi slot for a Vengeance without touching its already awesome tanking capability?



Thats more or less what iam saying (or tried to say:))

I've killed quite a few of the new enyos in a wolf, you just wear it down at range then go in for the kill (or just use a long point vaga wolf, but those can't kill a slicer).


Again, out range it, hit the massive EM hole. But yes, the dual web hawk is a little bit strong.

(I still need to test an ishkur vs it too, but I think that might stand a chance using warriors due to the much weaker tank of the dual web hawk and it's inability to use bonussed kinetic missiles)


Out dps-ing its reps with a gank ship works fine




But how is that a bad thing? It has no effect on AB only lowsec fits (either negative or positive) and makes them viable for nullsec...

5% speed bonus to frigate size afterburners per level.

ok, dead horse.



Make them the best ships in EVE to run low end anoms. Similar to how the ishtar is for hacs.

For this they'd need to be completely re-designed and their role readdressed. However, this would make them effective in low sec for ~something~.

The current proposal for AF's just makes them into beefier inty's that are a bit slower.

Beeter for lowsec? So easy..

Role Bonus: Automated evasive manuvers. Assualt Ships have a 7.5% chance per level to avoid anchored munitions such as station and gate turrets and launchers.

Add a random 'juke' animation while they are moving in combat (client side.) Done. Now.. can we move on?

Good point with that Retribution:) And my bad for being so specific about what can or can not kill what. That discussion is not what i had in mind. Basically I wanted to argue 3 points:

1) Wheres the nessesity for adding more slots? (Retribution is an exeption) What does that solving?

2) There are 2 types of Afs now - heavy tacklers and DPS (Jag and Wolf for example) but if you add the third med to Enyo you are making a hybrid which can use web+scram+prop combination of a heavy tackler accompanied by high dmg output of DPS AF - thats what i dislike about the idea.

3) Combination of rockets and the ability to equip two webs is bad imho - its far too great advantage for a ship without tracking and range issues (dont forget Hawks range bonus).

I hope I have managed to expess what i had in mind in more understandable way:)

As for Tawa Suyo: I have never said MWD sig bonus is a bad thing, just it will not help AFs much. If the idea was -to give some role bonus to AFs but dont give them much...well iam content.

So... it has a 37.5% not to get hit by each shot, but that still means that frigates fighting on gate will massively favour the person without gate gun aggro. A lot of frigate fights are so close that even taking one hit from sentries (which knock off around 15-20% of your total hp) will change the outcome of a fight.

Only way this bonus wouldn't be massively pointless RNG based pvp is if you made it 100% (btw, role bonuses are a flat bonus, not per level). At which point you get AFs sat on every gate in lowsec tackling anything bigger than a frig that comes through. Mechanics that increase the number of unavoidable gatecamps is hardly a good idea.



I do actually agree to a certain extent. The hawk in its current form is slightly too strong, especially once the Enyo's tank gets reduced slightly. But then, that's what testing is for.

Personally I'm in favour of reducing the base shields slightly. Obviously removing the 5th mid would immediately solve the issue, but that then makes it impossible to fit a decent active tank and still have the single web that a rocket ship requires (obviously talking about fits that don't require deadspace shield boosters worth 3 times the cost of the hull here). If you're going to do that then may as well change the active tanking bonus (not an _awful_ idea, but I do like the variety of styles AFs offer)



Makes the AFs viable in nullsec solo work and fleet work. Doesn't harm them or overpower them on lowsec AB only fits.

It helps AFs massively in areas they're currently not used due to their huge sig/slow speed while in no way affecting the areas they currently excel in.



If you copy across your existing install and use SiSi launcher? Maybe 1gb.

Please, do come onto SiSi, could always use more pilots to test these things. Who's your main btw so we know it's you?

(Oh, and SiSi launcher is here; http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Sisi_Launcher )

Dual webs/MSE.

Can use rage rockets and actually get full dps out of them vs a frig and still has an MSE tank.

Dual web harpy you can deal with because it sacrifices its tank for that control (even with the new resistance bonus) and has less projection.

Removing a mid and swapping the shield boost bonus for a resist one would do it, but then it basically makes the hawk/harpy the same ship which is kind of dull.

Jesus christ it's BONUSES stop trying to sound clever by appending latinate suffixes to make words which literally don't exist