Ships & Modules

Gallente arguably use them better.....for all the good that does.

I have a couple creative drone set ups that are a lot of fun, but still, missiles or nuets generally better served.

FFS
I was going to post about how I agreed with liang on this one, mostly because I've found nullsec pvp to be more blobby and skilless than high or lowsec pvp, but goddamn did you hit the nail on the head with aggro timers for logis, and I just KNOW liang is very much against the idea of RR triggering dock/gate aggression, and now I'm going to have to side with you >_>

That said; no, null does not function the same way as low sec. The gangs are smaller, hotdrops are far less common and supercaps are damn near unheard of. It's the only reason I ever set foot in lowsec, because as fleet sizes go up pilot skills affect the fight less and less. You may not think that 30 people in a gang qualifies as large, but at that point if you're not a logi pilot or the dictor, you could literally warp off in the middle of a fight and no one would even notice. A gang IMO should be considered large when the contributions of any one DPS ship is unnoticeable.

Also as a side note: There is highsec pvp that's not station games, you just have to rattle your targets enough to make them want to leave the docking ring :D
Not that stations aren't a huge part of it (and docking mechanics in general need a good hard looking at, especially when caps are involved) but claiming that highsec is nothing but station games is like claiming that nullsec is nothing but triple digit blobs.

Balance from a game-design perspective only mean one thing and one thing only: tolerable differentiation.
It doesn't assume anything regarding wether the user is a prodigy or a complete numbnut, so you don't "balance a game" around either one. Is the performance of Gallente hulls tolerable? Yes, yes it is.

The only thing you have to be fast enough for is to beat the average spread. You do. In fact, you argue the same thing with reference to piloting ability, you talk about averages. Gallente is fast enough on average, to be useful and tolerable. Is the average pilot competent enough to draw on that? How should i know? The people in my midst are, both the ones i fly with and many of the ones i fly against. Should we design the game around stupid? Well, you may have Soundwave onboard with you there, so... .

Though i thank you, because every time i write these remarks someone seem to imply i'm a good player, while i'm nothing special.

Is the chance practically non-existant for a plated Deimos to catch a Vaga? No it isn't. Is the overall chance for a Gallente ship to catch the vast majority of ships out there; or rely on drones, rails and utility roles; reasonably good? Yes it is. Have a variety of different groups shown that Gallente can be useful in various concepts over the past few years? Yes, yes they have.

You can catch almost anything in a ship-ship situation, you can base compositions around Gallente-heavy concepts, and you can outmanoeuver opposing gangs despite having a short-range main damage source. It's not just 1-1 or 5-5, it's been exemplified up toward 50-50. It's not just empire, or lowsec stations - it's been seen everywhere. If there's any fallacy in this thread it's your philosophy that a ship using a short-range weapon system has to be the fastest under any and all conditions.

The only thing most people here agree on is that Gallente are still rather poor in 100-man blobs, and have been so ever since Tachyons got buffed in 2008 and broke the 150km, 425mm Rail paradigm. Guess which was the most popular fleet ship back then? That's right, Megathrons. I'm sure you can get some sympathy from the AAA-guy on that, at least. Gallente is not the only balance issue among blobs though. #Deathtoallblobs.

Ta Da indeed.

Now imagine that Gallente was the fastest race, able to catch everything and doing the most DPS with best tracking... cool, short range would not be a hindrance to poor Gallente :/



You, on the other hand, seem to imply that all the ships from other races perform well with average skills, bad fittings, poor coordination and wrong amount of tactics, and that is balance. Wtf?

If there really would be that kind of ships, the problem would not be in blasters. Actually, maybe there is one, and it's about to get changed?

Meanwhile, people keep flying blaster ships where they work.

You're oversimplifying the issue. Its about more than just speed and the ability to bring DPS to bear - there are a huge number of other considerations. I personally believe that semi low ranged damage nano ships should exist within the game - and that its completely fine for those ships to be effectively uncatchable by blaster ships.




Actually, there's quite a high number of pirate and militia people coming here and telling you that you're wrong. The only people really drawing exception to Gallente/Blasters is nullbear mega blobbers null sec "PVPers".

-Liang

Huh? I used to fly in 20+ man fleets about 10 times a week in low sec.....in your neighborhood for that matter. Those were just the ones I was online for.

They may be rare in Amamake, that is because usually if you fly in there that deep everything in system docks or safes up.

Big fleets used to be more common about a year ago, but I don't know what happened to them in the meantime. You hardly ever see a 10+ man fleet in lowsec anymore. It's sort of nice.

Well, I wouldn't quite say the shortest range weapons have to be on the fastest ships, but they need the possibility of closing fast from time to time.

Blasters are basically the "melee" of EVE. If you think about melee classes in most games, they have some "closing" ability that's on a reasonable cooldown (so it can't be pure spammed - otherwise, with their higher DPS they'd be OP).

Some kind of superfast acceleration thing for a short burst on a longish cooldown perhaps - a "bull rush".

Or perhaps (to be more current) something equivalent to the Jedi Guardian's supercool "Force Leap" in SWTOR - i.e. an ability that can only be activated from a longish range, and not from a medium or close range.

"All power to main thrusters" or something like that.

You mean... overheated AB or MWD?

Incursus?
Federation Navy Comet?
Thorax?
Deimos?

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