Ships & Modules

maybe that it caps out after 4 or 5 MWD cycles

Results in 6min 30s cap life, but yeah in general cap is an issue for cruisers.

I only have one kill with the Blastos, but for that job it was the perfect tool. Needed some friendship magic in the form of a Raptor, I guess Tr3s not being solopwnmachines is also a good sign of their successful balance.

Nice addition, as they are also new Big Game for frigates.

Forgot: I saw someone do a lowsec non-rated plex in an Oracle, so guess they are not just pure gankboats.

I think you need to keep the terms small-gang and undermanned apart.

I guess the former tend to mean you become the latter though .

It kind of tie into the other discussion people are having here around us. When you say "bring more Huginns" you essentially say "bring more ships". Anything become "good" with numerical advantages, it's not a good indicator of ship performance. Assume they have more Huginns (ships) than you. The best way to test the mettle of a ship is looking at it's performance when undermanned, as they put it. The problem the Naga has is that it can't keep up with it's peers in a mixed gang and it does have issues with general speed curves even in a uniform gang.

I would never pick a Naga over a Talos unless i specificly aimed to exploit that extra nudge of DPS that only exist in perfect optimal. At any time outside of it's ideal position, the Talos will fare better. Mobile sniping is about moving and adapting afterall (while you suggest people don't adapt tactics to fit the Nagas style well enough, my point is that the Naga don't adapt to tactics around it very well). The upside of the Naga, which i briefly touched upon, is that it at least do have an advantage in optimal conditions. That make it somewhat interesting and not all that bad, because you can aim to exploit that advantage and form a concept around it, which is essentially what you are saying as well. There's two sides to it, with potential and limitation.

Not that i run mixed gangs to any larger degree myself, but i fight them alot - and we thrive on killing isolated, out-of-place ships. I also fight much larger gangs quite frequently (since that's the way the cookie crumbles in EVE these days) and it's very appearant that Nagas are not quite hitting speed averages to kite-snipe. If i don't aim to kite i'd rarely use a Naga over a Rokh. So while i think it's a fair ship with it's own niche appeal and potential, it remains between a Rokh and a hard place.


The numbers were meant as base figures (ie., where the Cerb today go 1400-1500 m/s; no heat, bonuses or implants). Something i can see the Cerb do for example (as i didn't adress it specificly in the outline post) would be something more in tune with it's Navy companions (the Caracal and Osprey).

Right now it's overshooting warp by 40km and warp-to by 90km. Adapting it to today's climate and giving it a bit of a specialist role (the HAC is afterall a specialist class) by removing one out of two range bonuses and adding a speed bonus will essentially have it go 25% faster while still shooting far by today's standards (see Rook and Tengu), without affecting the trait where Caldari are balanced slow where heavy-shield apply. It comes back to the Naga discussion. When racial trait and class ideals come in conflict, bonuses is a good way to deal with precision.

It's not a question of streamlining either, since how many really fast missile boats are there out there today? It's essentially just the navy Osprey and it has it's own issues, while Caldari as a shield-race have issues adapting into various shield gangs, since shield is usually about mobility in some capacity (mobile sniping, nano kiting).

I am a friend of adapting the ships to the climate instead of trying to reintroduce the old climate of extreme-range, less-mobile sniping. I still belive the game is more entertaining with a variation of different mid-ranges than what it was before when it was essentially 150km sniping, ludicrous nano and point blank. The problem, as with many other- and the top issues in the game, is that after those framework-changes in 2008-2009 (probing, nano), the post-balance was left incomplete in favour of new content - creating a majority of the problems we see here today.

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I've remarked on the development cycle before: Apocrypha was very much like Crucible, a bit of an emergency patch (a band-aid) to deal with accumulating issues short-term, meant to be solidified with an ambitious follow-up (Dominion). Dominion however was also largely incomplete and then CCP asked for an 18-month leeway to pursue other design projects outside of EVE. People were upset then, since Dominion had not delivered and that culminated with Incarna and the summer of rage, 24 months later. In that timeframe the game has stagnated with less actors in 0.0, bots becoming a major problem and over-arching balance issues (such as numbers) that stem from 2008, or iteration on the new (band-aid) content introduced then. A year and a half turned into four.

Inferno and the unnamed Dominion 2 is essentially starting over from Apocrypha running iteration on content from back then (POS-interaction, FW, lowsec, war-mechanics) and balancing problems with roots in that era (numbers vs. resources; nano / Tech III, Titan AoE DD / Titan tracking; Sov- and Wormhole interaction).

Pertaining to this thread, even mobile sniping and position-kiting (as reinvented with Crucible) first sprung up in the Apocrypha-era, and the aftermath of the nano and probing changes.