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Bad example, we have used Rohks in alphafleet and it works pretty well!

This is why the money move for anyone not "all V" right now is to forget about Dessie / BC and train all racial BS skills to I. Guaranteed you wll get all racial Destroyer and BC to IV for the price of around a 10 day train today. If you can get BC V, Destroyer V before the patch hits, so much the better.

Something else to look at:

Currently, Destroyers (as a skill) is pretty bland - it enables exactly 1 ship per race. That's OK as a stub skill (that unlocks a hull for each race), but not as a mainline skill. If Racial Destroyer is going to be part of the core progression, it needs to unlock more than a single hull.

Conversely, now that there are three different BC hulls per race, putting Battlecruiser into the mainline is workable.


(More generally, can I recommend that we all forget about our invested skill points and actually discuss the idea on its merits? If the idea itself is a net improvement, there are half a dozen different ways of dealing with "grandfathering" skill points. Moreover, your opinion is much more valuable if it doesn't appear to be smothered in a thick covering of "But I'm gonna be nerfed!")


What I'd like to hear more discussion of is "endgame" ships. What are the advantages and drawbacks of (say) lowering the threshold to actually sit in a carrier?

Note that requiring BS IV vs BS V doesn't actually have mechanical effect on your carrier skills, except an extra 20+ days training time. It won't inherently improve your support skills, since you can't train them in parallel with BS V. I'm not sure that any of the battleships count as a pseudo-carrier, so it's not providing extra opportunity to practice carrier skills. And the training time for the carrier supports is several months, so an extra half-month of experience isn't likely to make a big difference. Comments?

it is a waste if it's only trained as a capital ship pre requ.
my carrier pilot for example havs 2 BS5s but doesnt fly any BSs at all and has no large gun skills or other BS relater support skills, he has them purely to be able to fly carriers.
after these changes, those 2 BS5s turn into 60 days of totally wasted training time.

The benefit is that you can specialise earlier and faster without getting bogged down by semi-irrelevant prerequisites. This lets you be a bit more clever than before in what you choose and when.

It also makes most, if not all, T2 ships conform to standard pattern (hull skill + role skill), which makes it easier to add new ships and roles without creating a tangled mess of prerequisites, and which lets them fiddle with individual skills without creating unwanted side-effects on others. For instance, if for some reason they figured that the HAC skill was too cheap, changing it now would also affect command ships, but by decoupling those two, they can adjust one without affecting the other.

Just adding my voice to the general support for these changes - you've clearly got the right idea with the big picture here, as always the devil will be in the details. Here's hoping the new CCP can carry through on implementation.

Please forgive me if my interpretation of the proposed removal of generic skills is incorrect, but it might also be that everyone else, who appears to be focussing just on BC and destroyers, is missing something.

My point is, that there are far more generic ship skills in the game than the BC and destroyer skills, including Logistics, Recon, Heavy Interdictor, most of which i have at level 5, if you needed to understand my motive for posting.

I know that CCP have stated that you will still be able to fly the ships that you could before the change, but the bonuses that you get from the generic skill will be at risk. For example the recon skill to 5 will allow far more to be fitted onto a cov ops version, due to the recon skill bonus on the CPU usage of the cov ops cloaking device. If my general recon skill at level 5 is replaced by a whole set of racial skills to level 5, this wont be a problem, but anything less, would mean that i would not be able to use the same fittings that i currently can on at least 3 of the racial variants.

Like I said, i might have got this wrong, but, if not, please let's not just concentrate on the BC and destroyers when far more ship types will be affected.

Could you please elaborate on the artificial barrier dictating ship attributes within the same class? What is it? How does removing whatever it is help re balance ships?

Everyone's all worried about getting there sp for bc v, when i think that is the least important thing in this blog to take note of.

It doesn't look like they will “racialise” the role skills you mention — they will work just like now, and in order to fly any given T2 ship, you have to have the hull skill (frigate, dessie, cruiser, whatever) at lvl V and then the role skill (HAC, Recon, Logi, Interceptor) at lvl I+.

So your general recon skill will not be split up; it will still work almost exactly the same way it does now, except it will no longer require CovOps to train. Since you already have the racial cruiser skill for the recon ships you want to fly, and since you already have the Recon skill, everything will be exactly the same as before.

Right now, there is this strange rule where higher tier (= higher sklll requirement) dictates that the ship will be stronger, have more slots and fitting space, be more expensive, and generally just be “better”.

The most glaring example of this is the old tier-1 vs. tier-2 BC problem: the tier-2s are better than the tier-1s in pretty much every way for no particular reason.

They want to move away from this and instead assign each ship of a specific class to a particular role, and let the role determine what kind of abilities it gets. So a cruiser that only requires Cruiser I will no longer forcibly be weaker than a different cruiser that requires Cruiser III just because tier-1 is less than tier-3. Instead, if that first (previously tier-1) cruiser is in the “brick tank” role, it will be a hellalot sturdier than the second (previously tier-3) cruiser, even though the latter has a higher skill requirement because that second cruiser actually fulfils some newly invented “assault” role that is built around speed and firepower instead of pure tank.

To continue the battlecruiser example: the new tier-3 BCs are not simply “better” than the tier-1s and tier-2s — instead, they simply fill a different role: massive firesupport for fast-moving fleets. This role does not include massive tanks and it is implemented in such a way that they are quite vulnerable to small ships, so even though they are higher-tier than the old BCs, they are not universally better than them.

I've gone through the Dev posts, but remain curious (as the focus of the discussion is elsewhere,) just when should we expect these changes to come to Tranquility? The gut instinct says for Inferno... But, I sense a surprise coming.

So, is there even a general timeline for this to begin shaking up our "alternate" lives?
(Well, apart from the speculation and panic and such.)