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Fail

The people complaining about skills are complaining about a Straw Man or Red Herring fallacy. BCs are too versatile in their nature, and CCP's proposed "fix" is to make destroyer and BC skills racial. However, even if BCs were changed to require a racial skill, it does not change their overversatility. It's a remedy that doesn't even begin to affect the real problem

The way I see it, things are panning out like this:

Two hours later, the ship sinks and everyone dies because nobody thought to seal the damaged bulkhead. Game over.

You are right in that racial BC skills won't solve BC balance issues, but that isn't their intent. They are a solution to having 12 hulls derive bonuses from 1 skill and to bring consistency to the skill tree. The actual re-balancing of the ships themselves, once they have their turn to be balanced, will attempt to address the versatility issue.

Again, the racial destroyer thing has more to do with the number of hulls rather than their performance. BC's, no matter how over/underpowered they may be, are still 12 of them using the same skill. Destroyer is a group they are looking to expand to avoid creating a situation where the skill is to limited in applying only to one hull. right or wrong this makes the analysis of the ships within those classes entirely irrelevant to the discussion of the skill changes.

Look at it from a different angle. Explicitly, a Rupture requires only the Minmatar Cruiser skill to be trained, nothing else. A Hurricane, on the other hand, requires Minmatar Cruiser AND Battlecruiser skills to be trained, it only gets bonuses from one of them. The battlecruiser skill has zero effect on a Cyclone if Minmatar Cruiser is not trained, as the pilot cannot fly it to begin with.

How many hulls a skill affects is not relevant in its own right. I don't think anyone would argue against the present state of the Destroyers skill being perfectly fine. It is not because it affects only four hulls, but because of the nature of the ships themselves. The destroyer class is not scalar superior to the frigate class, it is an adaptation of the class to fill a different role. The skill determines how well a pilot can exploit this adaptation, but he must have thorough knowledge of how the racial frigates before properly understanding how this adaptation would even operate.

To parallel it to a real life situation, it's akin to automobiles. We have our motorbikes, passenger cars, and coaches. Each of these are their own classification. We'll be looking at cars (which would be a parallel to cruisers) for this example. There are multiple drivetrain configurations for cars; Traditional Rear wheel drive, Front wheel drive, PosiTrac, Four wheel drive, etc (Parallel: Racial cruisers). If I was interested in installing an oversized engine and a performance transmission (Parallel: Battlecruisers {Or what they should be}), I would have to know what the effects of that would be. Once I understand what the added weight, added power, and closer gears do, I can apply that knowledge to any drivetrain I am familiar with, and the coefficients would be similar, if not identical, to all.

Anyway, destroyers are fine skill wise, and can even stand to add a second racial dessie. By introducing tier 3 BCs, CCP screwed the pooch. But there is nothing that can be done about that, the damage is already done. The bigger problem is that CCP is planning to do something that will invalidate several core principles that the entire game was built around. Doing this will make the situation worse, not better.

Once again, CCP is using a blow torch to light a candle. They say they want to do small things incrementally? Then they need to keep the rulebook intact. Change smaller things first. Increase the skill requirement for destroyers/battlecruisers to be frigate/cruiser IV instead of III. Give BCs uniform role bonuses to make them less versatile. Then see how it plays out and go from there. It has a lot less potential for harm than the proposed change.

Frigate -> Cruiser -> Battleship. No exceptions.

Refund any obsolete prerequisite skills. Interdictor pilots should have interceptors refunded to 'injected only' status, etc. Otherwise you penalize pilots because they were unable to make a specific training choice that was available post-patch.

Do not penalize people who choose to fly one race's caps, another's subcaps and a third's T2 and a fourth's T3. Due to the wholesale-unbalanced nature of the different race's ships (ie Myrm =/= Cane and so on) at different sizes and tiers this is just natural for experienced pilots to do.

Hopefully the reactions of the player base mean something this go-round.

Personally? Drop this wholesale MESS of a project that needs no work and fix something that is actually broke.

I hear you, and I disagree. You say the next stage is a BS, I look at capabilities and not just things like module size. I think there is a place there which is too big and versatile for a cruiser or even a cruiser specialization. The thing I think is filling that place you are viewing as a cruiser specialization. I don't think it should go away. Nerfed at the high end yes, removed no.
I agree that they are OP for their roles, but their role is apparently not envisioned as you envision it. So rather than accept the place they have been given you are trying to refute a change by redefining it. If BC's are a cruiser spec than HAC's should be removed and BC's should require cruiser V. If not than their difference justifies a different classification. Seeing as they miss the mark of specialization in my opinion they cannot be classed as a cruiser spec.
Question: Considering titans and dreads, as well as carriers and SC's, use the same module size how can you accept them being classified differently but not cruisers and BC's?

When this was decided as a training progression the other classes didn't exist. Last I looked we'd had a few changes since '03.

I can fly 3 Battlecruiser race atm and use 2 intensively (hurricane and drake obviously) at battlecruiser V, as most people i know and probably a lot of people i don't know, especially those who does pvp or people who just love flying those two ships.

Both ships have very different uses and there are specific needs to have them both trained and you're suggesting that CCP remove the ability for us to fly those ships and choose only one and then have to spend at least 1.5 months to train the other two? No losses? seriously? The only 'gratification' for people who actually use the skill is that they have to pay more for their new medical clone class. Are you out of your mind?


You do know that carriers don't have 'guns' don't you? and what 'place they hold in line' you're talking about here?

It's better than handing out millions of SP for no other reason than that, but CCP will do what it thinks best, usually guided by players who won't take no for an answer.

The fact that both ships have very different uses should give an indication that CCPs move is the right one. All that extra skill training is used in many other areas for similar purpose anyway. It's not like Heavy Missile Launcher is only used on the Drake, and certainly training Passive and primary shield skills to V comes in useful on every ship class to a greater or lesser degree.

That latter bit was a reference to a comment made earlier about not needing to train for a ship using X-Large Turrets by training up a ship using Large Turrets. I think they were referring to the Dreads specifically, but referenced Capital ships specifically. My thought is the Battleship is just one step in the process. No reason it should be excluded and it looks like they are moving toward a model where you no longer need to train a sub-class to V anyway.

I might add that this isn't so much a problem if nobody has Battlecruiser to V, but starts to become one when they have that and especially when they have only trained one racial variant to get into that particular group of Battlecruisers and have the base requirements for the others.

Now, from what I've briefly read, they will suddenly get boosted to all racial variants of sub-classes to IV to meet the Prereqs and get each racial variant of BC to V on top of that. Suddenly they are not only capable of flying those ships well, but have level IV in all racial sub-classes. Doesn't really seem fair does it? Instead of losing a month and a half, they have suddenly gained it.

Of course I'm not counting exact or even actual time requirements; I'll leave that to the people who can't help doing that just to make a point.

There are plenty of people that either don't like getting a lot of sp for doing nothing, or afraid of loosing the possibility to fly a ship. From what i see no one really got into tweaking the ship skills ranks.

The probably easiest option would be to divide the existing dessie and bc skills rank by 4 to get those for races, but you would end up with rank 0.5 for dessies and 1.5 for bc. As we have neither of those atm in the game: Not really a viable option. The second thing to point out here is that bc would need less time to train then cruisers and even frigs which doesn't make any sense as the idea was to make a more fluend and logical progress.

So here is another idea: Tweak ALL the skills.
Atm the ranking is as follows: Frigs 2, Cruiser 5, BS 8 for each race and dessie 2, bc 6 for all together, that's as if we had a single rank 68 skill (4*2+4*5+4*8+2+6).
Now we can just redivide those 68 to the 5 race specific versions, e.g. with frigs 2, dessie 2, cruiser 3, bc 4, bs 6, or 1/2/3/4/7 or whatever other combination CCP prefers.
If this happens all t1 ship management sp should be refunded to rebuild ofc.

This has some ups and downs of course.
The sum over all t1 sub-cap ship skills combined remains the same. (pro, neither sp gained nor lost)
The higher ship skills maintain a higher rank. (pro)
Maxing out a single size of ship is faster as most ranks are a bit lower than they used to be. (this is pro, cause we aim for faster specialisation, some might call this a con tho)
You might loose the ability to fly one or two ships when rebuilding, or gain the ability to fly more (con, not really any way around this, but the differences should be pretty minor and fast to retrain if need be)
As they want to redo the prereqs and training times for most t2 ships anyway there shouldn't be a problem on that part.

I'm not really concerned myself, but that may be the result of my not flying anything at the moment. I do have a character trained to V in Battlecruisers incidently and I think it covers all of them.

If I'm not mistaken though, allowing all Battlecruisers means they will be dishing out Frigate, Destroyer, and Cruiser 4 for all races. I also don't consider skillpoints worthless, but that isn't really the issue. I just fail to see the downside of being a little more cautious in the doling out of SP. I'm sure there is a better alternative than that, but I haven't thought of what it may be at this point.

Certainly, one possible option is granting same level skill in all racial battlecruiser skills and simply graying them out until the prerequisite skills are trained if they are not already. That seems a lot easier and fairer than handing out individual skillpoints for each and every plyer who has it trained to one degree or another.