Ships & Modules

I think that the changes to t1 cruisers proposed by Alara IonStorm are the right ones. Anyone who says that cruisers may be balanced by cost are wrong because it's not only isk that make for cost effeciency but also time and logistics and tactics. If you bring a cruiser to a BC gang everybody will laugh at you and they will be right because you're the one who's about to be volleyed first and that's significant loss to the gang and a lot of pain in the ass for you to fly back and change the ship.

Basically it's like with modern tanks. Fit a 150mm against autocannons and small arms on the tank! With a such signifcant reduction in weight you can use wheel chasis. A 1500hp engine will get you to 80-110km/h easily, congrats! you're more mobile than an average MBT! But when it comes to bulldozering own way through rubble and barricades, or survivng under constant fire of AT guns/missiles you're basically ffffffuuuuu....

In this term EVE is awesome as it represents the real world situations and people's solution to it - more tankier/powerful vessel against raw mobility.

We don't need more EHP buffs - we need more fragile glass cannons like the Tier 3s.

-Liang

For what purpose? To compete with tiers3?

No matter how cheap you make current t1 cruisers they won't be viable due to their horrible survivability. 24k ehp cruiser dies less than in 1 minute to 4 BC's. And that's it one man down in your fleet. Which means no DPS, no utility, no intimidiating presence in the overview. It's not about ISK.

Same goes for destroyers. I see lots of them in Tama lol poping frigs but even an idea to add one into a gang sounds like a intentional sabotage.

Current cruisers make no sense in current lowsec meta full of BC's.

And when the tier one ships have more raw EHP then their T2 counterparts the EHP buff will continue....

Stealth arty nerf.

@Lian

1) Giving more capacitor would cause everyone to run full-neut because you could run them for longer. This would disadvantage cruisers without utility slots (Caracal) and unfairly benefit cruisers with plenty (Vexor, Arby). One benefit for the EW cruisers would be the ability to perma-run a rainbow BB (you can already permarun a damping celestis with MWD off).
2) Here's some mathsifying for you. A shield Bellicose starts with 148 sig (1 x LSE, 3 x rigs, 1 x Invul) and 19K EHP. 500% of that is 847mm. An armour celestis starts with a sig radius of 135, ending up with 810 plus 27K EHP. A shield cyclone starts with 327 and 69K EHP, and gets 1800 sig on MWD.

Your typical most annoying kiting cruiser, the Cynabal, starts with 135 sig radius, or 810 with MWD, but has no plates slowing it down. The average Cynabal, everyone would agree, has the same sig tank as a Celestis but goes 3 x as fast (plated Celestis is 1114m/s). It has less sig than a Bellicose, and goes faster; it is in the butter zone.

Now, before you carp on about "oh you want to make the Bellicose into a Cynabal" consider the Cynabal's attributes; 25% ROF, 10% damage per level and 10% falloff, allowing for the typical ZOMG performance you pay 300M for. A Bellicose with a 5% sig bonus to MWD would see its sig go from 148 to 555. Its DPS and falloff and ROF would be the same as now. Harder to hit, like a butterfly, but no sting like a bee

This would allow the Bellicose to efficiently sig tank while maintaining MWD.

3) Let us consider the same nanoed Bellicose, which due to gimped CPU gets a choice of lows of either 2 x TE's and 1 x Nano or DCU and 2 x nanos. The fit is razor tight. Tracking on the 220's (the only guns it can fit) is 0.114 with no TE's with range for Barrage of 2.75 + 16.5km. You have an align time of 4s

If you are really crazy and fit 2 TE's and even less tank, you get this to 0.135r/s and 3.5 + 27km. Plus your align time goes up to 5.5s, your speed goes down. Generally a bad idea.

Typical nanocane, if he were to fit 2 x TE's, 2 nano's and 220's, would get equivalent tracking and not gimp himself at all, and get an align time of 5.9s. Not bad; you get slightly worse align than a TE'd Bellicose for the equivalent OMG Winmatar Nerfbat tracking.

You can see where I'm going with this. BC's have the ability to achieve better real-world tracking and equivalent maneuverability to cruisers. That is pretty broken. A 25% tracking bonus to cruisers would allow you to concentrate on DPS mods, tank mods, etc.

4) 10% more shield, armour and hull base hitpoints won't turn cruisers into killdozers. Eg, again, the Bellicose.
Raw shield: 1250 + skills = 1,56
Raw Armour: 1210 + skills = 1,51
Raw hull: 1210 + skills = 1,56

Add 10%, it would look like
Raw shield 1375 + skills = 172
Raw armour 1300 + skills = 162
Raw hull 1300 + skills = 162

Calculating the EHP bonus at the end of the process? Depends on skills, modules, rigs, but 10% more HP won't do much of anything except give cruisers a little extra love. As I said before, the biggest addition to HP of a cruiser is the 1600 plate which adds 4,200hp. This far outweighs any 10% bonus to the raw hitpoints of any ship aside from BS's and capitals. Yes, trimarks will scale it up, but you go an ACR to get the plate vs a third trimark to get another percentage

5) You are welcome to stick 2 small armour RR's in your Caracal any day of the week

As for your "need more glass cannons" idea, nice troll, but I'm not biting. We've already got enough gank dessies soloing hulks and tornados soloing haulers and PVE tengu

i dont think t1 cruiser need a EHP buff
a EHP buff wont make them any better against BC or BS because if you get to the point you have to tank your going to lose anyway even with an etra 10k EHP also a EHP buff wont help that much against smaller class because if you cant hit them dosent matter too muc if they take another etra 20-30 seconds to take you down
imho T1 cruiser need a boost in survivability via more speed more agilty, the difference between BC and cruiser is too small atm
also most of them need theirs slots layout and their fitting stats readjusted and maybe some of their bonus change
speaking only about the combat cruiser thats my idea on how to fix them
maller- change cap bonus for a dmg bonu
omen- more fitting to allow a 800mm plate + heavy pulse setu
arbitrator is fin

thorax - change the mwd bonus for something useful like a turret tracking or somethin
vexor - need more fitting, its almost impossible to armor tank the ship with medium sized blaste
celestis - dampener are useless, if you cant fix dampener make it a bit more combat worthy, move 1 high to low, more fitting for a kite setup and 50mb of droneba

moa - moar fittings enough to fit a full rack of 250mm rails and mwd (or neutron blaster with some tank
caracal - more fittings agai
blackbird is fin

rupture - the ship its fine but it would be cool to see one of those 2 utility slots moved to a mid or lo
stabber- give the ship 25m of dronebay, after that move one or even both the utility slot to meds or low or give it an extra turret and replace the rof with a falloff bonus (10%)
bellicose- same as the celestis no one use painters and the ship its not good for combat, move 1 high to med, more fittings, give it 4 launcher and a damage bonus to missile instead of proj


on top of that put they speed/agility between frigs and BCs a normal cruiser would do 1600-2000 ms w/o speed mods based on the race (with the exeption of the stabber that should be faster) a good way to do that would be reducing their mass by a 30



with these changes the still wont be able to kill a BC and thats ok to me (same way a t1 frig cant kill a dessie) but they will be more hard to catch and they could be an option for roaming in hostile territory with something bigger

What makes you think that you should be able to face tank 4 BCs with a cruiser?



I got into a 1v1 frigate fight where I was dropping out 300 DPS with good tracking and it lasted 15 minutes. I've been in other fights where spent 10 minutes decimating an entire enemy fleet with just a few of us in glass cannons.

You're doing it wrong.

-Liang

I did not Armor Tank everything with a 1600mm, just the Arby, Rupture, Thorax and Vexor.

Not as stupid as you think TBH with those 4 Ships. They can be if you overheat and burn in quick on the primary.

I don't really understand what you mean? I never said I wanted a basically untanked Rupture. I just want it to equal 40000 EHP with an 800mm Plate and buffer armor while 1600mm Plates are adjusted to require Battleship PG.

Flatly untrue, the Vexor and Arbitrator are almost always Armor Tanked, Thorax's are about 50 / 50 and the Rupture is in for the most par the Shield column.

Hardly most.

Hah, that is cute, near modern BC levels of tank. Your near modern levels of Battlecruiser tank are based off the Brutix and the Hurricane fit for Shield. Drakes can pull above 100k EHP and 90k after the nerf, the duel plate Cane currently 95k EHP. So it is okay for Battlecruisers but not Cruisers.

Hurricane and Brutix were never designed to be fit that way but have to because of Shield OP. A priority should be to fix small scale Armor tanking so they don't have to be and get the tank they deserve.

Good for them.