EVE General Discussion

Reporting in on the Ship Balancing Keynote for Velicia while she's out on an important assignment :


Covered the current system as it is.

- How many ship types are being used currently?
> Half of them are "ok"
> 30%, Ships that are causing issues but work
> 30% Ships that are not good.

- Current trend > Skip Frigates and Cruisers for Battlecruisers.

"Half are just crap" - Half is motor oil in a beer glass

First > Clarification
- How ships improve on meta and tech level.
> Navy, Pirate Improvements

>Specializations > T2 between Pirate and Navy

> Tech 3 is Less efficient than T2
- For example, Command Ships with Ganglinks - if you follow the pattern the Command Ships should give more bonuses than T3 with ganglinks which is not the case. Maybe the Command ships should give 2-3 bonuses while T3 should give 2 bonuses with more bonuses.

- We want to solve that to make ships less redundant.

- New Models - Tie T3 ships with new models.


Skill and Progression Changes

- You can still fly ships you could fly before!
- Several things we don't like about current system - if you want to be a competitive level with veterans then you need to specialize, then you can compete
> BUT, the main problem is for fleet and field command ships to be specialized, you need a year to specialize
- So what we would like is that a new player can specialize into ships without the cross training.

- Split generic destroyer and battlecruiser skill into the 4 races.
- You can still fly ships you could fly before.
- Racial skills for all make it consistent for all T1 ships.
- Too easy to train every single ship with just training cruisers, for example
- Remove dependencies on other T2 prerequisites to get to other T2 ships.
- i.e. to train into Recons, I have to train covert ops even if I'm not interested.
- i.e. Same for Black ops, etc.
- Player Comments that make Capital ships too easy to train for - can be compensated for in other skills.

Ship Lines
- WTF are Ship Lines
- Tiericide by killing "tiers" that lay out that some ships are better than others based on "tier"
- The tiers affect slots and hit points based on ships tier.
- A system that makes certain ships artificially better than others based on tier is getting flushed out the toilet.
- Ship Lines name and icons are work in progress.

i.e.
- Combat Ships - General All Purpose Combat
- Attack Ships - Damage Ships, Cavalry
- Bombardment Ships - Missile Ships
- Support Ships - Logistics ships, Recon Ships
- Industrial Ships - hulks, etc.

Specialization skills can be included to improve ship line performances into separate trees for the ships.

Specialization examples :

Combat - Range or Tanking ships
Attack - Turrets or Drones ships
Support - Disruption and Assistance ships
Industrial Ships - Hauling and Mining ship specializations

An idea of how they fit ...

Combat : High Offense - High Defense, poor Mobility

Attack : Offense High - Defense Medium - Mobility High

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Current system : Interclass dependencies
New System : Goes away - At the bottom ships sorted by ship line.


e.g. Prophecy is currently a tanking ship purely - changes : Make it into a support ship with tracking disruption and drones.
e.g. Maller is a combat ship line - review it to make it more like a mini-Abaddon.

Give fitting and slots to ships that really need them.

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Some Tech 2 ships are changing manufacturers.

e.g. Zealot is Viziam and is moving to Carthum.

Carthum is heavy damage, and Viziam is more support.

Some Khanid ships might change. (Don't take away black shiny ships!!!)

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Questions :

Some ships will have more flavored ships : Amarr more Combat, Minmatar more Attack ships.

Bumping being reviewed

Revisit T3 subsystems and might fit into roles better.

NPC ships - are so easy to kill - ideally we want to make NPC ships prepare you better for PVP. So that if you're doing mission content and a PVPer comes in to your site you aren't caught unprepared.

Racial EWAR - Review EWAR - Gallente Disruption skill not used often - and Target Painters for Minmatar EWAR "Seriously?!"

Want to move Command ships ideally on grid.

I fixed it...

The autosave feature seems to like to do that.

Luckily, I Copy-Pasted before I posted (out of habit) - so it's fixed now!

Question they forgot to ask: will rebalancing and removal of the tiers, also mean the prices of ships will be rebalanced?

Also EAF jamming capitals? WRONG!!! The problem with EAF is not that it has no role, because it has: providing ECM for fast roaming gangs. The only problem is that it doesn't have the speedtank to do that.

Thanks Lacrime.