Ships & Modules

Here's an idea: Instead of removing the DD, or nerfing the guns, why not just remove the Titan from the game altogether? I mean, you only train for 2 years straight to pilot it, raise about $2,500.00 USD in ISK to afford it, spend a month in nullsec protecting it while it's being assembled and built (hoping your alliance doesn't fold or screw you over in the end anyway), and delegate yourself to being quite possibly the most paranoid type of capital pilot in all of EVE online. Why would ANYONE think that something the size of a spacestation that requires so many resources just to own, let alone operate, should be powerful at all? [/sarcasm]

*Puts on flame suit*
Let me preface this post with the fact that, on a different character, I fly a Leviathan. I do this for a major alliance who has a lot of titans. I've flown it for a while, and I've seen some pretty hilarious lossmails from fellow pilots. Some of this post may not factor in the full potential of gunnery on a titan given Citadel cruises and torps are uniformly bad against anything smaller than a planet. Not bitter.



This hasn't stopped titans from popping at a fairly regular interval. Titans have literally no defense from a subcap fleet. A single dictor can orbit and bubble it until the end of time (well until it runs out of bubbles anyway, a hictor could perma bubble assuming it was cap stable).

But this is fine. The same rule applies to several other ship engagements, and a Titan is designed to be used in fleets. However, given that goons recently killed a titan with something like 30 people, it's not particularly easy to say "Titans have too much ehp hurf blurf". Bring some neuting ships. It's a magical experience.

In a broader scope, tracking titans are fairly bad at this point. This isn't to say they can't blap battleships, but I will state they are bad at it and a tracking dread will do a better job in every checkbox that matters. So we can basically remove that role from the Titan entirely unless you're just being silly.

Titan DPS against structures is only slightly ahead of sieged dreads with t2 siege modules. Titans don't require siege as a bonus, but realistically with the 5m timer this isn't a massive improvement (not worth the cost difference for sure) given that you can drive by siege a POS fairly easily with a handful of dreads and it's much cheaper and less risky. Especially with Phoenixes which can be fit to be at jump cap as soon as they exit siege. Again the risk is lower with a dread, and you don't put your character in a coffin, so this role is again isn't ideal for the Titan. Supercarriers also excel here with the exception of poses themselves, for obvious reasons. Moreover the need to constantly grind structures is a fairly broken aspect of EVE that only the most fresh faced of newbies can honestly say they enjoy.

What Titans do have are bridges, and DDs. The DD itself is interesting but perhaps broken in ways I won't go into in this post. I do believe that the DD needs to be changed. If you look at the module's history, it's aparrent that CCP never really thought it through that well, and what's left of the module is writhing in agony; a barely breathing corpse abused by one too many knocks to the head with the nerf bat. However for the sake of argument, if you really wanted to poop on a hostile cap fleet, supercarriers have a better jump range and can use fighter bombers, which will do a pretty fantastic job and still sport impressive tanks. They can also launch fighters which are very good against many subcaps. Alpha is obviously lower so you can't insta-pop 3xCCC triage carriers, but that's a fairly broken mechanic to begin with.

Titan bridges are, while useful, not particularly fun or engaging for the pilot. Spare me the "boo hoo" posts as I don't really care. Alliances need bridges so they'll pay for titans and pilots if they can afford them, so people will fly titans. However it seems like if we narrow the scope of the titan to this single role, it's price ludicrous. Jump bridges run around 80m isk. Being able to light and bridge to a cyno is nice but lets at least keep things in perspective.

In summary, Titans are more utility at this point. The primary roles they fill are DDing hostile caps that happen to be inside jump range, and bridging ships. The first role is fairly risky for a 80b+ isk ship and many pilots (Mostly smaller coalitions who can't drum up a 250 man BS fleet at the push of a button) will avoid it. The second role is an exciting game of "push two buttons while sitting in the safety of a pos". This isn't to say you can't use titans for other things, but those other things are best left to Dreads or Supercarriers, which excel in those roles better and are less risky.

I guess to rein this post in, Titans have no direction. I don't really care how titans are changed, but something needs to change to give them a role again, beyond a giant over-priced jump bridge. And if bridging becomes their only role, the pricing needs to reflect that, which is a difficult decision given the number of Titans already in play. Smacking them with the nerf bat isn't the answer; it's a bandage. And maybe those bandages are necessary in the short term, but I hope CCP has some kind of long term plan to make Titans desirable and useful beyond Choose-Your-Own-Adventure jump bridges.

Mass limiting cynos is a terrible idea.

First, there are numerous workarounds. You can simply burn more cynos to your destination, which favors larger alliances who can drum up more cyno alts. Alternatively you can chain cyno by refitting a carrier once the first cyno caps out.

Second, the dynamics of a fight drastically change. It basically creates an environment where the first person to drop supercaps wins, as you'll be able to attack incoming capitals before they can get their whole fleet in system and set up.

And finally, if you rely on movement limitations to restrain capital fleets, then holding a system becomes trivial. Simply drop all your supers in it ahead of time and nobody can touch you.

I could spitball all kinds of titan role ideas, but that's not really my place. I'd much prefer to see CCP propose changes and reach out to other pilots, titan or otherwise, for feedback. However I get the feeling Titans are going to collect dust for a few more expansions.

And yeah I'll just leave this here
Someone call for a ride?

Also, nothing would stop your "anti-blob" titan from being used against small fleets out of boredom, and nothing about it stops it from supporting huge fleets.

Titans were originally meant to only come in ones and twos at the begging but as the game membership grew the resources to build them in mass became available. I don’t think nerffing them is the answer. We don’t want a expensive ship that dose nothing.
One thought to consider is if the titans can be mass produced then it’s probably time to introduce something bigger/better.
Something like tec 2 titans would fit the bill. This may sound crazy but then again having 50 titans on the field doesn’t sound that sane to me ether.
When we look at large fleet warfare no new content has been added besides neffing and buffing in a long, long, time.
This has left us with a 4 combat capable caps in 3 classes.
1 titan
2 mother ships or super carriers and carriers.
3 dreadnaughts
Then we have the battleships. Of all the battleships it seems only the tec 1 tier 3 ships get used much for fleet warfare.
So we really don’t have the ships to make balancing effective at all in large fleet warfare.
The caps will never be balanced without adding ships to make the null sec battle a dynamic engagement
I would propose adding 3 ships as a start in the right direction.
1 A tec 2 battle ship for the fleet. If you have hundreds of tier 3 tec1 bs being used in fleet engagements I think it’s time to give us a ter3 tec2 bs for the fleet.
A ship like this would help consolidate power and offset the caps dominance. For this ship I suggest more hp (about like the navy bs) +30% dps (with skills up to 5) and a 50% reduction to the rate of fire (lots more alpha)
2 A battle ship with smart bomb bonuses to counter the use of carriers.
3 A tier 2 anti-cap dreadnought that protects its self with a fuel powered deflector shield that cap weapons cannot penetrate but smaller, sub cap ships, can fly though. This ship would be vulnerable to small ships like bs, bc, fighters, and fighter bombers that got though its shield, but would be able to attack fleets of titans with impunity. A ship like this would allow titans to have awesome offensive capabilities without being overpowered.

Confirming that with enough money, anyone can pay to win in Eve. Introducing the Titan.

For a more strategic role, the DD could be limited to only work against structures. Require strontium too. And prevent it from moving or warping for at least as long as the Triage module prevents the carrier from moving and warping. Might as well throw in the same anti-RR/anti-help effects typical of Triage and Siege.

The titan’s original abilities were fine at the beginning of the game because of the number of them in the game. The super weapon was not overpowered because in most fleet battles there was only one titan. The problem came when there were 3-10 of them.
Tec 2 titans would not be overpowered because nobody would be able to afford more than one or two for a while.

To be honest, nothing prevents devs to code such useage carefully to avoid this sort of scenario. In any case though grind time will be lowered, but it doesn't look like "speeding up structure grind for those who can afford it" is a good role for a ship.

No matter what you give this ship, it's going to be exploited in some matter, to anti blob thus becomes a blob. Nice logistics, think dragging them through jump portals would be a nice idea, perhaps add another capability? Breaching cyno jammed systems in lieu of the sacrifice of sending them through with the fleet.