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EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE Guides, Mechanics & Gameplay => Topic started by: Silas Vitalia on 24 Nov 2011, 10:09
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Curious on you all's thoughts.
New Tier 3 BCs: "Meh"
Strictly for pvp and pirate-gank purposes. A handful of the Minmatar ones setup for alpha strike will be absolutely ruining quite a few high-sec haulers in the coming weeks. Basically if you kit them properly just a handful will be destroying far more valuable ships before CONCORD can show up. I think you only need about 10 to put a freighter down with ease. PVP wise these things are very, very fragile. I dont think they have nearly the buffer for any sort of larger engagements, they will pop before logis can even start repping. For raiding groups and anti cap work though they might be quite good.
Stealth Buff: "yay"
They are removing the proximity decloak between cloaked ships, so a group of cloaked bombers for example will no longer decloak each other if they are huddled too closely. Bombing runs will be much easier and we really need more effective bombers to thin out blobs.
Super Nerf: "meh" Good they can't fit regular drones now, but the larger capital issues are still there.
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Stealth Buff: "yay"
They are removing the proximity decloak between cloaked ships, so a group of cloaked bombers for example will no longer decloak each other if they are huddled too closely. Bombing runs will be much easier and we really need more effective bombers to thin out blobs.
Ooooh I like...
I can't find this in the devblogs. Have you got a link to it?
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http://www.evenews24.com/2011/11/23/jesters-trek-three-quick-ones/
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Honestly I think introducing new ships should be done with far less reservations. After all thats how it is in real life, sometimes something gets released into the market, turns stuff upside down a little.
Game mechanics in the large scale and individual ships, however, are way overdue for overhaul.
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They forgot to nerf projectiles, as usual.
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Tier 3 BC I'm not a fan of, simply because they strengthen the current metagame more rather than shaking it up.
Super Nerf: Not enough to properly redirect the roles of Supers from the I-win button they are. Now it seems they've gone from I-win to expensive paper weights, although removing their vast pvp viability and forcing them into specialist roles should be healthier over all.
Would like to see: a fix to on grid combat probing, so sniper PVP isn't as much of a joke as it is right now.
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Caps still need a -lot- of work. I think as more of the money-printing playerbase starts moving into Titans anyway its going to be just more of the same. The current flavor with these all-tracking titans is just nuts. You die in one shot, and if there is a half-dozen of them they are literally clearing out 70 or 80 ships in minutes.
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Caps still need a -lot- of work. I think as more of the money-printing playerbase starts moving into Titans anyway its going to be just more of the same. The current flavor with these all-tracking titans is just nuts. You die in one shot, and if there is a half-dozen of them they are literally clearing out 70 or 80 ships in minutes.
Pretty much. It's hard to place artificial limitations on super heavy equipment because player tenacity will find a way to abuse the super heavy assets. I believe the developers commented on never expecting to see these many titans in the game.
In the same stroke, the price tag also heavily colors the roles of the ships. Why pay 60 billion ISK for a ship that only does 1 useful thing, and traps the pilot inside it unless you have an alt to sit in it for you? It's not fun and the investment is so significant you want to be the I-win button, pretty much.
Carriers I'm fairly happy with, Dreadnoughts could use some tweaking so they're not obsolete versus Supercarriers. The super heavy stuff needs a thorough examination, IMO.
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They forgot to nerf projectiles, as usual.
No worries, Barrage and Scorch are high on the list :-)
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I dont care for barrage and scorch, they are fine for me.
I want to fix ACs stupid ludicrous pwg/cpu costs to make people actually choose a little more between tank or gank, like on most other ships (thats is part why ruptures and hurricanes are so OP sometimes, you can even fit a 1600mm + 6x 425mm ACs + 1 med neut on a cane, it does not consume cap, and its agile and fast).
I want to fix artillery alpha. Railguns shoud do big alpha, not artillery. You can already choose your damagetype and it does not consume cap at all.
Other than that to remain on topic, what Ghost said.
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Railguns shoud do big alpha, not artillery.
Railguns being scary? Yummy.
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Tier 3 BCs - I've not yet been able to test them en masse, but I'm not sure how they'll match up vs. Hellcat battleships or alpha-Maelstrom fleets; it will, in my opinion, depend largely on the ability of the BCs to keep transversal up without blooming their signatures to much. In the smaller fleets, I expext to see them mostly, if not totally, replacing Arty 'canes and Drakes as the alpha ships of choice.
POCOs - I still have a very bad feeling about these. Amarr Militia did a bit of testing on SiSi, and it takes 2 dreads about 20 minutes to push a POCO into reinforced or kill it. Based on some quick fitting on EVEmon and a bit of guesswork, I'd say that translates to about 4,000 DPS from each dread, or about the equivalent of 9 Abaddons in total. So... 10 battleships, 20 minutes. 20 battleships, 10 minutes. 40 battleships, 5 minutes, etc... in the end, it becomes rapidly apparent that while hit-and-runs will be quite possible for reinforcing POCOs, I expect much NAPfesting to deter the actual destruction of them.
Stealth buff - IIIIInteresting. I'll see where this goes before commenting on it.
Various T2 ammo buffs - on the one hand, yay for fimally making 2/3 of the T2 ammo in the game useful. OTOH, that means that faction ammo may take a bit of a nosedive in price for a while, and that stuff is part of my funding...
Various capital / supercap stuff - I'll break this down below, but I'd first like to note that I remain resoloute in my opinion that what caps need is not a decrease in ability, but a massive (perhaps 10-20x, or even more) increase in production cost, even if it meant leaving their abilities as they are. As has been said above, players will always learn to exploit some ability of such "end-game" vessels, so don't try to limit their abilities - limit their availability.
- Supercarriers - possibly good first step so far; that said, I fully expect to be seeing Pantheon (non-triage, numbers-based) carrier setups supporting Supercarriers now to fill in the gaps in Supercarrier ability.
- Titans - othankgod, no more having your FC, backup FC, backup-backup FC, booster-ships, etc... all instantly taken out at the beginning of a fight. OTOH, DPS-fit titans (what I think of as "PL fit") are still a serious bit of firepower.
- Dreads & Siege - for the most part, I approve. I do wish they had left the drones on the Moros, however - that was what distinguished it from simply being a short-ranged Revelation.
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I'm just happy I won't have to do the "warp @ 10, 20, 30" dance in a stealth ship ever again. vOv
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I'm just happy I won't have to do the "warp @ 10, 20, 30" dance in a stealth ship ever again. vOv
Going to reserve judgement on this one, but previously flying multiple cloaked bombers was the closest in EVE you'd get to formations, and this detracts from it somewhat.
As for the rest of it:
-Capital changes seem generally good. Levels the playing field for subcap fleets and adds a bit of a support requirement for large capital fleets.
-After some poking on SiSi, I can also say the New BCs are horrendous solo, but excel when you mix them in with support. Going to be testing this theory live the second they hit TQ I think.
-The changes to railguns don't seem too significant in practice either, but that might be because I'm simply too used to using blasters.
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Various capital / supercap stuff - I'll break this down below, but I'd first like to note that I remain resoloute in my opinion that what caps need is not a decrease in ability, but a massive (perhaps 10-20x, or even more) increase in production cost, even if it meant leaving their abilities as they are. As has been said above, players will always learn to exploit some ability of such "end-game" vessels, so don't try to limit their abilities - limit their availability.
Moot point for me. First when they introduced titans, they expected to see maybe one or two of them max at the same time considering how "expensive" they were considered to be. Now, is that still the case ? Ok, sure, re up the prices to follow global wealth growth, but eventually you will have to do it again in 2 years. That is hardly a fix.
For supercaps they just need to make them SPECIFIC, meaning that more than one or two of them on the field would be pointless (like a commandship).
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My main gripe about supercaps is the ease of deployment and the difficulty in scouting for them. There was the idea of a "cyno spoolup time" at some point, so you'd have to pop up a cyno and keep the cyno ship alive for a specific time (minutes) for it to be a valid beacon. I really liked that idea.
Carriers are not balanced among themselves at all, by the way. Will be interesting to see if the Nidhoggur boost helps, but I don't think it'll bring it up to par with the Archon. And the Chimera and Thanatos are miles off still.
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Going to be testing this theory live the second they hit TQ I think.
Okay, well... in all fairness, we can test them out on TQ, but, definitely not for like a week. Two things will happen when they go live, based on my limited experience with patches:
1. They'll be worth 800mil ISK for a while.
2. They'll have the new nebulae as their skin until CCP fixes it.
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Dreads & Siege - for the most part, I approve. I do wish they had left the drones on the Moros, however - that was what distinguished it from simply being a short-ranged Revelation.
This jsut has to be bullshit. No offence, but I will not believe this will go through until I read the changed stats in-game. If they do this... well, it will be 10 times less usable than it allready is, being obsolete and all.
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Dreads & Siege - for the most part, I approve. I do wish they had left the drones on the Moros, however - that was what distinguished it from simply being a short-ranged Revelation.
This jsut has to be bullshit. No offence, but I will not believe this will go through until I read the changed stats in-game. If they do this... well, it will be 10 times less usable than it allready is, being obsolete and all.
It's droneless on SiSi, and replacing the drones isn't one the things being cried for the loudest on the forums, so...
Mind you, I hear capital-sized rails aren't as terribad as other-sized rails. Maybe due to the fact that most things you shoot with dread guns don't usually have much transversal, and trans is rails' weakest attribute? v0v
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The Moros has a 25% RoF bonus instead of the drone bonus now. It does more dps than any other dread by a good margin, and it's one of the two dreads that are actually really good at long-range engagements (though not sure how much sniper dreads are used these days; might become more used again now with supercarriers less drastic, who knows).
Seriously, all drones on dreads ever did was a) make the Moros a station hugging pwn mobile until they nerfed the bonus the first time, and b) caused all sorts of rage because the frigging sentry drones managed to move while the ship stood still, meaning you lost them at every siege anyhow if no fleet member collected them for you.
Excellent change.
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Mind you, I hear capital-sized rails aren't as terribad as other-sized rails. Maybe due to the fact that most things you shoot with dread guns don't usually have much transversal, and trans is rails' weakest attribute? v0v
For subcapital classes, why rails are terribad is mostly because of they absence of meaningful strenght like for artillery (alpha) or beams (dps/tracking). The only little added value on rails is their small range bonus, meaning that they usually fire at a little more range than their counterparts (but thats not so meaningful). Besides this : rail tracking roughly equates arty tracking, and rail dps always equates arty dps (while beams have an overall 30% more dps and tracking than both).
For capitals, I havent checked but in terms of DPS everything always tends to be quite homogeneous, with the approximate same dps. Tracking though, might vary a little between weapons considering that their optimals (balanced by falloffs) are not the same.
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The biggest problem for sub-capital rails so far has been that engagement ranges have been cut to 150km with probing being so easy these days. Well, that, and the Apocalypse having a silly bonus that combines beam dps and tracking with rail ranges.
The changes to rails sound like they're addressing exactly what's needed, turning arty into the shortest-range, worst-tracking and worst-dps long-range weapon, which is where it should be with the alpha it has.
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What are the exact rails changes again ? I dont remember something really huge, like 5% damage and tracking more ?
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What are the exact rails changes again ? I dont remember something really huge, like 5% damage and tracking more ?
Less cpu, -12% pg, -30% cap use, +10% damage, 5s reload time.
Comparing a thrown-together Megathron fit with a Tempest fit, this gives the rail fit 5% more dps than artillery at 15% better tracking and better range coverage. Throwing numbers around is a bit iffy, as there is no "sniper fleet" more as in old times - you need a coherent fleet doctrine, not just "BS with long-range guns". I can see a setup similar to Hellcats for Railthrons, but I haven't really run the numbers on those.
Gallente ships face(d) two main problems. One is related to range changes: Over time, a lot of changes made "short-range engagements" work at longer and longer ranges (nerfing of WCS, T2 warp disruptors, overheat), so the blaster range got out of scale more and more. On the long-range engagements, the probing changes mean that "long-range" is now "well below 150km", which is hurting the range advantage of rails a lot. (Not that it mattered much at that point, the Apocalypse was then the best sniper by far because it had best dps, best tracking at max range...)
The other main problem for Gallente ships is still the armor tanking setup which is simply done so much better by the Amarr ships thanks to Amarr high dps at extremely long range with the "short-range" weapons. Scorch (and other long-range T2 ammo) fixes will hopefully address that.