Shadow's Caress
Abh Empire
Atropos.
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Posted - 2009.09.21 18:01:00 -
[1]
What we have here is a lack of agreement on what is balanced and what the intended role of a titan should be.
Please consider the sheer size, price tag, and historical rarity of titans taking a role in front line fleet combat. They used to be tactical nuclear weapons. I say that because multiple remote or drive-by DDs were used to clean out BS fleets, but would still not kill cap fleets. I've seen battles where even these tactics did not stop a fleet fight, but changed the flow of the fight.
Now they have been retooled to actually participate in capital fleet combat. There are no more tactical nukes, just large death spewing turds. There is a lot of debate over how many dreads a group of titans should or shouldn't be able to kill, but one large factor is being missed here: Supercarriers. If my math is correct (and I did testing + calculation for the better part of the day on saturday), then scarriers do slightly more DPS from their FBs than titans do with their insane capital guns. To put it simply, the supercapitals as general classes are somewhat balanced with respect to each other, and therefore can kill each other without too much difficulty. Scarriers may very well be titan hunters. These dread fleets you're all talking about are likely to be escorted by scarriers, which ought to balance things out a bit. We'll find out this weekend how true that really is.
In a nutshell: supercapitals will be on a level of their own above regular capitals, which will become nearly disposable. The nullsec system upgrades should offset the extra cost of lost capitals somewhat. If anything, what I see here is an attempt by CCP to make capital combat more fluid and less about timing dread fleet drops.
Supercapitals in general will be much more powerful than anything that can dock in a station. Is there a problem? With the coming changes it will be near impossible to build one and once you get into the pilot seat you won't be able to get out without a disturbance in the force occurring.
As a counterpoint, there will be an interesting dynamic where seemingly disposable dreads can form up and hot drop on supercaps. This is the capital equivalent of warping in a large gang of cruiser hulls to kill a well skilled and fitted battleship. You might loose some fully insured ships, but if you do it right (OMG, you have to use tactics!) you can cause more isk damage than you receive.
The only real problem I have with titans and scarriers in dominion is that they will be highly vulnerable during production, which means that the powers which have them now can easily halt all other supercap production. THAT to me is imbalanced.
All in all, I applaud CCP and think we are headed in the right direction. Some tweaks need to be done here and there, but overall I like it.
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