Darkstar Warrior
DarkstarRed
2
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Posted - 2012.08.22 11:30:00 -
[1] - Quote
Speaking as someone who sunk over a year and a considerable amount of isk into making a combat booster alt, obviously I don't want to see off-grid boosting completely disappear.
Leadership skills take a decent chunk of time - the charisma attribute they use means you want to do them when you're mapped for them which means you might as well get them all done in one go. It's been suggested that perhaps instead of doing them ALL, everyone could do some. If fleet bonuses worked in a cumulative fashion - which they don't - then yes I could see that many BC/t3/CS running one or two links each, thus not completely gimping the ship for any other purpose (like defensive/offensive capabilities), would be useful and reduce the skills investment required. I haven't seen CCP suggest making boosts cumulative though.
Right now, say you had a loki with sirmish mindlink in FC, tengu with siege mindlink in WC and a bunch of folk with leadership 5 in squad command roles. The loki's skirmish bonuses would apply as would the tengu's siege bonuses and whichever of the two pilots had better skills would apply the bonuses from any armor/information links being run on those ships. This is NOT cumulative. Any seige links the loki was running or skirmish links the tengu had active would be completely superseded by the other pilot's superior bonuses, and thus not counted.
So we're back to a limited number of boosters running multiple links by pilots who've had a considerable amount of time invested in skills, and usually in fairly flimsy ships. Command ships are the least vulnerable because of t2 ship resists but they're slower than t3s and struggle to maintain pace with fleet; t3s give superior bonuses but are far pricier and far more likely to die when caught.
The other issue is one of dual-boxing. Most combat boosters are alts simply because of the time requirement on the skills - would you want to take 9 months out of your combat skillplan to train up t2 ganglinks and leadership skills? Me either. Regardless of the quality of your pc and how many monitors you have available, I would argue that dual-boxing two characters in a combat situation is extremely difficult and likely to lead to mistakes and the loss of one (or both) ships. This is where the 'off-grid' bit gets relevant.
But I do agree that boosters shouldn't be able to make such a valuable contribution in 'perfect' safety. I would fully support a change which meant you couldn't activate links inside a POS shield. And perhaps it's worth applying an effect whereby active links increased your sig radius or nerfed your speed - making you easier to probe down? Another possibility would be some form of visible effect on the ships being boosted so that anyone engaging knows they are not in fact just dealing with a solo rifter but a heavily boosted one. Thus indicating to you that there's a booster in space somewhere you might want to deal with ASAP.
There should be risk involved in providing boosts to combat fleets - but I strongly feel that taking these booster alts on-grid renders them totally unworkable. I for one, would be forced to either field my booster alt or my combat main - not both. Which begs the question of which account it's viable to keep paying for...
[If I've merely repeated what others have already said then I apologise. Wanted to throw my tuppence in but am already overloaded with info today and didn't read the entire thread. No disrespect intended. :) ] |