I'm going to throw this here since I have a feeling a lot of questions coming up will be along this line:

Why nerf things when you could buff things instead?

This is a question that comes up often in any thread where we are discussing decreasing the power of an item or ship. I can completely understand where it's coming from. Buffing things makes people happy in much larger numbers, it simply feels good to see the effectiveness of your equipment increase. Many other games rely on constantly improving gear to drive engagement in their content and that method of development can work very well for those games.

I'm going to start by quoting my answer to this question from the Heavy Missile thread before Retribution, because what I said there still applies.

I would be lying if I said that we never allow power creep in EVE. It's quite simply much much easier to balance upwards and considering how powerful of a tool it is for creating short term customer satisfaction, some power creep is very hard to avoid. However we do need to be very mindful of how much we let ourselves indulge. There are cases where for the long term health of the game ecosystem we simply have to reduce the power of certain items and ships. We believe this is one of those times. I can promise you that we're committed to eating our vegetables and making adjustments either up or down based on our best estimation of what the game needs. We won't decrease the power of items and ships unless we deem it necessary but we also won't forget that our job is to manage the health of the game over the long term.

Active repping has its space, but with these changes the "space" of ships with active repping bonuses (like the Myrm) won't be invaded by actively repped, resistance bonused ships (like the Prophecy). So +1.

If everybody is worried about the loss of EHP, then just buff the baseline tanking stats of the affected ships.

I've never stopped reading this thread, I have it open every day to keep an eye on new posts. I am very interested in what people have to say, but that's not the same thing as designing by straw poll.

I'm also primarily looking at arguments made, not frequency of posting. So volume doesn't get you some kind of advantage Buhhdust. The honest truth is that if we had seen a convincing argument for why this change is a bad idea we would have been open to adjustments as always, but at the end of the day we need to make the best decisions we can for EVE's balance and sometimes that means disagreeing with a subset of passionate players.

Also this idea originated with me, so if you want to give someone death threats I'm your huckleberry.

So you are saying that my 1500m/s, 855 DPS, 64k EHP post Odyssey Ferox is bad?

Notsureifseriousorbad.jpd

We don't stop working on a ship after we've balanced it once. We'll keep making changes as needed to any and every ship.