I agree that the new BS's are going to be a little flimsy on tank but I also understand why CCP seem to be reluctant on buffing their EHP.

Ships with larger buffer tanks encourage blobbing which is something CCP and players don't really like.

Still. The new battleships really need their EHP increasing to justify their existance alongside CBC's and ABC's

Large EHP does nto encurage blobbing. The whoel GAMe encourages blobbing. Large cost encourage blobbign because failure has a higher cost.


That is not an issue with EHP, its an issue with the game not havign been designed to handle with too many players on combat. ANy game where all weapons do damage on any ship they hit and the ship has hitpoints and the effect of guns is only hitpoint loss will have this issue.

BCs are too cheap in comparison to BSes. What this thread is a about is that CCP is making them even more cost efficient since BS price increases. As sizeof void said its about what you can afford to lose. Also simply that the insurance payout drops those that don't aggress get less paid back when they get popped.

BSes were already rare to see in low sec. Most I seen now have been smartbomb BSes that catches pods. In every other case everyone use ABC because you can rather easily kite snipe and even if ABC pops. You do not really need to care because you probably already got its price back while you explored. BSes have increased sig they can be scanned more easily, slower to warp, less DPS, less speed, if you do sites and don't snipe fit you are forced to 3-4 res module fit that usually leaves predictable hole in your resistance. So BS is basically flown death trap thank to CCP even more expensive flown death trap. I haven't yet had the possibility to test NBCs but I believe that they can do what T1 BS do maybe not with same EHP but less risk. Even the hull would pay more they will most likely be worth their money unlike these expensive flow death traps.

We can just jack the price on every ship and totally ruin the casual player, and we can all spend hours more a day grinding isk to fund our little ships. That sound better?

Seriously, Everytime prices go up, causal players have to work harder to get in to pvp. New players will have to suffer trying to make isk just to get into pvp.

Ship prices may have gone up, but at the same time, ships you can fly within 1-2 weeks of skilling have been seriously beefed and in part even outperform their T2 counterparts. We're talking about 5 million isk ships outperofrming 120 mill isk ships here.

Anyway - you're missing the entire point:

An Abaddon costs 238 mill in Jita right now, according to the OP, they will all be raised to that level, so thre new Apoc will be ~240 mill isk.
Compare the new Apoc to an Oracle costing way less than a third in base-price. Now add to that the fact the Apoc uses large rigs, the Oracle uses Mediums - so make that more than 400-500% price difference in the basic, rigged hull.

Now look at the new Apocs stats and bonuses and think about what it can do.

Look at the Oracles stats and think about what you could do with that.

Which ship would you pick - either for a fleet or 1on1 situation?

And the ship noone would pick for obvious reasons takes a month longer to train and costs 5 times more??

Yeah - right - makes sense...


It's not about overall ship cost, but whilst cost is a bad overall balancing factor, performance should reflect the cost at least somewhat.

Regarding the tier 3 BCs I fail to see the the reason behind the whole concept for "Attack Battleships".
With less firepower than the ABCs, less tank than the Combat Battleships and significantly slower speed than ABCs, Attack Battleships seem to be a blend of those both ships with no clearly defined role of their own that will inevitably perform worse at any task than their more specialized cousins.

cruisers
combat battle cruisers
attack battle cruisers
Tech III cruisers

My only take away here is that CCP intends/wants everyone to fly cruisers and that the cruiser class is a "catch all" for all their crazy ideas. But why?

It is the odd idea of new folks being competitive. It is the odd idea that power shouldn't increase in a linear fashion with cost.

It is the odd idea of new folks being competitive. It is the odd idea that power shouldn't increase in a linear fashion with cost.

no time to post, must mine!

"according to the OP, they will all be raised to that level, so thre new Apoc will be ~240 mill isk. "

No where in the original post does it say that. No where. The new Apoc will be around 170-175 with mineral prices set to decrease and a pre-patch apocs not evaporating.

OP stated that all BS prices will be equal to the prices of the current tier 3s. So I'm thinking that 220 mil domi better bring twice the dps of it's current version... oh it won't , does it have twice the tank? ... no ? Does it move twice as fast? NO? What do you mean it's dps is actually lower. I thought the price went up? Can we buy the BPO of the current domi at the current price and keep making it? It's obviously the better ship, price wise, dps wise , utility wise, everything wise... G-+ddamnit I hate totalitarian regimes , and this "open box" game just took away yet another choice from me. Fu-ük you!

I like this change, makes sense to me considering the balancing efforts. My only suggestion would be to increase the base Hit Points of all the battleshipsGǪ.

Considering the Battleships are the bridge between cap ships and sub cap ships, they really need an increase in tank.

Like at least double of what they are now.

In reality, a Battleship ship should have an amazing tank with really powerful damage.

My initial suggestion was to increase the ehp of the battleships - that way, they'd be worth the extra cost, but they would also have a very clear niche relative to their counterparts, they'd be the "brick wall" of the battlefield. Now, they're just oversized, overpriced battlecruisers.

Battleships should be offering a very different experience, one where when a cruiser shoots you, you get to shrug and laugh at them for not bringing an entire fleet of friends, and one where when you push 'F1' something really noticeable happens to someone (unless they're another battleship, in which case you settle in for a long slugging match). As it is, BS damage projection feels poor, and their tanks seem to get torn up by fast agile ships too easily, IMO.

The solution is ... increase the survival factor of the BS through an increase of HP. Standard BSes should feel heavy and ponderous, it must be able to tank much, much more than than their BC counterparts while significantly projecting BS damage (tier 3 does a wonderful job at this already and it's dead cheap). It's a battleship but it sure doesn't feel like one at the moment in comparison to the Tier 3 BC. In its current form, it's a crying shame that BSes are now relegated to PVE and sniper fleet ships than they were back in their glory days, where they were used to be King of the sub capitals.

A battleship should be a serious step up, a ship you should cry about losing. It used to be so that people mined for weeks and months with Miner I's and cruisers to be able to get a battleship. I'm glad if this change is a small little step back to that past.

If you want to remove the blobs, drop alot of the isk flow in game, you have to start taking shots at the tech moons.

What is going to happen when Freighters for example become the next ships to be rebalanced. I expect we will get some mid range capacity Freighters introduced to bridge the gap between [T1 industrials] & [freighters] which will be nice.

If enough of them do move to low sec we could very well see the cost of the BSs be 20-40M isk less than the 150-240M it looks like it will be

"according to the OP, they will all be raised to that level, so thre new Apoc will be ~240 mill isk. "

No where in the original post does it say that. No where. The new Apoc will be around 170-175 with mineral prices set to decrease and a pre-patch apocs not evaporating.

It's too late now anyway, but if CCP wanted to assign special roles to different battleship tiers, I'd rather seen something like this:

1. Welpship: (Geddon, Pest, Raven, Mega), comparably poor performance, generous PG and CPU to make them very newby friendly, also extremely cheap to be the most cost-efficient of all battleships.

2. Fleet ship: (Mael, Baddon, Hype, Rokh) . Bonus to racial tanking, bonus to primary racial weapon system and enough PG and CPU to fit a full rack of your largest racial long range guns.

3. Gang ship: (Apoc, Phoon, Scorpion, Domi): Bonus to primary and secondary racial weapon system, generous med slot layout and utility high for highly flexible roles and combat utility. Rather limited PG and CPU to make those more suited to older players with good skills.

ok, so in a summarized form, what CCP thinks is that by increasing the price of battleship production, the prices will go down? you are forgetting that any and all markets are run at the core of supply and demand, if you want the prices to drop, you supply more then the demand, and if you want the prices to rise, you reduce the supply so as to rise the demand for the product, what you are suggesting here is to decrease the supply while maintaining the demand, as the production will have to collect more minerals to produce the same ships the prices of all ships will go up, with the mineral changes coming up, the prices might drop on their own, and battleship prices will drop. with these changes you are suggesting, the battleship prices will either rise even more, or stay at the same level.

back on the supply and demand part: ship prices will always be run by how wanted the ship is, Eg. if a major group picks the Rokh as their primary fleet doctrine, then the people supplying the ships can increase the prices of them as they see profit there, because the ship is wanted.

TLDR: this idea will not work, and has possibility of backfire.

I've never known an ingame change that has done anything other than raise mineral costs, I cannot see any reason as to why they will come down. The inflation is here to stay.

Battleships are NOT for new players. THe good think on the price in crease is that less NOT READY players will board them to just loose them very fast, and rage quit the game.


I am bafled how many players think they are ok to be flying a battleship with less than 8 M SP.