Let's futher talk about the Resistance gaps in Command ships.

The resistance bonus system to command ships really doesn't make much sense
Let me explain this clearly before people chime in:

A ship with a 50% natural resistance taking 100 damage will receive 50 damage

A ship with 50% natural resistance taking 100 damage with a 20% resistance bonus will have 55% resistance, and therefore take 45 damage.

The only time a resist bonus actually matters the way the Devs run numbers is when you start at 0% resist across the board. This hardly ever happens as a matter of base statistics on all ships.

Furthering the problem is Tech 2 resistances. A Tech 2 ship with a 20% resist bonus does not actually receive 20% less damage than a comparable tech 1 ship. Instead, it receives 20% less damage than a comparable ship with the same base resistances. 2 totally different mechanics at play.

How is this bad for Tech 2 balance. Well lets further examine the claymore / nighthawk conundrum I posted about earlier.

Claymore without any bonuses has 220 total resist for an average of 55
Nighthawk with bonuses has a 240 total resist for an average of 60% damage reduction

This is fine, skirmish armor fleets are a little bit of an oddity. We should keep agility and nano-based fighting with shield tanking, while giving ewar and resilience to armor fleets.
Ever thought of how powerful armor scorpions will be under the boosts of a new damnation running info and armor?

I have a feeling that they will be staying towards the rear of the engagement, preferably out of range of the sentries in use... and likely need to play the warp off and repair on the way back game. Which means we'll be seeing the newly buffed medium rails used a lot more commonly on these ships.

Keep in mind that even when they get forced on grid (hasn't happened just yet) they will just need to be on grid when used for fleet boosts, and a grid is a big place.

Because the damnation's dps sucks in relation to the others (~500). Even the sacrilege gets more dps. I don't expect to see it fielded en masse unless it's an attrition fleet. just my view.

why does the eos only have 16 slots while all others have 17?

Of course they do, but then they are going to get popped regardless of what they are flying... rendering the whole argument moot.

Numbers don't lie, you just don't understand math at all.

A ship with 50% natural resistance taking 100 damage with a 20% resistance bonus will have 55% resistance, and therefore take 45 damage.

Damnation is still the only CS viable on field in large battles.

What (re)balance are you talking about?

So, as far as not being able to boost inside of a POS shield, will this also apply to Rorquals and Orcas who's job is to sit there all day and never leave shields? If they can't boost from the shields, won't that just further break mining?

Awesome!



Wait, what ?!

Eos -> myrm
Absolution -> harbinger
Sleip -> hurricane
Nighthawk -> drake

Im really looking forward to the Black (nighthawk) drake and the blue (myrmidon) Eos. I personaly liked Amarr T2 more when it was gold with red highlights, not red with gold highlights so whatever on the harbinger. and we already have a camo fleet cain so meh on the slep

you mean the stretched chicken absolution, squeezed chicken nightawk, fat chicken onyx, stuffed chicken basilisk, and the squashed chicken rook?

Role Bonus: Immune to Electronic Sensor Effects (E-war, Sensor Dampening, remote sensor boosting), Can fit up to three Warfare Link modules
,,,
This would be a great ship for the FC to fly allowing him to keep tabs on his fleet from one end of the grid to the other without worrying about disruption; also with 2 resist bonuses and 8 tank slots this thing is going to be around for a while. The trade off being that this ship is about the speed and agility of a battleship.

Actually, the only way for a FC to survive a blob now is a capital ship. Giving more and more hp to comand ship for the sake of them surviving a blob focused fire can only lead to absurd things or this capital comand ship solution.

I don't understand why the extremely specialized (T2 Command Ships) get worse bonuses in the area they were created for (Gang links) than the supposedly generalized T3 Cruisers?

Another question if I may... why are there so many T2 ships which have the first skill bonuses that affect ship stats? I mean you need those skills to level 5 to be able to fly the bloody thing, so what is the point of adding say.. "4% bonus to all Armor Resistances" per Amarr Battlecruiser skill? Just incorporate it into the ship stats and give it another bonus, or swap it with a command ships skills bonus? There's dozens of ships with these kind of bonuses and it's annoying as hell. Basically it's a wasted bonus "slot".

The only time it would make sense is if you got podded without upgrading your clone and lost that specific skill, and then wonder if you should retrain Amarr BC5 for those extra bonuses.

I considered dropping the armor hp bonus from the Damnation, but in the end I think it's ok for it to have a strong identity, even if that identity makes it more popular than the others for large fleet warfare.

I recognize that a lot of people are unhappy with the existence of active repair bonuses on half of these ships, but I think that giving all command ships buffer bonuses isn't the right way to go. I believe that the four skirmish bonus command ships will all be viable for people who choose not to use the repair bonuses after this patch.

Well ferox gets 1 optimal bonus the other is sh resists.

But yes surely CS should be geared towards brawling .. thus range bonuses aren't particularly useful more tank and gank is what CS need

These ships should be flagships in a fleet ... rare, expensive but much superior to the rest of the ships in the fleet

plz not

in his thread he told us he will only change it when theres enough backup in the comunity and imho there wasnt.
so i hope this was just a troll...

plz let it be a troll

I can understand his motives. If he gives every CS the tank of damnation he will have to kill its gank. ANd people will complain again that they do no damage and are thus not good for anything.

He can't give them bot tank and gank because they would be way to overpowered. Imagine a CS doing 1200 dps (like astarta can) while having ovek 250k ehp (damnation). I call that bad balancing.

So if his goal is to give all of those ships good enough dps he needs to reduce the tank.

Fozzie can't make all the command ships a brick like the Damnation. It would 1) destroy the damnation and 2) ... umm.. ok I don't have a 2.

He wants the ships to have roles. The main command ships have 4 roles, Two Large Fleet Doctrine Ships (one armor, one sheild), one small fleet doctrine ship (one armor, one shield).

I get it... I would love to have the EOS be a Brick. Anyway.

That's a bit tricky. Which one should do which? Lets take astarte and eos (as those are ships I know best).

It seems astarte is better for small fleets while eos for larger. SO in the end there will again be no option for eos to do any significant damage. So skirmish commander who wants to use drones now has no ship to fly.

Problem is that "identity" pigeon holes it into the blob with practically no function outside: ****-poor dps with links that can be just as easily be carried by the Absolution which can actually help kill a cruiser if the need arises .. don't expect it to go much higher than that, 10 turrets with no drones to speak of and zero fight control.

PS: How do you know that it is the only functional blob link platform when they have generally never seen action so far .. anyone can sit in a POS or at a safe. Even CCP has no clue where the chips may land when/if they get through the Gordian knot they have their resident hacker chewing on.

Help the EOS for goodness sake!!!! What kind of bonuses are those anyway?

I'd rather see the eos with the current bonus layout and give it the slot you unjustly robbed of it, you take a slot away but give double 10% damage bonuses to other cs's

Believe it or not, but this balance pass goes a bit beyond simply "improving" ships, it's intent is "balance".

I have a couple of issues with this. First, tech II rigs were used, which are far too expensive to run on run-of-the-mill ships. If you're faction/deadspace fitting it, that's one thing, but tech II rigs add too much to the cost for standard use ships.

... for no good reason at all.

There used to be a point to this, many years ago when you were able to field more than 5 drones at once.

The size of drone bay (beyond 125m) was a factor in determining drone damage output. These days this is not the case. The extra drone bay size no longer means extra damage, just spare drones. Therefore in my view the dedicated drone ships need not suffer the loss of a high slot.

Drone battlecruisers have always lagged behind in the dps stakes, which makes them undesirable. This is not the case with the new cruisers. The the cruiser drone ships compete well on DPS with the turret versions.

Currently the EOS has been used even less than the astarte in pvp (read: only a fool would do so). It needs to be competitive, otherwise why waste the effort designing it? No-one will ever build one, let alone use it in combat.

Except it doesn't, not quite, this current eos is not as good as the old

Just got on Sisi to test the Eos.

Fozzie, could you explain the point of the hybrid tracking bonus when your ship only has four turrets? Also, even with a speed bonus, the heavies are still hilariously slow, and rather easy to kill.

Combined with the limited dronebay (unless your enemies are new to this game, you're going to lose a lot of heavies, fast), I don't really understand the point of making the Eos a weaker brawler when compared to the Astarte. Rather, shouldn't it be give a different role?

Or something more interesting, like perhaps the ability to field more drones per level, as someone else mentioned in this thread.

Perhaps give a double bonus, replacing the hybrid tracking with another 7.5% to Heavy Drone speed and perhaps RoF?

Haven't seen a bonus for drone RoF, so it'd be something new at least :p

Hello Fozzie,


Please force your graphics-slaves into making:

Harbinger as Damnation base hull
Myrmidon as Eos base hull

I don't care about the others.

A single rep c-type LAR domi with EANM, DC and RAH will tank all sanctums while doing something like 900dps, and this was before the armour repair buff. I can't imagine why I would embarrass the crew of a T2 ship with this kind of work...

The EOS would tank gurista sanctums with one arm tied behind it's back, while singing Bohemian Rhapsody and performing a pole dance.

If I saw it there though, I'd feel compelled to put it out of its misery...

Take a look around and tell me if you see ships other than the Command Ships that can field links while having considerably more EHP than even the 4x1600 Damnation .. get back to me when you see it (hint: they are bigger)

For massive blobs (offensive ones at least) CC's or even T3's will not be the optimal choice due to the risk of being 'head shotted' as you mention, but there are other options hitherto unexplored due to off-grid functionality.

Off/On/Tangential-to topic: Why not add a CC level link bonus to the activation of the Triage module (think Rorqual deploy bonus)?

stuffs

It's actually been part of the original tiericide design from the start of this balance pass that T2 ships should have tighter fittings than T1, since they are built for players with higher SP. We've diluted that quite a bit by giving a HACs and Command Ships tons of fittings (probably too much but we can always go back and adjust later as needed) but I beleive the original intent has a valid basis. One of the things we look at when we design a ship is how "forgiving" it is, in piloting skill required, cost of losing it, difficulty fitting. T2 can be a bit less forgiving as long as the rewards are there for people who overcome the slight challenge of dropping a mod to Meta 3 or 4 once and awhile.

from the points of view of resisting alpha and giving boost, they're the most powerful players, no?

sure it's a lot of cash to risk, but do you want to win or not? what was the cost to TEST for example, of losing Fountain? sometimes you just have to go all in.

I think it's easy to miss some of the advantages of the EOS because on paper the Astarte looks better, however...

The astarte can project damage for 5km. It could fit railguns but it has no tracking bonus to them so on balance I expect that it will be used as a boosting brawler (and by some, just a heavy brawler although I think there are better options).

The EOS can project damage theoretically out to 60km (or more with a DLA). Now I know drones take time to travel, and I know that in a 1v1 they get shot. But in (say) a 5v5 there's no time to be shooting drones. You're too busy calling primaries or saving your skin. Now the EOS also has the "useless" tracking bonus, but that's not so useless if it's being applied to the new more powerful railguns, particularly when backed up with heavy drones (I know, they'll take 20 seconds to get to target, but fights are often much longer than that). Not to mention the massive utility of EC-900 drones. Those guys play hell with ships' target locking. Even with recent changes to sensor strengths. They effectively remove one opposing ship from the fight until you are ready to take hime down.

I like the idea of a speed or agility bonus on the Eos. I think a few people have mentioned it. It is skirmishing ship after all, or at least that's what the gang link bonuses suggest.

The Sleipnir has always been to me more of a machine that terrifies solo players, or even very small gangs.
Yeah, it has more tank now, with the resist boosts, and the shield booster buff (but a lot of ship fits are getting a repper/booster buff with the new repper/booster stats), but the ship is taking a big hit in DPS (10.00 effective guns vs 11.6667), and losing that 8th slot really hurts it's utility at the same time.

Oh well, that's fine then. We've found a role for the EOS!

It's a 200m isk rat-catcher :)

So what not only are they going to be ongrid they are going to have to run by squad? With a 250m mindlink in my head.

Not ******* likely.

No.... those were estimates of the cost of said links based on their extensive internal economic data.

They know how much people charge per LP point for most items, what the demand for links is, and how much they are going to cost in the store.

This price will likely go up or down with demand and the economy in general over time, this is simply their estimate of the starting price based on current factors.