Lazei
Magellanic Itg
Goonswarm Federation
4
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Posted - 2013.10.28 17:04:00 -
[1] - Quote
CCP Fozzie wrote:Like I said, I'm not currently convinced that the warp speeds possible in the current Rubicon design are detrimental to the game overall. I will however be watching them very carefully so if you disagree please take advantage of the power of these ships as much as you can and enjoy the benefits while demonstrating to us why we should change it.
How are you not seeing how big of a difference the warp speed changes will make in null sec warfare? You are killing at least half a dozen fleet comps with this change while making a lot more even more unviable than they were. Its not like nullsec alliances have many choices anymore... A couple of armor battleships, tech 3s and maybe Zealots/Eagles and thats it.
Clearly I'm missing something so maybe you can explain why I'm wrong. Don't you see any problems with Interdictors warping so fast that they can bubble fleets before they even start aligning out after they have landed on grid followed by squads of bombers? A competent prober will catch cruisers and bigger quite easily especially in high TiDi where you have more time to look at dscan and start running your probes when a hostile fleet is seen at the right distance. If the prober's timing is good enough he can start warping a dictor instantly when the hostile fleet lands, dictor bubbles them and the prober's friends of 4 squads of bombers unload bombs on them. This will happen every time a fleet lands on grid as long as the bomber fleet has dictors to spare.
So what are fleet supposed to do to counter this? Warp in a big big line a few at the time giving the hostiles who set up on grid a huge advantage? Even if the line is 100km long and your spreading is perfect you will still lose 30% of your fleet to a bombing run. Warp in several suicide dictors to get your warp in spot covered in bubbles? That might work but sacrificing 5+ dictors every time you want to warp to a grid seems a bit too much. Warp to hostiles at 0 and hope that their bombers don't want to bomb their friendlies? If you do this you just have to hope the 3rd party bombers kill both of your fleets. Have some large smartbombs to kill incoming bombs or maybe bubbles? Might work if your smartbomb dudes get lucky and are on the correct sides of the fleet warp ball and if the game doesn't lag out and they don't miss their 1-2 second time window. BC fleets are still dead though and the dictor can be warped to 10km too which is nicely out of range.
Now someone is thinking that the first bomb will kill the bubble allowing the fleet to warp away. That might work well for some faster aligning fleets but in reality you will still get hit by multiple bombs, have to spend time repping in a safe, warp in again and get bombed again. Also the bomber fleet might have a Heavy Interdictor that gets warped after the Light Interdictor but before his bubble goes up. HIC would land inside the bubble and put his own bubble up forcing the fleet that is about to get bombed to stay on grid long enough for the bombs to explode.
Please note that all the examples are from a subcap sov blob side of things. Your 40 man rail Naga fleet will be fine but when you have 500-2000 player fights everyone is bringing bombers and you end up in a situation like 1-SMEB where Test Rokhs died by the hundreds against 4 different bomber fleets..
Some of you are probably laughing at null sec alliance's F1 monkeys that are nothing compared to the elite pvp small gang dudes who hate the blob. But what are the alliances supposed to do? The game mechanics don't allow any fancy strategies at such large scale and the game is just too slow with its 1 second ticks to handle these kinds of speeds. The only option is to either go for it in a ****** cheap t1 cruiser fleet and hope you don't get bombed or go with more expensive tech 3 fleets that are able to survive. Both choices aren't really fun as the first is like saying we have already lost the fight and the second causes less fights because people are more afraid to use more expensive (isk and skillpoint wise) fleets. Its fun for the bombers of course.
After these changes the only thing that matters in nullsec sov fights is your ability to stay on grid, bomb survivability and how long beforehand you form a fleet so you can setup on the timer's grid before it gets too dangerous.
Fleets this change will kill:
- All tier 3 sniping BCs. You will get probed and bubbled before you even finish warping and bombed a few seconds afterwards
- All other BC fleets, just don't have the EHP or speed to survive or dodge bombs
- All remaining shield BS fleets (not that there were many left because of constant shield nerfs/armor buffs). Its amazing that shield BS fleets are becoming even bigger joke. I didn't think that would be possible
- Some high sig or low tank armor BS fleets (anything that can't be double plated pretty much)
- Some HAC fleets like Muninns
I want to make something very clear here. Bomber's warp speed has nothing to do with all of this. They could warp slower than a battleship and the results would be the same. This is all about Interdictors being able to force fleets to stay on grid, especially at the moment they land and have no defensive bubbles up. And even with defensive bubbles its not certain that you wont die. In the Fountain war CFC bombed many completely bubble surrounded Dominix fleets. Sure CFC lost a couple of dozen bombers in each run from the 100 or whatever there were in fleet but killing 100-200 hostiles was worth it.
Its a lot of words to say bombers, with good support, are imbalanced. But these warp speeds changes will make them even more unstoppable killing machines especially considering their cheap cost and extreme mobility with Blackops bridges.
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