To balance the ishtar I would greatly reduce the target range by 1/3 or to 52.8km. That way if you want to take advantage of the senty range you have to use sensor boosters.

"Lets nerf a ship that uses a broken weapon system for PVP instead of fixing the broken weapon system" - CCP

To deal with sentries? Rohk comes to mind, as does any maurader-- large rails will do the job easily, as will beams and cruise...artillery will be in falloff and fire a bit slow for the purpose. Get outside that drone control range--- which is only 100 or less for 99.9999% of all drone boats and you are shooting a stationary cruiser. I don't care how bad you think laser tracking is, they can hit a stationary cruiser which is what a sentry looks like for targeting, and if you can't, it's not like target painters don't exist or are hard to use.

Expensive? perhaps, but it can be done cheaper by the attack battlecruisers. They can counter by picking up their sentries and chasing you, but then they are doing exactly 0 DPS. Stop letting them fight how they want, and this problem will go away.

Tempest is fine as it is now with its versatility in choice of either shield or armor fitting. If you're going to take a slot and put it into the lows, take it from high instead of mid.

As many people have stated, the problem with ishtars is their ability to use sentries and be insanely mobile as well. Outside of using bombs in null, low sec fights have no "good" way of taking away their dps unless you want to sacrifice a smarty battleship to the pvp Gods each time.

On a side note, you guys at CCP need to not just "tweak the current" but also keep adding new things. The last thing you actually added to the game was a single t2 mining frigate and nothing else (I'm not counting the mordus ships because I don't consider them "line ships"). It's just a circling of encouraging/forcing people to train skills they didn't have to train before or further eyecandy.

Where is the t2 smartbombing ship? Where is the mobile cyno jamming ship? Where is the sub-cap mini-triage ship? I'm not saying these ideas are good or anything but goddamn; these latest patches are seriously lacking in actual new content.

"maybe I didnt explain myself, sorry - not native english.
when a drone ship drop connection to its drones, those will stop and become immobile targets - easily blapped by anybody, the only defence a small or even medium drone has is when its orbiting its target.
so if ewar do the same it basically means singleshotting all the droneship weapons."

So be it. I'm ok with that. I should have to fit my ship to prevent losing connection with my drones.

When I am flying my Apoc in missions, and I get tracking disrupted, damped or ecm'd, it affects my ship's effectiveness. I dont complain about it. I fit my ship to compensate the best I can. However, if I use a Domi, Ishtar or Armageddon, ewar does not affect the effectiveness of my drones/sentries. They keep shooting and tearing through targets, even though I cant target the rats or my guns cant track. So why is it ok for ewar to affect my ship but it doesn't affect my drones? To me, making ewar hitting my ship affect my drones is common sense, but then why call it common sense when its not so common?

this proposed ewar would make it too easy.
compromise:
when the droneship get hit by ewar drones stop shooting.
they still orbit their last target, if that target get destroyed they move to their next target as per standard drone rules but wont do any damage.
their owner can recall them (orbit or dronebay), nothing else till ewar get broken.

This change does not address the underlying problem with the Ishtar. Namely, sentry drones are broken.

They are a battleship size weapons platform.

Make it so only battleships can use them. Not cruisers, not carriers, JUST battleships. Make them require a role bonus.



Yeah, you should counter kite the guys with a 90km range weapon system and a 2.5km/s or higher speed.

There is a reason the "counters" you are talking about do not see widespread use.

It's because they're bad. The Arazu is lucky if it can stand up under a few moments firepower from an Ishtar. The Lachesis is a joke, in fact all of the Recon ships need about a ten thousand native hitpoint buff. But look, they have not been rebalanced yet.

Sentry drones have no real counters besides bombing, which is problematic against Ishtars for reasons that should be obvious. Nevermind carriers, who are immune to even that since their drone bays are so ridiculous.

He can wreck the rest of your fleet but you totally have a "win" because your long range pair killed a bunch of drones...

As Querns noted, catching you before you edited, it runs a single damage mod. The Zealot I compared to has two, the Tengu three. The point is to compare standard fleet fits to the range of Ishtar DPS numbers and illustrate that the Ishtar's range is "about 15% lower" to "nearly 50% higher" than other fleet cruisers, with some common fleet BS included just because.

using the argument that sentries can be killed as a downside is kind of lame when your talking about a ship that can hold 3 sets of them. if your going to put forth the effort to kill that many drones you have probably already lost the fight. each garde2 has over 6000 raw hp with max skills so that's 30,000 hp per set. assuming an ehp value of 45,000 for the ishtar that adds up to 135,000 hp you have to kill, assuming you kill every drone and the ship... all while doing a meager 1800 m/s. sure your drones die eventually but they are essentially tripling your ehp to do so.

the fact that sentries cant move can also be seen as an advantage, if your kiting away from your enemy your essentially laying a big fat land mine in your wake whenever you deploy them. what downside is there to this? should my fleet stop and kill the drones before continuing?

the problem with the ishtar is that its simply the total package. it has everything you can possibly want in a ship.

the way to bring it in line with other ships is to start taking away its features one at a time, the problem is, where to start?

i think even if the optimal+tracking bonus was removed completely it would still be op, sentries have great range even before that bonus, and not every ship that uses large weapon systems needs a tracking bonus to be effective either.

ive spent way too much time writing this post and i don't know what else to do about this ship. ccp dosen't have it easy when it comes to ship balance, that's for sure.

Pretty much. At a bare minimum battleships need to see a 1.5-2x increase in hit points and scanning resolution so that they're not completely useless without an accompanying fleet.

That would only grant them higher alpha...

I am not defendign him.. I am just translating him. Also missiosn do not need much developer time, just game designer time. So to expect some 4 missiosn per semester would be acceptable demand...

We are still leaning towards more gradual changes for this particular pass.

I guess you'd be happy if my stabber can fit a full rack of 1400mm then also?

Just pay attention on how far a geddon can project damage without usign ANY of his high slots!!!!

its been about a week since he posted here .. like whats going on man..

Game theory as taught by who, acti-blizzard? Get out, you know nothing.