Hi guys

You may or may not have seen me make a post a while back saying that we were intending to do a revisit on battleship and heavy assault cruiser balance for this summer, and I can now be a little more specific with you about that!

After digging into this we were both happy and a bit surprised to find that there weren't a lot of clear changes needed. Battleships especially seem to be in a pretty solid place. There are ships within the class getting less use than others, but that is almost completely due to either the meta favoring certain things (this is why the Abaddon isn't seeing a lot of action for example) or due to the ship falling into a niche that isn't extremely popular even though the ship performs exceptionally in that niche (the Hyperion is a great example of this). So the result is that for now we are going to leave BS alone and keep checking back for opportunities to make improvements.

HACs on the other hand are a slightly different story. In general the class gained a lot of power in the last pass and it's seeing plenty of use across the board, but there are some pretty clear imbalances between certain ships in the class. If you've undocked lately you probably know the Ishtar especially is a little out of control. Here's the small set of changes we're going to make:

Ishtar:
Bonus to drone tracking and optimal range from 7.5% per level -> 5% per level
Max Velocity from 195 -> 185

Eagle:
Max Velocity from 180 -> 190

Muninn:
Max velocity from 210 -> 230

We expect that some of you will feel this is far too gentle on the Ishtar, and we understand that (it's what we heard from the CSM as well), but we get releases very often now and we're happy to be conservative here, rather than nuke it out of the game, and just make more changes if they're needed in the following release.

Looking forward to your feedback as always

PS - how would you feel about an 8/4/7 Tempest?

Note for clarity: Hyperion release date is August 26