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

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.


No, my illiterate friend, they're x amount of tracking scripted omnis, which do not improve range, just like they do not improve tracking if range scripted.

counter tactics against sentry drones

eh. drones should be more consistently ewar resistant/immune than they are now. that and range flexibility is what they do... at the expense of, I don't know, something. being destroyable and being delayed damage, I guess.

Bomb runs? Forcing Ishtars to warp off and then shoot or scoop them? Frigates? Dedicated ships? Mobile drones from your ships?

CCP Rise used to solo battheships all the time.


https://www.youtube.com/user/jampyzero/videos

Also there used to be videos on club-bear.com but they are gone now. You can find the mirrors online somewhere.

This "Ishtar has bonuses to battleship weapons" line that keeps coming up is interesting. We talked about it some earlier here. There's parts of it that we can agree about but it's also something that makes drones interesting across all drone using/bonused ships. You could use the same argument to say that Dominix's shouldn't get bonuses to light drones or that Vexors shouldn't be able to use lights or heavies or sentries.

On the Ishtar, I would like to see it get -1 Mid and +1 low to encourage armor tanking.

CFC if you cant beat them, nerf them.

Devs I hope you skip over the CFC posting brigade of nerfing. Its sorta personal for them. They cant figure out how to beat them, so they will try to get them nerfed. This isnt a new case, it has happened before with ships.

Its a shame really, they have the biggest collection of players in Nullsec and when they cant out blob something, they run and cry about it to get it nerfed.

Do you mean the same fleet doctrines most of the alliances in the CFC currently use? Just because it is not a CFC doctrine does not mean it is not being used by the CFC. Or is the the standard Grr Goons reply when you cant defend something that is clearly broken and most sides agree on this statement.

we could just remove sentry drones altogether. they're silly and hard to balance.

Perhaps the solution is to increase the size (but not bandwidth) of sentry drones. Sentries taking up 50 m3 of space would severely limit the number of sentries a drone ship may utilize. Suddenly Ishtars are 1 set of Sentries, 1 Set of heavies.

Food for thought, not necessarily a good idea (and may require balancing the drone bay of other drone boats).

Interesting concept. 50m3 would probably be too much. Even 30m3 may be sufficient. That would leave an ishtar with 75m3 after 2 sets of sentries. Otherwise 35m3 sentries would give you 25m3 remaining.

Sentry drones have enormous downsides. They can be killed like other drones AND they don't return to your ship. There's a reason they were never used at all until assist + these tracking/optimal bonuses came along.

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.

CCP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WHAT ABOUT AMARR HAC's ?????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ishtars will just assign their drones to someone with longer target range.

Ishtars will just assign their drones to someone with longer target range.