James Zimmer
Furtherance.
30
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Posted - 2015.06.23 15:32:36 -
[1] - Quote
How does this increase participation for the average player? FCs will still be able to fleet warp their fleets to members so if I'm an F1 damage dealer, I'm still pretty mindless. What it does change is the balance of a lot of tactics, particularly for mixed-corp fleets. Here are some of the most concerning issues
1. Slippery Petes are going to get stupid powerful. In a SP fleet, I just warp 1 ship ahead to a bookmark or send an interceptor forward and then warp my fleet on top of them. My tactics barely change, but now I force my opponent to commit a ship with billions in implants to maybe catch the 1 Tengu it can scram. If you can't bum-rush the Tengu blob with a ton of super-fast frigs, you're pretty much screwed.
2. Pipebombs are going to get painful. First off, hats off to Rooks and Kings for inventing such an ingenious tactic. Second, hats off to the FCs who painstakingly went and bookmarked perches all over the place to avoid them. Going from gate, to perch, to gate already slowed down fleets. This is just adding another step to safe fleet movement. This will be somewhat preventable in a corp (though it will make corp spies even more deadly), but mixed-corp fleets are going to get hit pretty hard by every form of bubble-related mechanic if they try to move at any speed other than slow. That's not too big of a deal for small gangs that are roaming just to roam, but bigger gangs with objectives are going to be penalized.
3. Hotdrops are going to get relatively much more powerful. They'll be faster than warping your fleet to an enemy fleet, so if you don't have to, why do it. I already think hotdrops are a kind of gimicy tactic, and I don't support making them any stronger.
This barely does anything to weaken bombers, since they manuever cloaked and don't have nearly the need of other ships for their fleet to arrive immediately, and it only makes F1 damage dealers slightly more involved, in a very finite number of situations. The biggest issue, however, is that this seemingly came out of nowhere. If you look at the "Features and Ideas Discussion" we're talking about all sorts of things.
Here's an example of some of the recent topics I've noticed have recieved a lot of attention:
- More engaging mining
- Changes to logistics
- T3 balance
- Changes to warp prevention (shameless plug for my own thread)
- Battlecruiser buffs
- Cynos
- Bomb mechanics
I understand that there are big concept changes to the game that players really can't invent, such as the recent sov changes and proposed new structures (which both generally seem really good, and if CCP keeps up the community involvement, will probably be fairly polished right off the bat), but little stuff like fleet warps? Listen to the community. There are a lot of ways to make non-FCs more involved, and due to the massive changes to sov, CCP is already doing it. Fleet sizes will get smaller, and small fleets already put a higher premium on individual involvement. There are other things to address that haven't been addressed, and id CCP has the time for this, they certainly have the time to change some of those. |