Balanced doesn't mean "equal", it doesn't mean everything is good at everything.

And ironically, the way T3s are, they kill the "different ships for different tasks" idea.

Need a cloaky ship that can go somewhere and light a covert cyno and survive? Then use a T3C because Recons aren't nullified and can't get near as much EHP.

Need a fleet combat ship with lots of EHP? Screw a battleship (those just get bombed, even if you have defender missile dessies with you), get a Proteus or a Tengu.

Need an exploration ship. We have bonused exploration ships, but screw those, Tengu is better because it can survive the more dangerous sites.

If you love different ships for different tasks you will love EVE after these abominations get fixed.

I see what your problem is.

As an aside games that are balanced to perfection tend to be incredibly bland and short lived a game needs character and texture and that comes from things not being too finely tuned in balance - that isn't necessarily an argument that T3s don't need changing but the changes people often call for won't do what they think they will do.

Regarding loss of players - the number of people complaining about the balance of T3s is minimal while these people themselves are saying what an outcry the kind of nerfs they want will cause - you can guess where the balance of player loss lies.

This is the thing though - we looked at it a lot because outside of casual roams, etc. quite often there are situations where you want those durable fleet ships that can brawl (i.e. Gallente blasters) with atleast a decent chance against the full spectrum of threats in today's Eve.

-snip-

-Proteus - Now we are talking - generic fit it has the EHP to make it survivable, waaay too small sig, reasonable mobility, good damage, not cheap but not so costly its a significant barrier - but then being the top pick it makes it viable to bling out a bit which further turns it from a great choice into a monster.

Nerfing the Proteus does nothing really to shift the balance of power unless you savage it and that doesn't change the fact that the other options are lacking.

Nerfing the Proteus does nothing really to shift the balance of power unless you savage it and that doesn't change the fact that the other options are lacking.

Nerfing the Proteus in that case mean you have to make a choice instead of selecting the obvious best answer in your proposed list.

That's ridiculous and an absolutely blind way of approaching the game and the meta. If a ship is amazing in a way that almost every other ship struggles with, and it's not an amazingly specialized roll that requires a special bonus, that ship is almost certainly OP.

See, this is what gets me, you can list off all of those ships that the Proteus is *strictly better than* including several with comparable total hull costs, and look at that and go "nah, it's just fun to fly, it's not imbalanced!"

That's ridiculous and an absolutely blind way of approaching the game and the meta. If a ship is amazing in a way that almost every other ship struggles with, and it's not an amazingly specialized roll that requires a special bonus, that ship is almost certainly OP.

That's exactly what jumped out and 'got' me too. I was like 'geez, the guy just listed the next 15 best options available, then threw the proteus in there for comparison, then concluded the proteus was by and large the only thing you'd want to fly when compared to those ships... and then concluded that the proteus isn't OP and shouldn't be nerfed?'

If you actually paid attention I outlined why none of those are a particularly good alternative let alone the next best option for that specific role.

Take away the prot and you are left with a bunch of very poor choices for a fairly fundamental role - some of them might have suited the Eve of yesterday in that role but things have moved on.

If you actually paid attention I outlined why none of those are a particularly good alternative let alone the next best option for that specific role.

Take away the prot and you are left with a bunch of very poor choices for a fairly fundamental role - some of them might have suited the Eve of yesterday in that role but things have moved on.

In a serious fleet role they need to be able to stand their ground - in a serious engagement the t1 stuff will go down hard, the deimos lacks the ehp to survive fast target switching and the bigger stuff will get blapped by bombing runs, carrier fighters, dreads and so on.

The rigs were always a problem as you cant have a ship that can change on the fly when the rigs cant be removed so that was a much needed fix.

Ah, one of my favorite forum regulars! Good to see you.

I have a question about the quote above. I don't keep up with places like Reddit where stuff like this probably already got hashed out, but your reference to the rigs seems oddly phrased, or very deliberately phrased.

"...that was a much needed fix"

That makes it sound like something already happened. I'm not aware of any announced balance changes for T3C yet. So are T3 ships getting rigs removed completely? I remember someone on the forums long ago made a very convincing argument for removing rigs from T3 ships. Is that something CCP is going to do?

Best of luck with that approach - the reality is you'd be ******* in the wind trying to use any other ship the days when say the Brutix, etc. would have been a viable choice for that fairly fundamental game and race role have long gone as the game has developed - yeah you go chose that Megathron* and see what happens ;) typically in those fleet the t1 BCs and BS, etc. get primaried and blapped off the field in short order - the end result of taking the Prot out of that equation is just going to push gameplay even more towards high mobility ranged fleets.



* That isn't to say Mega fleets, etc. aren't viable but that is in a different context where the Prot wouldn't really be an option.

That's called a trade-off. If you want tons of EHP you sacrifice other things for it. If you want tons of speed, you sacrifice other things for it.

If you can get all of the things at once the ship is OP.

You also seem to have missed that a good chunk of the ships out there being kitey and playing the high-mobility ranged game are, in fact, T3Cs, and you're overly focused on the Proteus and what you can get away with in a fleet setting with Medium Blasters. That's a bit of a square peg you're trying to jam into that round hole.

Basically you seem to be salty that the meta currently favors kitey ships, and your 10km range Medium Blasters aren't measuring up. Welcome to the meta, don't let it hit you anywhere sensitive. It'll swing around eventually to something friendly to your preferred style of play, in the meantime I suggest adapting or stepping away from it.

The original idea behind these ships was to have a cruiser that was very adaptable, what we got was a pocket battleship that did the job of some 60+ ships only better. In the tiercide plan CCP have these ships slated to land somewhere between t1 and faction cruisers so given where they are today T3C are in for one hell of a beating from the nerf bat.

Whatever changes are made need to consider solo/duo combat explorers and nomads (whether PvP or PvE driven) as well.

In the current ship trees, T3Cs are the optimal choice for that.
The game lacks an equivalent to the SoE exploration line for PvE combat purposes.
TC3s fill that role, albeit with a higher cost and the risk of SP loss.

Why should SoE have an equivalent pve exploration ship when they're pretty much specialised for that purpose?

For the proteus, that would give you the option of a deimos that requires a whole new skill tree or a stratios that requires a whole new skill tree, level 5 skills and has no cargo capacity.

Which has to go into a hauler mode to carry enough gear to do the clark kent thing at destination

I also think it has ramifications for the current "most systems are occupied" phenomenon in null (ie a great many systems became useful to run anoms and escalate from, after CCP changed the composition of ihub generated anoms in bad truesec systems - along with the sov changes).

If the covert/nullified ship isn't good enough to actually do the escalation anymore, most people would be far keener on abusing the predictability of the walker to keep the escalation in blue space - ie cluster up into the same old deadends they used to and fly an interceptor to the citadel containing their rattlesnake when they get an escalation, which might have to be moved 1 or 2 jumps tops. I certainly wouldn't do what I did before, which is go fetch them from red space.

Why do you ask me?
I never claimed there should be.

I pointed out that there isn't, and that T3Cs fill that role.

Asteros/Stratios are quite poor at combat pve.
They are data/relic optimised.

or team up business.

More like between a thorax and a navy exequror

Nah. You don't need a huge number of mods to radically change the ship.

Quite frankly I'm not too bothered if this makes doing things like 10/10s harder and riskier. If fewer run them then supply of the rewards drops and the people who do put in the time and effort get greater reward. I honestly think exploration was swung too far towards being easy.

You still have the Gila for combat exploration if Stratios isn't enough dps for you. Some hacs do pretty well also. Yeah you can't run 10/10 ded in them but that should be battleship/marauder or team up business.

Trade off lol no matter the trade off you don't get something suited to the role which is the point of what I'm saying. The rest is just wrong and an assumption on your part - as anyone who has actually played with me could verify.

I was talking about the fleet blaster prot because it is the one brought up most often in this thread.

I can't see the point to such a ship, if nothing else, we don't need more ships at that scale of hitpoints.

The drone variant carries 225m3 of drones. The modules are 40m3 each. The depot is 50m3 if I recall. Even just going to covops/null and 1 combat fit works only because you can leave some of the drone bay on the ship.

I don't entirely disagree with that, but one problem is that it will be perceived as 2 player content, or rather, 2 account content done with blops which is imo a worse place to be as a game design than being done by solo t3s.

Trade off lol no matter the trade off you don't get something suited to the role which is the point of what I'm saying. The rest is just wrong and an assumption on your part - as anyone who has actually played with me could verify.

I was talking about the fleet blaster prot because it is the one brought up most often in this thread.

The reason nobody even consider the trade offs is because we all know there is a WTFPWNMOBILE that does it all in one package. Once your remove that "do it all" option, all the trade offs become interesting. The whole list of ship you made is essentially invalidated by a single one in the same way a bunch of frig and destroyer were completely invalidated by T3Ds. It's funny how the T3 stuff always seem to break stuff.

Your "role" in this case seems to be "OP super-tanked solo pwn mobile". That's not a role, it's blatantly over-powered.

If you actually have a better description of it besides "the role" then please elaborate, but so far you've been extremely vague and looking for meaning behind your language seems to just point to "The Proteus is the only thing that can do these things because it's OP" which is, um, not a counter argument against the ship being nerfed.

At all.

For a serious fleet role (rather than casual roams or throw away PVP, etc.) take that WTFPWNMOBILE off the table though and you are still left with options that are either hamstrung by the high bar for entry i.e. commandships or wholly inadequate to perform the role in today's Eve regardless of compromises you make.

The only reason those ships are hamstrung is because T3C do the job so much better.

Nope.

Spent many many hours in those kind of engagements - most of the other "options" in the line for that role are too laughable in today's Eve to even entertain, the others that are adequate are hamstrung by the bar for entry - personally I had my alt in a halo'd Eos or Astarte in a fair few cases but that isn't an option for many mainstream players.

That's because you wan't something horrendously overpowered not something handy.

drone bay and cargo hold a two different things. you dont have to have to carry 3 entire fits in the hold to radically change the ship.

This is a multi player game, more working together is a good thing.