Asm Nihouyah
Blackwater Task Forces Goonswarm Federation
2
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Posted - 2017.05.19 11:13:57 -
[1] - Quote
I'd love to be able to help with T3 cruiser rebalance. I've been playing EVE on and off since the time T3s came to be, and I made decent amount of fitting and possible usage analysis and drafts, including doctrine designs using T3s as support ships, optimizing mainline T3 fits and using those ships as solo/small gang/dedicated utility ships.
I will stress parts of T3 cruisers that make them unique and special among all other ships:
Hull name gives you nothing: this was the premise when T3s were introduced - that hull itself would tell you nothing about what this ships role is, how it'll behave and what exact capabilities of the ship are. Min-maxed cookie cutter builds made it less significant part of using T3s, but - with a bit of killboard stats play - this still works in solo/small gang scenarios, when seeing your ship on dscan/grid still doesn't give enemy enough information to know what to expect. I feel like this part should be stressed even more, and T3s should be able to refit to counter almost any given setup when having enough time to do so.
You can overspecialize while gimping everything else: this is true to an extent for Strategic Cruisers now, and I think that all balance problems lie with not gimping everything else enough to make it work. There's nothing inheritely wrong with 700k effective HP nullified T3, as long as this ship doesn't also deal decent DPS at good range while having the advantage of range control. Unusual and highly specialized fits like fast lock alpha Loki, X-Large Shield booster Tengu or buffer Proteus should still be a thing, they just should come with more severe disadvantages.
Numbers tuning: T3 cruisers should be tuned first and foremost to Heavy Assault Cruisers and Recons. Current state of slightly worse, but a bit tankier Recons is acceptable, but there should be no way to create T3 cruiser fit comparable in all important parameters to equivalent HAC. T3 can be slightly better than HAC in one aspect (say, tank) while being clearly behind in all other aspects, or it can be much better in one aspect while sacrificing almost everything else to do so.
Covert ops subsystem: this is one of the uses that are unique to Strategic Cruisers - logistics bonused ships with ability to use Black Ops bridge, interdiction nullified ships with ability to fit covert cyno. T3 cruisers have a lot of options and possibilities enabled by covert subsystem in interaction with other traits; taking away any of those uses will remove entire ship role from the game outside narrow group of players willing to use and risk AT prize ships like Etana.
I want to see T3 cruisers becoming unviable as mainline ship doctrine, and instead taking place as either specialized hulls, or as tool to confuse enemy - when you compose entire fleet with Strategic Cruisers and make enemy guess what is the role of each ship on grid. For the last part, adding low significance bonus like full immunity to ship scanners - to make them even more unpredictable - would be great in terms of pointing out assumed ship use, as wildcard hull that can do anything, just not everything at once. |