Originally by: Something Awry

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No, really, what is the point of cruisers?

The cruiser used to be a key class, a big step up from frigates and the class in which most pilots probably spent the bulk of their careers, since flying a battleship competently is a longish-term proposition.

Now, a cruiser is something you fly if you absolutely must have a new ship while waiting for Battlecruisers to train.

OK, some of the role-based cruisers still have, well, a role - the mining cruisers are still OK for casual mining, the Blackbird is cheaper than a Scorpion, you still see people flying Stabbers and Thoraxes because they have bonuses that BCs don't get. But when's the last time you saw someone doing serious flying in a Moa, a Caracal, a Vexor, a Maller...?

The same problem doesn't arise with frigates because destroyers have very significant weaknesses which still leave frigates the class of choice for many purposes (and some of the most pleasant flying in Eve), and AFs/inties take a while to train. Up until the introduction of tier 2 BCs, some races' BCs were undesirable because they didn't follow the line of progression that some pilots wanted to follow for that race, but now (assuming you're not facing a hard limitation on ship size for a complex), why would you choose a Vexor over a Myrmidon or a Caracal over a Drake? There is no reason, because those tier 2 BCs are upgunned and uptanked versions of those cruisers. There is no downside.

As an example, let's look at Gallente ships. Moving from the Incursus to the Catalyst, you suffer a 25% drop in max velocity, a more than 50% increase in mass and a 100% increase in sig radius. Moving from the Vexor to the Myrmidon, you see only a 15% drop in max velocity, and only 17% greater mass, crucially meaning cruiser ABs and MWDs work pretty well. For that you get more than 3 times the armour and shields and more than twice the cap - where is it all fitting? And how is it so light? The sig radius has doubled, but the mass gone up by only 17% - by some rather silly calculations, the density of the Myrmidon is a seventh that of the Vexor - and a Myrmidon would actually float in air. The increase in sig radius, while significant, hardly comes into play because it's almost completely countered by the tanking bonus BCs get.

This is not an irrelevant rant. I don't want cruisers to be obsolete. I still remember what a thrill it was to fly one for the first time. Now, if I want to relax and do some low sec ratting in a frigate, I'm not competing with other frigate or cruiser pilots, I'm competing with cowards in BCs - yep, the ship of choice for belt ratting in 0.4 is now, apparently, a Battlecruiser. For killing rats that any tier 3 frigate can make short work of. People don't learn to fly ships well any more, they just move to bigger ships sooner.

What's to be done? You could make the ships bigger and heavier, but few new pilots pay much attention to those stats. You could reshape them to be closer to their originally envisaged role - the reason they get that bonus to Warfare Links. You could upgrade tier 3 and selected tier 2 cruisers. But it's probably too late, the cruiser is dead, long live boring bigger-is-better battlecruisers. Meh.

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