Originally by: Mr TriX

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Warning: Experienced carrier pilot

I will start off with saying it is a reward to spend all the time and isk to fly a carrier.
I will also say I have been flying a carrier for over 3 months now and I still have yet to use it enough to recoup the time and money I spent on it.

Let me be the first to say with any good experience, carriers can't "do it all". They can pretend to, but dropping 6 carriers on anything is a large risk unless you have decent support for them.

I will also say that yes they are effective against the average battleship fleet, I have been in many gangs where we have successfully killed carriers with ships smaller then battleships. With very little losses I will add. A recent event where we bumped a carrier over 45km away from his 6+ other carriers to kill him. The reason we took very little losses is because the other carriers could not launch fighters because we quickly dispatched them with our HACs/etc. We even jammed several of carriers to prevent them remote repping.

*Damps are highly effective against carriers in lock time alone.
*Well tanked BS with smartbombs can easily distract fighters/drones while ECM ships jam them.

I've had more success killing capital ships while in BS and hac gangs than with using my carrier.

If anything I think carrier damage should be increased. Being able to dish out only a little more damage than dps battleship and costing 10+ times more? Add to that a few small ships can render my carrier DPS Null. Sure I can carry 200+ light-heavy drones. But you put a damp/ecm on me and start killing drones I then have no control over what or who they attack. If you get locked when my carrier is damped you simply warp out and back in and you get another 2 minutes of free time while I try to lock you if its even possible.

As for ship maintainance bay. Thats not very useful itself unles your using carriers to bring battleships and other ships to a remote location for restocking. I have never seen or heard of anyone flying upto a carrier in battle to grab a new ship. Your pod would never last that long.

A boost to fighter damage and a little more reduction to tracking to make the dps vrs battleships similar, yet the damage to capital ships greatly enhanced. Then carriers would be much better used in fleet combat of killing other carriers. Reducing the effect of "Carriers Online".

I agree carriers are used to much. But the majority of them that use them loose them by stupidity. Flying around solo hauling. Mining in belts. Camping gates with few support. Rightly so they lose them.

Maybe while boosting carrier damage vrs capitals, you could increase carrier cost a little to reduce the amount of them in game.

One other change could be to somehow make dreads more able to counter carriers. Isn't their jump range less then carriers? (I haven't trained for dread).

So to review, carriers are very vulnerable without support or large number of carriers. They cost alot and don't do all that much damage for their size/class. They are versatile yes, but at great risk. They could use a boost in damage and cost to build. Their ability to kill frigates is still limited by the max speed of light drones. Cruiser class ships have no problems killing fighters/drones and losses are expected - Its a carrier after all! Cost of loosing all fighters vs loosing a few cruisers very similar.

Hope this sheds some light on this topic from someone who hardly ever gets a chance to use his carrier.

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