Wrayeth
Shiva
Morsus Mihi
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Posted - 2008.03.09 09:30:00 -
[1]
Edited by: Wrayeth on 09/03/2008 09:29:57
I'm glad you asked. 
1.) Overpowered nano ships.
2.) Ubertanks
3.) Broken recons and EAS.
I'd add POS warfare to this list, but I don't have any suggestions as to how to fix it.
FIrst and foremost, the extreme prevalence of nano ships make a goodly chunk of the other ships in the game largely useless. 10-man nano gang? Let me undock my maelstrom...oh, yeah, that's right - it's useless against them. Instead, I have to switch to my rapier or huginn, ships I dislike highly but fly because you have to have the damned things. It's enough to make me just want to stay in dock, TBH. Some days I don't even bother logging on because I know I'll get nothing but nano gangs/blobs.
The sad thing is, speed-tanking isn't a horrible idea in and of itself, but the current speed-tanking balance is horribly, horribly broken. Simply, the speeds are too fast. Back when the only real nano ship you'd see was the vagabond, it was annoying but livable. They could run away just like today's nano ships, but their speed was only 3000-3500m/s in most instances, resulting in the ability to fight them with normal ships. Their lesser velocity also kept their ability to run away within reasonable bounds, meaning that if you got a web on one it wouldn't just automatically coast out of range within two seconds.
So, how to adjust speed-tanking so that it's still viable but no longer OMGWTFPWN? Simple: extend the stacking penalty to all modules and rigs that increase speed, excepting the AB/MWD itself and gang warfare links. Also nerf snakes ('nuff said). This should result in ships that can still use their speed to tank, but are no longer invulnerability on a stick when their opponents don't have a rapier/huginn/curse/battleship with heavy neuts.
The second item, tanking, is pretty straightforward. There are tanks that cannot be broken in 1-v-1 combat (sometimes even 2-v-1 or more, for that matter). These sorts of tanks encourage blobbing - if you know you're likely to run into some supertanks, you have no choice but to bring more people. As a result, the simple answer is to find those tanks that are game-breaking and tweak the ship and module statistics so that they are no longer broken.
The third item is broken recons. Simply put, some of the recons break the balance in between ships. A good example of this can be seen in what the huginn, rapier, and hyena do to the tempest. Despite its craptastic tank and limited DPS, the tempest used to be quite decent in PvP due to its velocity advantage over other battleships (and lack of supertanks that it can't break). It used to be able control the range of an engagement to minimize the damage it took from incoming fire while maximizing its own damage output. Now, however, a single hyena flown in conjunction with a blasterthron spells the utter, certain, and immediate doom of the tempest.
This is another item that requires a balancing pass, either to nerf the recons causing the problems or boost the ships that are unreasonably affected by the broken recons. Certain ships should be counters for others, but the current state of recons and EAS takes it more than a bit too far in some instances.
I was going to elaborate more on this, but I'm half asleep and haven't had anything to eat for some time. I need to go get some grubb.
-Wrayeth
n00b Extraordinaire
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