Grey Azorria wrote:Firstly, numbers is a real issue, It is at the point where people can field enough supers to destroy any non super cap fleet with impunity.
Secondly, This is EVE, not WoW or any other generic MMO, there should be no 'best' ship, no ship that WILL beat everything else, right now, the only way to beat a super cap blob is with an even bigger super cap blob, sub caps are pretty irrelevant once supers show up. As it is, most big fights end the same way, sup caps and normal caps fight for a little while, then one or both sides bring in the supers, maybe doomsday a couple of things and then everyone goes home, because there is no point fighting anymore.
Thirdly, and this is similar to the second, Titans can currently track, and pretty much insta pop, battlecruisers and up, and therefore they have no real counter, as they can kill off all the DPS of a fleet very quickly, which is wrong, everything should have some counter that is not just a bigger blob. This is why people are screaming for CCP to nerf Titans tracking.
^^ This is pretty much it... but I will elaborate with my 0.02 isk worth:
One of the best aspects of EvE is bigger does NOT mean better. When you get into bigger ships, you often gain some dps, some tank, some range, but you also limit your ability to apply your dps to smaller targets, you lose mobility, etc. Essentially, every ship has pros and cons. To kill a battlecruiser, you can ship up and just out-class it OR you could ship down and take advantages of its weaknesses. I've solo'd vaga's, drakes, and ravens in a frigate because those bigger ships have weaknesses I can exploit using a smaller ship.
In most cases, the pros and cons of entire fleets scale up. A fleet of abbadons has the range, superior dps, and superior tank to annihilate a similar fleet of drakes. But those abbadons will get dessimated by a fleet of afterburning zealots and guardians, becuase the BS's can't hit the AHACs for much damage. The drakes shred a fleet of AHACs because they can outrun the zealots, and their medium weapons hit zealots for lots of damage. This is makes EvE a high-tec Rock-Paper-Scissors game, also known as Rochambeau.
The Rochambeau game keeps gang and fleet warfare very interesting, because winning often doesn't revolve around a "best" fleet, so much as a counter fleet. Even carriers, dreads, and supercapitals fit nicely into the Rochambeau game unil the release of dominion. In dominion, SC's and Titans were buffed from fleet support ships into frontline fleet dps ships. With their EWAR immunity, their ability to destroy any class of ship (be it frigates, cruisers, BC's, BS's, or other capitals), their amazing tanks, and their ability to RR each other, a group of supercaps hard to beat. Their RR abilities, tank, and EWAR immunity also mean they scale EXTREMELY well. So, with the release of dominion, the superpowers started producing supercaps en mass.
By the release of cruicible, the number of supercaps in the game grew from a few hundered Pre-dominion to over four thousand. Suddenly, 100-man supercap fleets are not the dream of some super alliance, but the standard sov-fight escallation force.
A 50+ supercap fleet used to have the power to obliterate any fleet on the field, and there was NO counter beyond MORE supercaps. Essentially, the rock-paper-scissors game devolved into rock-paper-scissors-THERMONUCLEARSUPERCAPBOMB. Essentially, the delicate game balances within EvE was ruined, and so CCP stepped in during the cruicible release to tone down the overwhelming domination supercaps were playing in the game. While they made leaps forward, they overlooked titan tracking, such that titans, with their enormous guns, can still decimate any fleet thrown at them.
The reason you see these threads, is people feel the game needs to be balanced. It's totally reasonable for supercaps to represent a potent option to the Rochambeau game... but they need to have a weakness so they can be countered. If the only counter is "more supercaps", then the rock paper scissors supercap game really breaks down and becomes the who-has-more-supercaps game.
This is not acceptable.
No-one really gives a **** about small groups of supers being hotdropped on people... What they care about is the impenetrable assault force they represent when dropped in large groups, especially during sov fights.