A few weeks back we put forward a proposal for changes to address issues with FAX, which you can read Here. This proposal sparked a great round of feedback and we are back with a new plan, which will go out this November.
In this proposal, we hope to target the issues more accurately. Mainly, we want to lower the remote rep potential for FAX somewhat, tweak some of their strongest tools for defense (which currently make them very frustrating to kill in certain circumstances), and increase their vulnerability to capacitor warfare.
We will make the following changes to achieve those goals:
All capital remote repair modules duration increased by 20%
All capital remote shield booster modules duration increased by 20%
Capital Emergency Hull Energizer duration decreased by approximately 25%
Capital Emergency Hull Energizer active resistance bonus reduced to 95% (was 99.9%)
Capital Ancillary Shield Boosters limited to 1 per ship (this does affect all capitals, not only FAX)
Apostle and Minokawa bonus to capacitor pool removed
Lif and Ninazu bonus to capital cap injector amount removed
We appreciate any insight or feedback you contribute. The response last time was very helpful and convinced us to delay and rework, so thank you. We hope this proposal feels more on target.
Still figuring out what wax to polish this turd with eh? Maybe that’s an unfair criticism, its not CCP’s fault when players figure out how to win by scaling out and creating huge capital blob fights.
Or is it?
Reduce reps by %10, see 10% more FAX’s in space. Not like people have to do much after they cyno their FAX alt in to save a super, plenty of time to cyno in another one and get its reps going too.
Why not increase FAX cost so they aren’t used as Pawn sacrifices to save a Queen piece? Some groups have more than enough resources they don’t blink to send multiple faxes in order to save a super.
Diminishing returns on FAX reps to capitals, like how module stacking penalties work. It seems silly when a super is getting hit with 1,000,000 DPS and 1,000,000 reps at the same time its virtually operating risk-free.
Wasn’t there an incident in HS years ago with one group stacking repairs on a ship that was ganking everyone the reason concord now do damage exponentially?
These big capital ships are almost impossible to alpha once you get hold of them. The attackers and defenders might as well be entosis wanding a node. I hear that’s really popular.
Its like that old Battlefield ( It was a problem in Battlefield 2, and seems to be a thing with the new ones according to youtube ) game where you put 3 engineers in a helicopter and flew around getting shot to pieces but the engineers wildly repairing at the roof, wall and floor meant you never died unless your pilot crashed into the ground or were suicided by another aircraft.
Still doesn’t solve n+1, why not seriously just make it so titans can’t use haw guns and can’t target subcaps at all, and then have it so the fax have a repair cap. Like your weird damage cap for structures, but a rep cap. It’ll solve the problem of n+1 as when you hit that rep cap the extra faxes on field will be pointless as their reps won’t be counted.
Well in case of small gang warfare when a small gang is looking for a small fight that doesn’t need to escalate the cost of vomiting a fax machine on tech 1 cruisers is too low.
But bombers bar is always willing to help shooting them down…
Why not increase the built cost by let’s say 100% like you did with battleships in the tiericide back in 2012-14?
Battleships now do less than ever ever before for only twice the cost - yeay.
Why shoudn’t fax machines be different? Make them cost 5 billion and 12 weeks to built and all of a sudden, people may go back to fly Guardians or Augorors.
Need to reballance the lif and ninazu completely with this change as they have duration bonus. Apostle and mino base cap pool has never seemed like to much of an issue when neuting them out, especially with how cheap talisman sets are these days.
Hopefully this isnt the last pass on this and I can respect balancing these for all player groups in new eden must be very hard. Overall i am happy with the changes suggested here but i still believe EHE should be denied to be fit on faxs regardless of the EHE changes coming.
You also need to make FAX’s more expensive, they are far far to cheap!
What will happen with ships that are already fitted with dual capital ASBs? Will the second ASB be moved to cargo or item hangar? Or will I be unable to undock until I remove it?
By nerfing ehe, you realise you are nerfing dreads and dreadbombs too which in the current meta aren’t all that strong already due to the inevitable “fax wall”
The ancil nerf is good and is where we should be going. It fixes some inherent issues with rorqual hunting, although not all of them. The hull energizer nerf is pretty bad for dread, which is suppose to be the one best weapon used to kill supers, and the ancil nerf probably nerf a few solo / active fits too. In the best of worlds dreads should probably be allowed to have 2 ancils. The RR duration increase is probably a good thing to nerf FAXes reparing subcap fleets, although I’m unsure if this is really hurting shield FAXes since shield boost lands on activation.
The one big issue that is dodge here is that, on a dread bomb, it’s basically a trade between dread and faxes. FAXes are basically used meatshields for supers. This works because FAXes are cheapers than dreads. They should be worth more so that the answer to save supers would not be to mindlessly send as many FAXes as possible.
Would it be possible to make the remote rep ammount signatur based? So that it is less effective to repair smaller ships with capital reppers? At the moment, bigger is just better.
And perhaps just remove the E-War resistances from Faxes to allow more counterplay?
It will hurt their ability to sustain remote reps I think (With the cap injection amounts removed from Lif/Ninazu), however it won’t hurt active tanking from FAXs as much as it probably should. Since you’ll still be able to repair 80% of the time on Minokawa with 2x Capital Injectors, or all the time with 2C+1L on Minokawa+Lif.
The Ninazu and Apostle can obviously fit multiple large injectors so won’t have a problem with active tanking at all, although sustaining their remote reps under heavy cap pressure will probably be more difficult than now on the Ninazu without the cap injector bonus.
I think a big problem is the SMA being able to hold 4 Hoarders worth of 3200s. Right now you would actually run dry perma repping off your fleet hanger and cargo in about 22 minutes on FAXes, however being able to hold 4 hoarders worth. (2 with loot fairy) means you get several hours worth of self boosting.
I definitely think there is a discussion to be had about restricting multiple injectors on ships. You don’t really see it that often on sub capitals. Mostly some PVP ships using XL pith shield boosters with 2x medium injector (Basically Sleipnir/Claymore only). Battleships used to run 2x large sometimes, like Neut Dominix/RR Dominix and some Dual Rep fits that are cap hungry, but ever since 3200s were put in the game they were no longer used. So unlike with ancillary shield boosters where preserving multiple copies on subcaps was probably a good thing, going ahead and just restricting all injectors wouldn’t have much collateral damage at all.
All in all good first step towards better capital balance.
I’m not a huge fan of removing the capacitor bonuses from the FAX as it offers a unique role for the lif and ninazu and helps out the minokawa a lot more. One of the main issues with the minokawa is you have to sacrifice tank for injection (this isn’t a lowslot cap injector suggestion lmao), giving the minokawa a similar injector bonus the lif and ninazu have could be interesting. Not as strong as 10% per level but 5% maybe, it would bring it into line a bit more if you could inject similar numbers to an apostle.
People complaining about dreads being affected by the EHE re-balance aren’t considering the numbers. You will still have ~14m ehp when you energize. Considering most dreads can tank a DD anyway (ccpls look at the moros) it doesn’t make sense for an attacker to then waste DDs on you once you have energized. I see the EHE re-balance as a good thing, people aren’t not going to fit them because of this change because of how powerful they are.
Limiting Capital Ancils is a good change. Sure it hurts some dread fits and ~wormholers are collateral damage~ however capital ancils are still going to be very strong on rorquals and even other caps. Overall good change that was needed.
Increasing the duration of capital remote reps is a good first start. I would say that it’s important to make this change then wait a few months at least to see how things go. I would expect at least a big capital fight or two to really see. In huge battles this won’t really matter, you will still drop enough fax to stabalize reps on any target. However in smaller fights where the number of FAXes you have is more limited this could make a difference between catching a target and watching it die.
I see a lot of complaints from people that the active tanked FAXes are a huge problem (smaller gangs can’t break their tank) however CCP has not proposed a nerf of bonuses these ships get to active tanking or the modules themselves. I still think there is some stigma around active faxes being easy kills from when triage carriers were often fit with 4 cap rechargers, and 5 power relays making them very easy to kill. I think people are still expecting to kill these blinged out ships with 30 people and thats where a lot the noise comes from.
Limiting the number of injectors a fax can have is going the wrong way I think. It would mean the aposlte is still stronger as it can just fit cap rechargers. It would also make FAXes a lot easier to keep cap dry especially with AOE neut projectors.