2ish Years ago, not long after the Triglavian event, I had a very, very brief discussion (more like a single question followed by a short answer) concerning what CCP planned to do with the EDENCOM vessels. This was, for the record, after the initial buff to their number of targets. I, and many others, expressed serious concerns about the viability (or rather, the near total lack thereof) of the ships as well as their ludicrous pricepoint (the almost direct result of a single component which drops from only a select number of Triglavian rats which can only ever be found in Pochven or spawning out of wormholes leading to Pochven; specifically the Triglavian Transconduit Datacaster, which makes up anywhere from 50-90% of the total cost of any given EDENCOM Hull, Module, or Ammo).
The answer I got, presumably from the dev more or less responsible (or a dev who had communicated with the one/team responsible) that they were taking a “wait and see” approach.
It’s been 2 years. And the single only change these ships have seen is that the Pyrolancea drug and a number of wormhole effects now affect their weapons- which means more or less absolutely nothing whatsoever. Even in a C6 wormhole with the maximum bonus damage, the WH rats are still simply too durable and too fast for Vorton’s to kill them with anything approximating speed. Outside of Wormholes, the only ship which sees any amount of use is apparently (at least according to sources I’ve found on reddit and from discussion with people in-game) is the Stormbringer, almost exclusively in the Abyssal filament activity. Beyond that, there is only a single type of site for a single pirate faction that the Thunderchild is even somewhat competitive (Sansha Havens, to be specific- two Thunderchilds can clear those out decently quickly, making about ~200m/hr assuming you have the safety necessary to not get ganked and a decently developed system). The frigate, the Skybreaker, sees no use whatsoever in any application anywhere in New Eden, and is the single most useless ship hull in the entire game. Even Corvettes help out new players just starting out, and are a free and easy way for people to travel in HS without too much threat of being ganked.
What happened? Are they seriously waiting this long? I see so many easy ways to fix these ships, to make them at least viable. Making these ships viable, to boot, is a huge way to stir up activity in Pochven and get people actually willing to farm the activities in there just to acquire these ships- which would, over time, push their prices down a bit. It would also help to introduce some more choice and variety in ship options and general ratting stratagies, and possibly introduce more variety into PvP as well (though I believe these ships were intended for PvE, as they are the “Anti-Trig” line of vessels and the trig ships really are born to kill capsuleer vessels)
The first, and easiest, way to fix these ships is to make their gun more generically usable. Increase the bounce range so that it doesn’t require ships to be in knife-fighting range of each other (15km, or even 20km, radius would be decent given how rats like to spread out), and make it so the bounces prioritize locked targets first- with excess bounces being random. This gives the vessels a measure of control over how they apply their damage, allowing them to to be at all functional in most scenarios. To compensate for this, so that they aren’t just totally OP by way of freely targeting 7+ ships at once and guaranteeing huge and controlled DPS, reduce their base number of locked targets so that you need higher skills and/or modules to lock a decent number of ships- thereby adding a cost to the control, while still giving players the option to optimize their damage/speed/tank if they are fine only locking 2 or 3 ships. This would make all 3 ships genuinely useful in both PvP and ratting, even with their pitiful single-target damage. As they would finally have the range and controllability necessary to actually achieve their theoretically very high raw output in most situations (which is still only barely that of other ships in their weight class, due to their generally poor application and the fact that passive shield regen or local repair - both of which are exceedingly common amongst most rat factions - can dramatically reduce this output far more heavily than single-target weapons).
A different possibility, one that should certainly not be combined with the above, is to embrace their unreliability and let that be the balancing point for the weapons. Semi-poor application and a relative inability to effectively control where your damage goes, in return for a much higher raw damage output. Straight up, double their damage. That’s it. Their single-target damage would still be absolute dogwater compared to most other ships in their weightclass, but it would mean that the ships getting to hit multiple targets soars their damage output. The issue, of course, being that those targets need to be traveling relatively slowly and within 10km of each other. Not to mention that, in PvP, walls of drones and closing the gap can hard-counter the ships by causing their damage to go into targets they cannot easily apply into or worse, their own allies (turning them into a PvP liability, while being extremely good at Ratting vessels). As ratting ships, they would become at least viable with this “Oh but why use a Marauder when a Thunderchild could output 4x the DPS” that doesn’t happen, even with this, pretty much ever. Why? Again, poor application. Even against battleships moving a decent click, a thunderchild’s Vorton Projector can lose a significant portion of its damage. Furthermore, rats almost always have ohkay-ish passive shield regen and very often have some amount of logistics (either local or from other rats in the site). Furthermore, rats tend to mindlessly chase after their target vessel- which causes them to spread out very widely as each individual frigate, cruiser, and battleship enters their own orbits a few km apart from one another. Especially over long fights with lots of ships or in very large sites where the rats spawn very far from one another. At best these ships are hitting 2 or 3 rats at any given time, with only a handful of exceptions (such as the aforementioned Sansha Haven, which spawns them all in a tight clump in the middle of rocks that block their movement). This means that for most purposes, the ships would be merely competitive with other T1 battleships and/or Marauders (when fully kitted out with expensive modules to be able to tank), and only in a select number of specific sites would they be anything close to an “objective best”. Furthermore, because this method also makes them weaker in PvP due to friendly fire and general uncontrollability, these ships would be exceedingly dangerous to rat in. Both in Hi-sec because a suspect pilot can more or less force the ratter to lose their concord protection, and in low-sec because the ships cannot deal effectively with drone swarms and cannot be safely used in groups due to friendly fire. This makes them a high risk, high reward type of ship that requires careful planning (and likely fleet coordination) to use effectively.
A third possibility is to make these ships just plain more cost effective by lowering the ludicrous number of Triglavian Transconduit Datacasters needed to buy their BPCs. Making them far, far cheaper to construct and thus alot more attractive as a “cheap for what it does” option, which of course matters alot for PvP than it does for PvE. If a Thunderchild cost half as much as a Leshrak to build and fit, that would be a fair tradeoff for the loss in raw combat power.
A fourth possibility (and my preferred one, to be frank- though it would be the more difficult of the possibilities to do) is to expand their shipline to match the Triglavians. Introduce Tech 2 vessels with better role bonuses that do any of the above things. All of them would be cheaper than their tech 1 variants due to the nature of invention (since the bulk of the tech 1 costs are in the datacasters needed to acquire the BPC, turning 1 T1 BPC into multiple T2 BPCs would dramatically lower the cost of the T2 items, despite higher material costs), and better role bonuses or access to unique modules would give each variety of ship a use case. Frigates could be excellent ewar platforms. Destroyers could wipe groups of drones or frigates in a brawl. Logi cruisers would have a very specific niche against smartbombs or other EDENCOM vessels (or just big crazy brawls with people shooting everywhere in general), of course HACs/HICs do their thing. Battlecruisers could be cheap platforms for the large Vorton projectors or very durable command cruisers. And of course, a Marauder variant of a Thunderchild would be straight up competitive with other Marauders for any variety of ratting with basically no other changes (the marauder role bonus + bastion module, alone, is enough to make the Large projector viable as a weapon). A Dread could likewise be an absolute menace in fights between capitals. And thats without considering any unique mechanics outside of the obvious “multi-logi” one. What if one of these ship variants applied to more targets? Fewer targets? A controlled set of targets instead of random? There’s so many possibilities with T2 variants. Of course, this is of the options the most difficult to execute because it would require someone to go through and create all of these things. Which is much more costly than having a guy quickly change a handful of numbers around.
In any case, I think its plainly obvious to see that EDENCOM vessels are not in a good place. They are both more costly than all of their contemporaries for frankly ridiculous reasons, and are not in any way competitive with any other vessels in the game except in quite literally 1 or 2 specific scenarios and nowhere else.
i like to multibox 3 thunderchilds in some missions because its just crazy how fast they can be xD