Battleship update: role bonuses

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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Awhile ago when Battlecruisers finally got a role bonus for range increases, we saw a significant (and well-needed) uptick in their usage across new eden. T1 and Navy Battleships still have their uses, but are generally pushed aside more by useful Pirate faction battleships. I think it would be a healthy balance decision to give T1 and Navy battleships these role bonuses both to help their usage and flexibility, as well as focusing their roles on what they’re good at, especially giving each race a proper disruption battleship like the Amarr and Caldari have.

EDIT: after feedback, i realize how OP these all look, so i’m going to give flat bonus to each race’s ships, instead of individual ships

Caldari

-Battleship role bonus: 25% bonus to shield HP

Gallente

-Battleship role bonus: 25% bonus to drone speed and tracking

Amarr

-Battleship role bonus: 25% bonus to armor HP

Minmatar

-Battleship role bonus: 25% reduced capacitor cost of large armor and shield repair modules

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Saved

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Never.

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While I 100% agree that battleships are very weak at the moment, I’m not sure about these. They all feel like waaaay too much.

Rather than go through each of them (I’m lazy) lets look at the Caldari bonuses.

The Scorp getting a 75% role bonus would turn it into an utterly extraordinary ECM boat. Easily best-in-class, even over the Rook and Widow (even giving the Falcon a run for its money). For example, a flavoured ECM II with no SDAs and a single dispersion aug II would have a jam strength of 15.6… without heat. The widow, a Tech2 battleship that also has ECM bonuses, sits at 12.9 with the same fit (no SDAs, one T2 rig).

But the real icing on the cake is the price. They’re so utterly cheap that after insurance you can whelp those allllll day. With a full mid rack of ECMs.

The Raven’s bonuses collide with the Bagel and the RNI. Those bonuses are significant for a reason. They’re also on pirate/navy boats because of their significance.

Rokh makes an excellent sniper boat. These will just become alpha doctrines, which is in direct conflict with artillery boats. Interestingly, the proposed RNI bonus would have been much better for the Rokh. All in all, not outrageous, but still too much.

The navy scorp… it’s tanky (personally, where I think all battleship tanks should be at, with the SNI over and above where it is now). Giving it tank AND spank without taking something else away is having your cake and eating it too.

And the RNI. I can’t possibly see how this would benefit it outside of PVE. Even bonused, the cruise and torp bonuses make it useless fighting anything smaller than a cruiser (even then…). Stuff >=cruiser size doesn’t take long to lock. If you’re far enough away for a range script to be useful, you’ll just get probed down and warped onto. Best case, they become yet another sniper boat.

All in all, the bonuses you propose are all the same. They don’t taste right, they don’t really fit the problem.

What is the problem? Depends who you ask.

Honestly, give them a much higher warp speed (mach getting to double-dip of course) and give them probably 50% more ehp via raw stat boosts.

They’re supposed to be tanky ships that slug it out. 50% more ehp would do absolute wonders for breaking alpha fleets. And the warp speed would mean you wuoldn’t slit your wrists for even thinking about flying them 20+ jumps.

3 Likes
5

I’m fine with some of these but some are too much.
But the Abaddon one won’t even matter without a cap buff. That thing with batteries and rechargers konks out in just a few minutes firing.

The biggest issue for battleships is theyre all slow as **** and take forever to warp. You get all the inconveniences of sluggish capital ship style movement with none of the presence, tank, and a small bit of the fire power for an absurd cost over a frigate or cruiser.

Battleships needs to be between a 100k BC and a 1-2+m HP cap.
If battleships remain as slow as they are now. Give them 500k HP thresholds for a decent fit.

If you wanna increase the firepower as you propose give them more speed and leave tank as is.

But anyway the role bonuses are blanket. Combat battlecruisers don’t get you unique roll bonuses, off the top of my head they all get roughly the same bonus and the boost modules.

I’ve long said battleships need a role bonus too but it would need to be based on bs uses.
Figure out what you want each Bs to do across all 4 lines.
Abaddon, Raven, are tanky, make two of the other Bs tanky from min and gal in someway and give them all a blanket tank bonus. That’s generally. how CCP does it.

You haven’t designated a specific role unless yoyou just threw all your bonuses into leveled bonuses and adjusted the numbers and then made the role bonus something like
Battleship:
enhanced combat capabilities
3 or 4 bonuses per level

In the same way a carrier has enhanced targeting range.

But the 20 second aligns and only going like 100m/s and warping at potato speed needs to go in general.
Battleships are just too slow, too squishy for how much they cost.
Damage is arguable in my ideas to rebalance the undersized weapons to be sub battleship guns high angle weapons the same way the rapid light missile launcher currently is for frigates.

1 Like
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reduction to cap use… always feels like such a waste of a bonus its like the weapons are so bad you need a bonus just to bring it back to normal? This is why I don’t fly amarr :confused:

What makes people not use BS’s? They align too slow warp too slow no one wants to have a 5 hour roam where all their enemies run away, I think to bring them back to some type of usable statis their align time and warp speed need to be brought a bit closer to bc’s.

One thing that stands out of battle ships is they’re tanks, I would give them roll bonus of +50% cap warfare resistance, so that people cant cheese BS tanks by just neuting them out.

1 Like
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So basically a Domi at Gal BS I gets Barghest @Gal BS V heavy scrams?

How about NO?

2 Likes
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The matter is that a fleet of cruisers is more cost effective then a fleet of battleships.

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I would rather see a more universal role bonus that says extra armor / shield gained from equipping plates/extenders. Or better yet. Just give us XL Shield Extenders and 3200mm Plates, I mean seriously. LSE’s and 1600s are fit on cruisers

3 Likes
10

Falloff would be better to me for Minmatar ships. Acs get basically no benefit from optimal. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the defensive part of the ship traits moved to the role. Like the Maelstroms role would be 37.5% increase to shield boost amount?. If the Tempest is ac fit wouldn’t the 25% rof be better for that. And giving the Maelstrom a damage bonus may fit better into alpha fleet doctrines.

I would think you may want to have 4 types of traits defensive offensive and application as well as an e-war specialization. Or am I not understanding or (prolly the case) do you suggest the Hyperion have a 50% damage and 37.5% bonus to tracking along with the 37.5% bonus to self reps?

2 Likes
11

Turn off the fitting restrictions in pyfa, and throw a capital shield extender on a battleship.

Prepare to cream your pants.

[Apocalypse Navy Issue, LolTank APOC]

Damage Control II
Heat Sink II
Heat Sink II
Reactor Control Unit II
Reactor Control Unit II
Reactor Control Unit II
Reactor Control Unit II
Reactor Control Unit II

CONCORD Capital Shield Extender
Dread Guristas Adaptive Invulnerability Field
Dread Guristas Adaptive Invulnerability Field
Large Micro Jump Drive

Dual Heavy Pulse Laser II, Conflagration L
Dual Heavy Pulse Laser II, Conflagration L
Dual Heavy Pulse Laser II, Conflagration L
Dual Heavy Pulse Laser II, Conflagration L
Dual Heavy Pulse Laser II, Conflagration L
Dual Heavy Pulse Laser II, Conflagration L
Dual Heavy Pulse Laser II, Conflagration L
Dual Heavy Pulse Laser II, Conflagration L

Large Ancillary Current Router I
Large Core Defense Field Extender II
Large Core Defense Field Extender II

Berserker II x3

THIS right here is where a battleship should sit. With real guns of course.

2 Likes
12

changing per-level to role bonus makes it available and full-strength at lvl 1 , which is now available to free accounts , and removes incentive to pay for the account so it can be trained to lvl 5 .

i do like the idea of a role bonus but you have to be very careful to make it balanced and still maintain a reason to take the skill to lvl 5 … warp speed’s been mentioned , scan res and lock range also would be nice , both changes reverse nerfs done to battleships as game mechanics and modules were changed .

3 Likes
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Buffing battleships a bit- yes

But these? No.

Not against role bonuses but something less broken and more fitting for the ships in question. I still just think more ehp and dps would make them better fleet fighters.

With regards to pirate ships, the problem is they are too cheap (remember when they were 1bil each?) and null blocs too wealthy. The supply is an issue and the ways to attack income is an issue.

5 Likes
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Edit: nvm he already mentioned cap shield extender lulfit.

2 Likes
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The problem with battleships is not their bonuses, it’s that most of them have no reason to exist. The poor tracking on large weapons makes it hard to apply damage to anything smaller than a battleship. If the other side doesn’t bring any battleships your battleships are of limited value, and if you leave your battleships at home you severely hurt the effectiveness of anyone dumb enough to bring battleships.

If you want more viable battleships then they need to be gods of combat to make up for their very poor speed (both strategic and tactical). Battleships should have their current levels of main-gun firepower, but also enough secondary batteries to kill cruisers and at least force frigates to take the threat seriously.

1 Like
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A dedicated cap booster hold would help. Because anything that is active tanked is chewing through cap 800’s (which take a lot of space) like nobodies business. More base Ehp. A slightly larger drone bay, not necessarily bandwidth, for better frig defence. And goddamn give every BS at least ONE utility high, so they are not sacrificing damage for the frigate/cruiser/drone menace defence. You might need to increase some bonuses on some ships with an already full rack of highs to keep damage levels similar but not drastically.

1 Like
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You’re talking about solo and small gang, which I’m not saying shouldn’t happen in a battleship but its not the battleships role.

Not ALL battleships need to be made small gang viable. Use a tempest, hyp, raven, geddon, phoon…

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I had a bit of a discussion started up on the matter (it was dreads, but quickly enveloped battleships). It was actually a very interesting discussion, somehow either the trollols didn’t see any room to troll or they just didn’t see the thread.

Either way. Feel free to read up on the thread if the topic interests you.

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The scorp’s ecm strength bonus would be the same as before at level 5, since it’s 15% per level. 75% is a role bonus, not a levelled one. The idea with that and others is their damage and general effectiveness being raised for the initial investment into them, or if you don’t feel it’s necessary to spend the time to train battleships up to 5.

Also, i will agree that a raw hp boost would be a great alternative to this for battleship buffs in general.

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Hard pass. Training skills is necessary. Getting skills to 5 for that extra punch is the ONLY reason to train them to 5.