Blops BB - Split like Recon Cruisers

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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Initial credit for the idea must go to @Lugh_Crow-Slave… he mentioned it in passing and honestly I’ve been very heavily in thought about the subject since then. I love the idea. I’ve always felt that blops BBs would have a VERY fun time in a big fight, but they obviously cannot do this without gloriously dying in a fire.

To start with, the role of this ship - the niche it would occupy.

The targeted engagement profile would be anything that a battleship fleet would normally fill.

The niche is to reduce the reliance on a bridging titan. A group of battleships can rapidly travel to contested space without requiring the capital staging. They’ve got tank so they can actually engage in a sustained fight unlike their cloaky cousins (existing blops BBs).

These battleships would be almost a mixture of roles of the carrier and dread. Where the carrier excels at killing subcaps and is relatively vulnerable to getting defanged by support fleets, and where a dread oppositely suffers from having a hard time killing subcaps but not having to worry about getting defanged, these battleships would be able to mix the capabilities of both.

You’d also be able to have them jump in as subcap support for carrier fleets.

Key highlights:

  • T2 resist profile
  • Could bridge COMBAT Recons (but not bombers or force recons)
  • Roughly 250m sig radius (quite small for a battleship), at a cost of not being able to fit “battleship only” modules such as grapplers and TSBs

The finer details:

  • Decently-shiny tank would generally sit around 250-300k EHP
  • Decently-shiny dps would generally sit around 800
  • Being a T2 BB, I’d expect their decently-shiny cost to sit around 2.5B

Role bonuses:

  • D-scan immunity instead of cloaking bonuses
  • 75% Jump Fatigue Reduction
  • 33% improved ship agility

Blops bonuses:

  • Resistance bonus, say 3-4% per level
  • 15% reduction in bridging fuel costs per level

Racial BB bonuses:

  • Weapon bonuses that play to the strengths of race’s primary weapon platform

Now… if it’s POSSIBLE (I don’t know if it is) I would add one other huge role bonus. But I don’t know if it’s programmatically possible. The ability to jump to a cyno in-system. Why? Because they’d be able to land on something in-system without the delay of waiting to exit warp, at the obvious cost of the capacitor that jump drives use, and of course fatigue.

There still feels like many reasons to use carriers, dreads, and all existing subcaps. What say you? Too OP? Workable? Doesn’t really fill a need that other ships can’t fill better?

3 Likes
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… was expecting you to go insane and make something stupid OP instead while you achieved that in most aspects of this the finished product would only be used to bridge combat recons should a group want them rather than/ in addition to force recons.

the dps is too low to use these as opposed to anything else that fits the role and if you fix the dps the rest becomes op.

as for in system cynos i’m still of the opinion that cynos should just work this way in general.

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I love this idea. It feels like a much more worthwhile ship for smaller fleets, whereas a BLOPs and a cyno chain is an expensive way of moving smaller fleets anywhere.

1 Like
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I found 2 things that I would like to get some more details about:

Does this mean that this new ship can only bridge combat recons (or just that’s what they would be used for most likely as Lugh said), or anything except the two mentioned ships, at which point wouldn’t be better if it could bridge subcapitals that can’t fit a cov-ops cloak?

My question here isn’t really why but instead how? We’re talking about battleships here, not light(ish) cruisers, how can you not see something this big?

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Blobbs of Blackbirds? That does not make any sense.

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you understand that BB is the standard designation for battleship right?

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  1. OP AF, 800dps with 250k ehp? You are talking about something dat overshines doctrine pirate bs meanwhile able to block dscan and jump.

  2. Over complicated mechanics

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However that may be, in a place like New Eden, there is no room for error. I am very sure that writing battleship will not shorten anyones lifespan by a lot.

It is not my fault that two letter acronyms can be confused with others. If mister overpowered wants to clear, she / he can write down one word.

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I thought that was a US designation to be honest. In UK terms a BB is a gun that fires ballbearing sized pellets :smiley:

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The DPS goal was to be slightly lower than your average battleship doctrine, while having higher tank to better survive an engagement against an alpha doctrine. With 300k EHP, you need to have at least 30 battleships hit it at once… since server lag, and KM whores with split gun stacks are a thing, I expect that it would take closer to 50 battleships in an alpha fleet to be able to volley these off, at which point you’d be better off bringing T1 battleships via titan bridge to avoid the rather insane losses.

It would be able to bridge only combat recons, different from their “force” variant capable of bridging covops stuff.

If size were an issue, D-Scan would miss frigates, which are in cases 1/10th the size. Odds are if you want to get role-playish with it, it’d be the same as stealth craft of today - radar absorbing material, along with angles that tend to refract rather than reflect.

Yes, they do. They also have easily triple the skill requirements (blops, jump drives, racial BB 5) of a pirate BS doctrine, and easily triple the cost. Anyone who says cost is not a balancing factor has certainly not tried to SRP a T2 BB doctrine before. If you start trading kills between these and pirate BBs, the pirate BB fleet will easily win the isk war.

Gotta remember the training and cost of these ships is quite in-line with a carrier. A pirate BB fleet against a carrier blob is a very one-sided fight, the carriers would mop the floor with them in all but the most one-sided of engagements.

Maybe if you’re 5 years old? I hardly see anything complicated here. In fact the only thing that’s not in a multitude of other ships is the in-system cynos.

Mr. Overpowered is lazy, thank you very much. @Corraidhin_Farsaidh is correct that BB is specifically a US naval designation, however I see it frequently used on the forums (and I myself have used it many times without confusion from those responding).

Did you have anything to contribute to the topic, or were you only interested in an absent-minded, asinine attempt at trolling the thread?

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In EvE BB is almost always used as the abbreviation for the Blackbird as pointed out by Elitatwo. I merely pointed out that BB is only a US standard and pretty meaningless to the rest of the world.

Battleship is clear and precise, with the most common abbreviation here being BS. Coincidentally that is the abbreviation for my view on your attempt to patronize me.

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Say what now? I’m not allowed to agree with your argument, without your viewing it as being patronizing? Do you even understand what that word means?

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This is the section I refer too. I had no problem with your comment and agree many know BB is a battleship, but many more would not, or would confuse with a Blackbird in this context.

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That comment was not directed at you, but rather at @elitatwo for somehow needing clarification on a “blops blackbird”. I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Anyone with half a braincell would know that “blops” in it’s purest form is the “black ops” skill, which applies solely to battleships. In less pure forms (“blops drop”) it can also represent any form of engagement involving black ops battleships, including ships with covops cloaks, which again does not apply to the blackbird.

It was also not patronizing. There was no subtle or hidden distaste for his comment in my response. It was a very overtly hostile response.

If you thought I was referring to you, when asking if you had anything to contribute, no. I was replying to the quote above that block of text.

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Setting aside anything else, BB is used all the time for the blackbird so a new idea propsing blops BB would seem to imply such.

In terms of the idea, would a battleship that can’t be seen on d-scan not be OP? With combat recons the combat utility is traded for sneakiness. A battleship would bring a lot more dps to bear. This is a genuine question to understand better as I haven’t used blops yet, but its on the (ever growing) list.

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I can acknowledge that BB is commonly used for blackbird. On the other hand, proposing a blackbird with a jump drive, 800 dps, and a 250-300k EHP buffer wound not support that line of thinking. I merely mean to say that with a little bit of thought, it becomes apparent that the topic is of a battleship.

As for the D-Scan, that’s an excellent question.

Regarding the Recon Cruisers, Force Recons and Combat recons are balanced against each other on multiple metrics… tank, ewar, and cloak/dscan. The combat variants have stronger ewar, stronger dps, stronger tanks, and dscan immunity. The force variants trade some of those strengths for covops cloaks.

Regarding the battleships, they swap their cloaking bonus for d-scan immunity, with the same increase in combat capability that the combat recon saw. Rather than get an ewar bonus which would invalidate combat recons, I suspected it would be more interesting to simply amp up the combat bonuses on these BBs and leave the combat recons with a very useful role in supporting the BBs.

Basically, by themselves they’d be a decent (but not amazing) way to bring force to bear on an enemy. But if they really wanted to shine, they’d be supported by Combat Recons, controlling the grid for them. A mixed synergistic doctrine.

The net result, ideally, would be this:
Carriers supported by Battleships, supported by combat recons.

The carriers are busy defanging other carriers, the battleships are busy providing fire support, the combat recons are busy doing grid control. The increased tank of a combat recon allows it to better stay in a fight than the force recon variants.

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Wouldn’t the ability to have a fleet of alts in d-scan immune battleships in a deep safe be an issue though? Especially in WH’s without local?

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Combat probes? They’re especially common in a WH.

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Okay, then Mr. 4-year-old
I said these ships are “mechanically overcomplicate” base on CCP’s game design philosophy.

For example, the original post removed BS exclusive modules from these ships, like MJD and grapplers.

Such acts that block certain aspect in a class of ships just to make them somehow “weaker” is contradicting to CCP’s ship design philosophy, I don’t need to repeat that.

Overally, these ships you designed are heavily overlapping with other ships and completely useless in current meta game.

They are t2 battleships capable of jumping in and out but weaker and even more pricey than dreadnoughts and carriers, meanwhile, they cannot blop bridge, so what is the point bringing them into battles? Are you expecting combat recon ships being able to fast tackle ratters?

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First of all, MJDs are not exclusive to battleships; you can put them on battlecruisers.

And I’m very sorry to tell you that there is actually a certain class of battlecruiser that cannot fit an MJD. It’s called an Attack Battlecruiser. I know that’s a very confusing topic that you apparently don’t understand but… wait… you… you do understand that?

Oh. But then why is it confusing?