You clearly dont know how tanky T3c logis are. 100 battleship wont break one with another 9 repping it let alone 20.
No, they don’t. A frontline ship is one you use to create a battle line. You use them when you’re expecting a fight. They’re tough, they’ve got good projection, they’ve got good DPS. All of these are of course in flux depending on fit.
A baltec fleet you mentioned is a front line doctrine.
If a baltec fleet were to undock and engage a blops fleet, the blops fleet would lose. If a blops fleet were to undock and engage a baltec fleet, the blops fleet would lose. I don’t think you disagree with that?
So, now we come to the topic of an ambush. The use of their jump/bridge allows them to insert themselves for the ambush. The use of cloak allows them to pre-position for the ambush. The use of covert ships for their strengths to remove the frontline fleet’s ability to effectively fight is what makes it the ambush.
This is your preconception only.
I clearly said even numbers. Not all in battleships mind you. Bombers, recons, battleships, logistics, all executing a precision strike at the very outset of the engagement to completely neutralize the enemy fleet before they have a chance to fight back.
Except it’s not. As I said above, you’ve used a first strike via covert capabilities (such as void bombs in the case of HACs) to take away their exact strengths. HACs are strong for 3 reasons: Speed, ADCs, and excellent damage application. The ambush I described removes at minimum the first two, and inhibits the third (if they’re using cap-dependent guns, you’ve taken that away from them as well).
Surely you know how easy it is to start a fight at zero cap in an ADC? Do you remember when standup void bombs were wrecking everything? This is that.
The sacrifice is cost. Again, we’re not talking about balance here. Cost != Balance… but cost and capability are directly relevant to each other. Paying an extra 4 bil and spending an extra 3+ months training does warrant extra capabilities. It doesn’t have any bearing at all on balance.
So… for all of your talk earlier about how we’re “doubling” their EHP, and how this is a huge massive change that makes them vastly OP godtier ships, we’re actually only talking about a modest increase? You’re contradicting yourself.
You clearly don’t know how to kill logi (keep in mind we’re talking about COVERT T3C Logi, not combat T3C logi). 100 battleships will literally volley logi (not even talking about arty at this point), but even if they couldn’t, the trick isn’t to just keep beating your head against the wall. The trick is to switch targets. Do it right and their reps are still cycling on the wrong target. It’s really not that hard, it happens all the time.
You realise theres 2 of us right? And that modest increase with ur suggested buff would mean double.
And again you are back in that “Special ambush scenario” ■■■■■■■■.
Please god no
I’m just picturing all the passive 800k ehp rattlesnakes farming with a 5k dps tank
Edit: okay 800k is a lot, but you get the point hopefully
Yes, there’s two of us. Hence ‘we’. Unless I misunderstand where you’re trying to go with that - regardless, feels moot.
Lets do some quick math here:
(edit: forums are helpfully formatting this text… it looks like ■■■■, you can probably get the gist of it though)
132x2 = 264. Well in excess of the 150-200k I want.
187x2 = 374, well in excess of the 150-200 I want
150x2 = 300, well in excess of the 150-200 I want
“Double” means 2X to you too, right?
Which. Is. What. Blops. Are. Made. For.
Is it really so ■■■■■■■ hard to understand that they aren’t supposed to be able to just go fight something?
You dont want them just to go fight something. You want them to demolish a same size fleet. They are not meant to do that. Simple as it is. And while ur Uber Special Constructed Nice Lovely Ambush sounds good. It would never work. Even with the EHP buff. 1 out of 1000 fleet would land in ur setup and that 1 fleet would melt the BLOPS fleet. Ehich is completely okay. This is how it should be.
PS: Since we established that current BLOPS have the same EHP as current T1 BS ur buff is actually nothing. Since we are where you want BLOPS to be. Which means you jsut cant pull off the Super Ambush.
PS2: GIT GUD
I want them to be able to use their strengths to their advantage. As I keep saying, I want them to be able to use the strengths that covert fleets already have to cut the balls off of a hostile fleet before the fighting starts. They can do this, easily.
CCP has a long history of supporting the idea that “the fleet that is more prepared should win”.
The PROBLEM is that as you say, they aren’t going to sit there with their thumbs up their asses - they’re gonna start popping blops. And as I keep saying, trading is not a viable option for blops.
Easily circumvented. Imagine a fight is already underway… who cares who’s fighting who, maybe you’re a third party, maybe you’re just a separate fleet assisting the first. Either way, say there’s a baltec fleet (using them again as you brought them up).
Covert ship lights a cyno 40 off the baltec fleet as a probing dictor lands and bubbles them (this happens all the time, nothing unusual at all). Now the bombers drop bombs, the recons go in to do their thing, and when the bridges cycle down the battleships jump in.
I’ve also established that this is 100% dependent on fits. If you want to go in circles all day we can. I am going to go get some food though.
Im confused. Why are you multiplying the values i gave you indicating they already get the EHP youre requesting.
Also, the panther with 187k is with slaves, so why are you doubling it with slaves, but not the others?
You said:
To which i responded to saying they can already get to those values using the mods/tools available already in game.
So an ambush scenario isnt expecting a fight?
If t1 battleships are frontline, then tough is pretty average at 150k to 200k. Which means you want your BLOPs to match these “alleged” frontline ships while also retaining their ability to jump, bridge and cyno.
Most t1 battleships dont have projection. The “baltecmega” has no inherent projection bonus on the hull, same as BLOPs (except widow). BLOPs also have dps (5 heavy drones on 3 of them + gun dps). The widow can still sport 1k dps with torps.
I fail to see a difference in a “frontline” battleship and the BLOPs youre advocating for. You want them to be frontline battleships without taking into account the fact they can jump lightyears and bridge other ships with them.
- So, who cares, it’s a battleship. No one whines that carriers have too much ehp. Also if it’s only base ehp changing most of the snake ehp comes from extenders, not the base so it wouldn’t change much on that type of fit.
- obviously all the passive regen slows down to keep ehps the same. So their passive regen is exactly what it was before.
2- if you double the base hp, you already have a bonus on the undoubled version
Say base is 50k ehp
Tanked base is ~2-300k ehp, adding 150-250k ehp
Double the base ehp, you get 100k ehp
To which the 150-250k ehp still adds
To say the regen wouldn’t change is a lie since the regen depends on the current shield hp that is now BASEx2+Shield extenders instead of just BASE+Shield extenders
Basic maths here fam
I’m taking your supplied values to show they’re not far from the desired values. Far less than “doubling” as you say a number of times. If you want to plug some slaves into a deemer and then double it, I’m sure you’ll see it’s also more than 150-200k EHP.
That said, I would expect 150-200k without HG slaves. That’s far too much (however you could of course put slaves in to get it above, if you’ve more isk than sense).
Only by using slaves and max tank fits. That’s excessive and by far an edge case.
And again… we’re discussing balance. Balance and capability are different concepts. BALANCE would indicate that those T1 battleships would be trading (favourably) against blops. The cost of blops warrants additional capabilities. Said capabilities have no effect on balance, merely on how you use them.
Large turrets in general have projection over medium turrets. The hulls don’t always have range bonuses, but the turrets themselves do have an inherent increase in range. That is the battleship projection mantra.
The difference, frankly, is capability. At the end of the day, in a void if you put 20 battleships of each against each other, they’d trade. That alone demonstrates balance-in-class (which again, is different from capability and the costs of those capabilities).
When you make it a little more realistic outside of a void by adding in support (links, ewar, logi) a supported blops fleet will fall flat on its face against a supported conventional fleet. Which is balanced, and exactly where it should be.
When you add the ability for blops to use their jump/bridge for tactical advantage by immediately entering the fight with a surgical strike intended to cripple the entire hostile fleet, you’re using preparation, skill, and hard counter compositions - again, not a balance issue (balance is whether or not hulls stack up well against each other). They have to pull that surgical strike off or they lose hard. High risk, high reward.
Consider the comparison between blops and capitals. Caps have tank, damage, and by virtue of jump drives mobility. Supers have substantially higher tank and damage and only a slight reduction in range (which really, doesn’t affect mobility in any significant way). You can certainly defang a carrier, you sure as ■■■■ can’t defang a boson.
CCP rebalance shield regen time whenever they change shield hp to keep regen rates the same. If anything it would actually decrease shield regen rates with extenders added, not increase it.
Eh… diminishing returns would be the easiest way to keep it from getting insane. For example, stacking LSEs wouldn’t have a compounding effect on passive EHPS as it does now.
The biggest problem with Blops imo is that they have such a limited purpose. Aside from being a bridge for cloakies all they can do is jump on someone and DPS it down. If that fails for some reason they can jump out or they die. For that role they are well balanced, if you consider that their main advantage comes from the fact that cloaking in general is OP and needs fixes. So they have the advantage of surprise, the advantage of DPS, the advantage of mobility (aka jumpdrive), if you now also give them the advantage of a heavy tank, they are going to be seriously OP.
Any change to the current state would require to redefine the role and many features of the Blops. I very much would love to see that, because I find them to be very lazy designed right now.
I agree completely that blops has a limited purpose - as said, I feel it’s relegated to little more than seal clubbing (and of course bridging, which is SUPER fun…). The “jump in and deeps them” is what bombers are for. I do agree they need “something else”… and marginal ability (I feel it to be marginal after the stated increase) to hold grid feels like something unique that no other covert ship can offer.
That said, I would ask you these questions:
- Do you consider 150-200k EHP to be a “heavy tank”?
- Do you feel that a seal clubbing drop would be swayed by the extra EHP in any statistically significant way?
- Do you feel that there is any emergent behaviour that would come of this (for example concern about them becoming front-line ships)?
- Do you feel that capitals, with their same ability to surprise an opponent with huge dps and jump drive mobility should have paper-thin tanks to take this into account?
The core question is: what are Blops supposed to be? Answering that question answers all your others.
If you want them to be battle-ship-sized assassins, then they fill the role well. Then eHP is meaningless, because your pray has no chance anyway, throw some Windows in and he can’t even target a thing. And if you fly Blops solo then… well don’t, that’s not the purpose of it’s current role.
If you want them to be any other role than that, you have to re-balance the entire ship.
That’s the thing… what IS blops supposed to be? Other than a bridge. No reason whatsoever to bring them to grid for the fun part of the drop, unless you’re antisocial and don’t like groups of people. 20 dudes in bombers with a few recons will rape anything.
You can say “assassin”, but really, that’s not it. Looking at CCP’s own description yields a high degree of uncertainty as well:
- “Short Range Jump drive”…? What?
- Infiltration and espionage? In a battleship?! You don’t infiltrate jack ■■■■ with a battleship. You cyno one in with the ship you use to infiltrate.
- Bridging is boring as ■■■■, so “planting” recon and espionage forces is pointless… you’ve got a cyno there already… what the ■■■■ will your bridged ships see that the cyno won’t?
At the end of the day… they don’t have a niche. They’re used for hotdrops, usually by small groups that don’t have the numbers to just use bombers. That’s it. To call that an assassin is being very generous.
Ultimately, I feel their modus operandi is surprise. The ability to very quickly appear in a place that they really weren’t expected. To fight opponent(s) that really weren’t expecting a fight at that time. Maybe you’re ambushing a ratter, maybe you’re buttsexing a gatecamp. Maybe there’s a fleet that managed to bug out with losses and are on their way home, and you weren’t finished with them. The last two, additional buffer suits them very nicely. I feel that both fit within what you would expect a battleship to be used for.
Well you basically describe an Assassin, sooo…
CCP rarely has a clue what people are going to do with their ships when they design them.
By that description, Titans are assassins. Cyno goes up, titan jumps in and bosons the hostiles. Soooo…
Sounds more like berserkers to me than assassins.
An assassin is someone who silently kills a target without blowing his cover.
A Titan jumping in and decimating a fleet does sound different to me.