15 with an additional 20% if the pilot trained their sensor skills, so 18.
With a command-linked T2 Falcon at 18.2 sensor per ECM, you have about 101% chance per mid slot to jam it. You could of course use multiple jams and overheat them if you think 101% is not enough to keep the Cenotaph permanently jammed.
How?
Why do you keep saying that?
You are living in the situation where the Cenotaph is highly effective. It doesn’t have nearly as much impact anywhere outside your part of space as far as I know.
Wrong. Make that 500k +, which means it will always live long enough to DOT multiple ships. Even if you immediately primary it with your whole fleet. Even if you overheat. It WILL DOT your key ships.
Wrong. Make that 5000+ DPS per Basi, more than 20.000 DPS from a full squad. Which means a smallscale Fleet of 10-30 ships can for a long time not even hurt it until you disable the Logis first. Have you ever tried to disable 4 Fleetboosted Basis flown by high skilled pilots with a small gang? Let me tell you, that will take time. Enough time for the Cenotaph to effectively DOT all your key ships.
Wrong. Make that 150+, which reduces your Jam chance against it to pretty much zero.
Well, I just took some Cenotaph fits of the ships you fought. The tankiest one was 105k EHP.
The T2 tank fits I threw together got more like 140k.
But again, it turns out you’re living in a part of space that is very different than the rest of space if a ship like this gets 500k EHP.
Sure, I too can add links, overheat Pithym A-type multispectrum hardeners and equip a full set of high-grade Nirvana implants and get over 500k.
But you know what the funny thing is?
How does one kill such a massive beast of a ship?
If only the game had some way to bypass silly high resistances like that. I think a Cenotaph could have an easy time killing someone who has overblinged their ship like that - the ship has only 75k raw hitpoints!
I was listing raw hitpoint repairs, I’m pretty sure you’re modifying it with resistances.
(But what if you could ignore those resistances and hit the Cenotaph straight at it’s raw hitpoints? Wouldn’t that be a strong tool against those way-too-blingy wormholers?)
I’m disappointed you didn’t go for high-grade Jackals in addition to the remote sensor boosters and info links. You’d get 271 sensor strenght!
I can conclude that we’re talking about very different situations and I can see why the Cenotaph is so strong where you fight.
The Cenotaph seems to excel at countering exactly the kind of monster you describe. Maybe bring a Cenotaph of your own to bring it down?
For everyone else in space who isn’t brawling in multi-billion fits the Cenotaph is a pretty mediocre ship, brought along on blops fleets for fun and to deal nice damage versus caps, or to pressure the occasional high-bling target they find.
Many strategies in EVE have a counter, and it appears bling ships now too have a counter!
They always had. Skill and tactics. And this is now removed by an easy skilless massacre mechanic. And that is exactly who low-skill player like hotdroppers love it and high-skill players like WH smallscalers hate it. That is why it ruins otherwise good fights that usually go Skill-vs-Skill, Tactic-vs-Tactic. As linked in the BR above, that smaller Armor Gang had good chances to fight a much larger shield gang. It was uncertain for a long time who could decide that battle for himself. A single Cenotaph easily decided it, absolutely onesided.
We can end this discussion, as forseen. While I never would deny an objectively OP mechanic as being OP if it hurts the space you live in, you seem to have no problem to accept an objectively OP mechanic as being fine if it hurts the space where I live in. Thats the difference.
Keep in mind this advantage of bling ships is not removed by the Cenotaph, it is reduced.
Even if the Cenotaph bypasses the resistances, all other ships won’t bypass the resistances so cannot help focus fire, or are still dealing their normal -resisted- damage.
In what way does it ruin otherwise good fights?
Until now you’ve only been complaining about the ship dealing high damage in the situation it is designed to deal high damage.
Could you explain how it ruins otherwise good fights?
Finally we are getting somewhere with this discussion with real arguments, something concrete beyond “the ship deals a lot of damage so it is bad for the game”.
So it affects balance of how an armor gang could fight a larger shield gang? By dealing almost twice the damage the number two (TFI) did, and contributing one fifth of the damage of the total gang?
Well yea, that happens more often in this game.
I’ve seen battleship fleets that got a massive boost in effectiveness by having one Fax around to repair them.
Entire fleet engagements decided by one good interdictor.
I can see how the Cenotaph had impact in that fight, but I fail to see why it is bad for the game if players can reship into an effective counter to another fleet and then proceed to use that ship to their advantage.
I have lost interest to further waste any time in taking part in this discussion, thank you. It has already wasted more of my time than I wanted, even despite I knew that from the first post. My fault to keep trying despite knowing better.
My bad. My opinion will not change, because it is based on long year experiences in game design and balance (not nessessarily limited to EVE Online), EVE lore, EVE mechanics, smallscale fights and tactics. That ship and it’s mechanic is crazy OP, incredibly bad designed and hurting gameplay. Despite a LOT better options being offered to CCP from the very first moments.
Then please turn that experience into a coherent argument about why you think the Cenotaph is bad for the game and the way you suggest the ship can be changed in a way that it holds it’s strengths and niche but in a healthier situation.
Because until now the main argument you had that I’ve heard is “it deals a lot of damage in my specific niche”, which happens to be the niche in which the ship excels by design: high resistance brawls of large subcaps.
How does it impact gameplay with it’s high damage?
Does it dominate the meta, how?
What are the strategies people have tried against it?
What are the new strategies that are being used to enable the ship?
Does it just create a new meta? Add a new counter to previously uncounterable options?
Or does it decrease the amount of ship choices players have?
And any more useful things you can think of that are relevant to the discussion.
Because sure, you can already be completely hating the ship because it’s supposedly oppressive in your niche, please tell us too how and why that is the case. Instead of just saying that it deals a lot of damage and must be bad.
This is highly inaccurate. I distinctively remember playing a Rogue in World of Warcraft, kiting players with crippling poison while my bleeds killed them.
Same with Warlock DoTs, most of those were single target when I played.
Area of Effect, Damage over Time, the only thing they have in common is that they are both gaming concepts of how you can deal damage, but aren’t linked together in any way.
Some attacks do use both characteristics, but that doesn’t mean a DoT has to be AoE.
I think the reason we’re seeing stuff like that is simply because the supply of ships and pilots with the skills to fly them is still relatively low. Also, BLOPS is a specific style of combat where your point about DOTs not stacking is valid. It’s generally many on one, as opposed to the fights I’m talking about, which are one on one or many on many.
Assuming Damnation command bursts with a mindlink (I think breacher pods take command burst HP into account):
For armor brawl setups, what I’m saying is fair; and probably understated for wormhole groups that tend to go with a lot of blingly/faction ships and modules. Small gang kiting and positional long range fleets, like what we see in nullsec, will still be viable. I’m concerned about armor brawl, and all the ships that do nothing but armor brawl, being made irrelevant.
You’re right that people can adapt to this, but I doubt this is where the meta will go. 1.5 logi for every DPS ship? or just ditch brawling entirely and bring a shield kite fleet instead? Unless armor brawl in general gets tweaks to increase damage rather dramatically, I know what I would do.
Indeed, and the thing that convinced me that Cenotaphs are absolutely broken was a 1v1 against one in a polarized Tempest, pumping out almost 1900 DPS on overheat (and I was overheating), perfect range control and double heavy neuts. If anything should hard counter a resist-bypassing mechanic, it should be polarization. I got curb-stomped. It wasn’t even close. When a mechanic dramatically outclasses its natural counter, we’re looking at a serious balance issue.
I can indeed see the Cenotaph as a threat to high resist armor brawls.
If armor brawls stop existing because of Cenotaphs only I agree this may require changes to the Cenotaph. Less variety is never a good thing.
But I guess until now armor brawls were in favour because of the previous ‘new ships’ that were added, the Triglavian battlecruisers and battleships?
New ship, new meta, it’s not always bad.
I looked it up, I guess you mean this fight?
Nice of you to try, good to know these stats, I was wondering how it would go!
What I notice is that it was a buffer fit Tempest though. By equipping those plates and armor pumps you nearly tripled the breacher pod damage from 280 dps to 740 dps.
A better counter would be a (polarized) active-tanked ship rather than a passive one, as the Cenotaph loves the high hitpoints of passive tanks. A polarized ship seems to be a fun idea, but you were not flying it’s natural counter.
I want Exotic Dancers used as human shields against breacher pods, also all those “prisoners”, “guerrilla”, “mercenaries”, “scientists” we get from missions and can’t even scrap for resources atm, could be used as regular CHARGES, for an hypothetical “ANTI-BREACHER” defense crew, thus invent a counter mechanic.
Freighters will have to pay for these “human charges”, have a dedicated “human container” where to store these “CHARGES” crews, and an appropriate Hi or MID slot module that will consume them as the breacher pods try to access the Ship Neural system…
Ideally ALL ships could have a “humans” container cargo space, in addition to the normal “GAS Storage” or “Fleet ships”, “ORE, or “AMMO”, that some Command and Industrial ship already sports
“Humans” transport could become a highly valuable job in addition to have the former job to function as “charges” container for those ships that will be able to fit the “anti-breacher-pod” module….
Armor brawl has been popular for years for smaller groups, even before Trig ships. The mids allow you to hold things or control the fight without needing to dedicate a lot of people to hyper-specialized ships, and if you’re close enough to scram/web stuff, short range weapons are just better.
Correct. It’s true that it was not an optimized anti-Cenotaph fit. I wasn’t looking to fight a Cenotaph specifically and I didn’t really understand the Cenotaph at the time.
I probably should have said that a little better. It would logically follow that if you’re fighting something that ignores resists, foregoing resists for more damage should be a natural counter. It’s not, I’ve cooked up active rep polarized ships and they don’t work. You take too much damage from secondary weapons. If you want to solo a Cenotaph, triple-rep Hyperions and bling-rep Maelstroms are probably the best options.
In some ways, that kind of highlights the problem with these ships. They’re supposed to be particularly good against buffer ships, but they’re also so good against active rep ships that I have to pick ships that are a class larger and have rep bonuses to find a potential counter. Their ability to bypass resists is supposed to be a key strength, but when I forego resists to crank more damage into them, I lose in that setting too. They’re supposed to be ideal for fleet/gang settings, where they can apply DOTs to multiple ships at the same time, but even in solo settings, they’re a monster.
I think we’ve established that it’s pretty extraordinary in certain settings. It should be trading a lot for those advantages. Maybe mobility, maybe it’s a lousy solo ship, maybe it’s a glass cannon etc. Instead, it is very good in practically all other settings too.
the more i think about it.. the ceno can only have one breacher round working at a time no matter how many are on grid.. upto 75 secs later the next one can fire..
soooooo whets to stop the freighter from aligning and and warping as soon as the point is gone?? all i see if op bitching about the gank.
frigates would end up on the kill mail. technically bumping in this case might be partitionable.. i had a gm warning for bumping miners.. miners that claimed to be pvpers.