As a person who FC’d 100-150 man blops hotdrop fleets, I %100 would jump/immobilize blopses if it had the cyno inhibition effect, as that would be the only proper counter to use against capital umbrellas in many null regions (e.g. Delve, Impass or NC space). Without the cyno inhibition I won’t even bother tackling PvE capitals in these regions. When I immobilize my blops, the defenders could organize a response fleet and come kill it even if the initial target PvE ship dies. Still a fine exchange for the chance of killing a super or a few Rorquals.
Rorqual tank matters for content generation because Rorqual is on the initial defender side. It has to survive until help arrives. Blops tank doesn’t matter much, as its help is already there (its own fleet), and content is generated when/if the defending local side organizes a fleet and warps on grid.
Consider though that I’ve seen a lot of the suggestions on the cyno inhib include a spool-up time.
Our PVE cyno policy is “if you see an inhib go up when you get tackled, you light your cyno NOW.” It won’t kill an active cyno, and if there is any spool-up at all, they’ll just light their cynos as soon as they see the drop start. You’re back to getting blobbed by capitals.
As mentioned, I support the general idea; I’d rather see it as a role bonus to mobile inhib anchor time for simplicity. I like the idea of having the ability to cockblock someone’s bait drop. But even with the inhib, you’re still going to have to deal with the capital umbrella.
Since you’re going to have to deal with the capitals regardless, I feel that you need to be equipped to try and handle a capital response. Since the principle threat to a subcap fleet is carriers, the battleships should be equipped with the means to defang them. Not 100% of the time, it shouldn’t be an iwin ship, but if you can defang their carriers, you should be able to win. A blops fleet cannot defang a carrier blob now unless they just use falcons to jam out all the fighters… which again highlights “not BBs” as a solution. Or widows, but you’d need a lot of widows.
Edit:
What I guess I’m trying to say is yes they should provide some utility, it strikes me as a very “utility-rich” niche… but recons provide utility already. The BBs should offer “staying power”. That’s the whole point behind a battleship. Thick tank, big guns.
I mean, if you catch a PvE capital, chances are he’s been careless anyway. There are people who has been careless to not light their cynoes for an entire 1 minute. If we have a spool time on an inhibitor module, or (reduced) anchor time on a mobile cyno inhibitor, then the target has less time to be careless. If it goes online instantly, then the target has even less time (just the initial tackle before the blops comes on grid).
In all cases the target has some time. The question is how much. The less time it has, the more people will be careless. This is how my proposal is a counter to the capital umbrella. If the target is really careful, then they deserve the help of their capital umbrella anyway.
The whole point of my proposal is being able to drop on places where you can’t otherwise counter the capital umbrella. More tank on blopses, and a force that is based on tanky battleships instead of bombers/T3Cs will not change much. These people will drop 100+ titans+supercapitals on you. You can’t really defang them at a rate that is not devastating to your fleet. You can’t still do anything if your fleet was marauder level tanky. The whole point of my post relies on the target being careless about lighting the cyno on time. If reduce the time that we give to him, from 60 seconds, to 5 or 10 seconds, then many more people will fail to light their cyno and more PvE capitals will die in these areas of space (as it should be).
So as you see, blops tank is not the issue here. Besides, people are much less likely to accept a tank buff on the blops than a utility upgrade. As I said, the tank buff changes lots of other things including fleet vs. fleet warfare. Nobody wants to see instantly droppable, reduced fatigue ships to be used as mainline fleet doctrines vs. other PvP fleets. Blopses are essentially for infiltrating behind enemy lines and killing unsuspecting ships.
I like the idea - I would just shorten the coverage range to like 50-75km. Add a warm up timer.
And to those who are on the Goons chat - Goons lost their space, they avoided most of the conflict and didn’t loose a lot of their war chest. They now have been able to bring in like 5x the amount of ore and ISK the rest of the game brings in a year in a month.
Rorqs, dreads, and marauders all have self-tackle aspects. I’d love to see that added to carriers as well (locked in place for 5 mins if they turn on a NSA for example). But that’s a different topic.
It’s quite easy to tackle some capital ships. And I agree, they have less time to be careless - I like that, as I had said. I do LIKE the concept of a cyno inhib ability for the BBs.
They will WANT to drop 100 (super)capitals on you. If you inhib their cyno, I 99% promise that a response fleet will be going gate to gate in subcaps to push you off the tackled rorq. If you’ve got 30 BBs, and they bring in 50 cruisers, your only answer at the moment is GTFO. Quickly. Net result is although you’ve avoided the cap blob, they’ve still pushed you off before you’ve killed the capital ship.
On the contrary, I would LOVE to see that. I think my personal favourite idea (mine, and a lot of people didn’t like it which is fair) was to give them single-capacity bomb launchers (originally just a module that could load standup ASM bombs but I think I like regular bomb launchers more) with a long reload. You cyno them in (as they cannot warp cloaked) at the bombing target, they launch bombs and start emptying their guns into the enemy fleet. Differs from bombing runs because you don’t have to be pre-aligned and warp off before they look at your bomber.
It fits the “suddenly wtf?!” niche, it excels at wiping out anchored F1 monkeys that need to be purged anyways, and if it ever got implemented I would totally be okay with the current resist profile.
Infiltration is all fine and good… but honestly, how often does it actually get used for infiltration? Messing with a corp/alliance’s rearguard and such sounds very fun. But they rarely ever do this in practice. Most of the time they just sneak in, blap a ratter or miner, and vanish. That doesn’t feel like infiltration, that doesn’t feel like slipping behind enemy lines to wreak havoc. It just feels like shooting a fish in a barrel.
There is no need to manage the environment to ensure larger corporations do not dominate all. Selective domination will always ensure that larger empires will fracture as leaders wanting to be their own independent state will always arise within the larger empire to take from it what they will.