HAW fits, carriers, and supers are more than capable of engaging subcaps.
■■■■, I still laugh when I think about a proteus pilot that was mouthing off in local until he got blapped by a 'bus. Thought he was safe, toggling his scram on and off (couldn’t tackle it obviously, just trying to act like hot ■■■■ flying under the guns) and then one volley later a pod was flying out. Followed by some of the most maniacal laughter on comms I have ever heard.
Then consider that capitals are supposed to be supported… a sufficiently sized group of carriers supporting each other is absolutely a thing, and it’ll ■■■■ up a fleet made of cruisers or larger with ease.
Yes i do. I did not assume they can’t. I said useful, not capable. While they are capable, i am yet to see “lets take couple dreads with us to engage them” in my corp chat. And that is what i want. Deglorify them, make them as common as BSes or anything else in fights (with price concerns added). Just a wishful thinking, i know.
There is no point using carriers if you have supers. By the time you have enough carriers to overcome their weaknesses you should be using supers.
Carriers only have a defined role on paper in practice they are just rating ships for people without enough alts to run vni.
There is nothing a carrier can do that isn’t out done by another ship capital or otherwise. People freaked out on sisi then ccp over corrected and ruined them. They were great when they had less than bb dps with the turrets and had huge alpha but only 9 rockets. Had that stayed we would see them have a use
While I won’t disagree that they’re no longer pwnmobiles, they still have their uses. It’s like saying that Pirate battleships are better than T1 battleships, so if you’ve got critical mass you may as well just use pirate ships. Sure that’s a valid point… but… them lossmails yo.
They’re certainly weaker than supers, but on the same token, they’re like 1/10th the cost. It’s a LOT easier to commit carriers to an engagement than it is your super fleet… and that ignores the differences in build time (I don’t honestly know how long it takes to build either, only that it takes longer to build supers).
If you’ve got 50 cap pilots to drop in carriers, or 50 cap pilots to drop in supers, you’re going to be a LOT more careful with the supers than you will with the carriers. The carriers, whatever… depending on SRP you can probably just replace the hulls from the nearest cache and leave the modules to the players. Like dreads, they can be thrown away these days.
■■■■… we never actually did it but our corp was talking about cheap-fitting a bunch of carriers and going on a roam with them, return trip through Valhalla. Would have been wicked fun, and it’s pretty much guarenteed that we’ll get uber-dropped by whichever large bloc was closest. Not an every-day kind of thing, a special-occasion fleet. Like April Fools or something.
With war brewing in Fountain/Delve/etc, that’s likely not going to happen any time soon. But it might happen eventually… it will never happen in the foreseeable future with supers.
but that’s just it… the other problem with carriers. Cost. they are without fail nearly 1b+ more than dreads and that’s just with a T2 fit normally it’s higher as the need to use high meta mods in the buffer tank of a carrier is higher than in the active tank of a dread. at the same time fighters only have extra uses on paper. but HAW will apply damage better and tank better. not to mention while a little costly they can swap mid fight from sub cap to capital weapons. the only reason to use a carrier over a dread is for a quick gank or because you can’t fly a dread.
also with supers vs carriers it’s often cheaper to drop supers rather than carriers just because of how fast a much smaller group of enemy suppers will wipe out carriers. Something you don’t see with dreads and titans or dreads and supers. simply because dreads can actually fight back carriers can’t. Only other time a carrier is better than a dread is when you are only fighting subs and you are at a citadel anchored on the edge of grid with several command dessi. this situation is so rare simply because the only time you are going to use it is when assaulting an enemy structure (otherwise the enemy with just fuck off) and when doing that once again suppers are simply better.
you cant just say “well yeah supers are better but they should be” nothing in eve should be like that. carriers and supers should be similar but they need to be their own thing. Right now there is nothing a carrier can do that a super does not do better. there is no other area in eve where there is simply a direct upgrade except a very, very few T1 to T2. this is not like pirate VS t1 BBs because there are still things those T1s do better other than just being cheaper. some project range way better than pirate, some tank way better than pirate, some have E-war some have more specific weapon system bonuses. even in capitals a Titan is not simply a better dead. they are both similar in role but do it much differently.
■■■■ here’s a simple one. get rid of the 1% command boost bonus add in new types of links that are basically the inverse of the current ones and bonus the carriers to that. rather than affecting fleet mates they effect none fleet mates. still only a 1% bonus so they would not fully counter act enemy boosts but they would weaken them and they could hurt an unprepared fleet or a fleet who got its CS killed. these would not be persistent effects (that would be OP) rather they would be similar to the burst projectors of the supers. highly telegraphed and temporary.
Honestly, I still remember and like the changes we were talking about in a different thread regarding space superiority bonuses.
Turning carriers into dedicated SS boats would not only improve their damage against smaller ships that supers cannot apply to (at least, not without SS fighters and only to the same extent carriers can) but give them a significant role countering supers. They’d be both their big brother’s support and counter at the same time, depending on where they were on-grid.
I agree the command boost bonuses are retarded… if you’re using boosts, you’ve got a command ship.
Taking their fighter bonuses away (ratters are screaming no) and that silly command bonus, and then migrating those bonuses over to SS fighters would go a LONG way towards making them a very legitimate hull class again.
yeah that’s still one of my favorite ideas with it as well. though with abyssal and crap i can’t see ccp having the time to mess with it for quite a while.
even if nothing else just dropping fighter cost and fighter size so that it wasn’t 1b for a full hanger and you could actually use different types of fighters and have spares for those different types would go a long way
Agreed, they have a lot to focus on and I don’t see carriers getting special attention any time soon. And I still think battleships need a balance pass more than carriers need a supplemental one. I believe we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one, I’m pretty sure the changes I’d like to see from battleships are most definitely not what you want to see (based on previous conversation).
OTOH I don’t think fighter costs should be reduced… they’re pretty decent where they are. 25m for a squad of T1 fighters really isn’t bad. When doing SS, I always lead with T1 SS first. They’ll get whelped in the initial scrum, along with a shittonne of other fighters (hostile and otherwise). If it’s still going strong, I’ll launch supplemental T1 otherwise once the bulk of fighters have been cleared, I send in T2 to mop up. At more than triple the cost, I end up saving a lot of ISK lol.
no other capital (other than supers) has such a high operating cost there is simply no need for you to be fielding a bunch of sub par cruisers with carries.
if T1 fighters had any resists at all i could agree but they are just to flimsy to use in any real fight. no one even needs to have that griffin to jam you. just a web and most fleets will clear your flight in 9 shots from just one or two of their ships
Ah, I was talking about large fights and that battle over SS, before the supers use their heavy fighters.
Against subcaps, as long as you’ve got the critical mass of carriers needed to win the fight, you’ll trade well. Their subcaps cost more than your fighters, so even if you end up trading near 2:1 you’ll probably come out ahead. Fighters are a lot easier to resupply too. There is, however, a much better argument with subcaps for starting with T2 fighters given their insanely better stats, although you certainly don’t trade as well.
T1 SS I just expect to die… they’re the vanguard, they charge in and do their best to cause as much damage as possible before they die. T2 SS are more for holding the grid once you’ve reduced their on-grid strength (or throwing a hail-mary when you’ve lost grid control).
You mean the HAW that’s 200km away from the hostile fleet?
Yes, the cost of running a HAW dread is much lower… but the risk is much higher (siege), and the utility is much lower (siege, conventional gun range, kind of ■■■■ tracking). Carriers OTOH can be aligned to a POS/citadel, and immediately warp/fleet warp out to their safe place if they get probed or a cepter charges them.
Not saying they aren’t out-performed in a big brawl, but carriers do have utility with their fighters that a HAW would never even dream of. As you probably well know, if you jump a dread in, expect it to die and then be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t. Carriers, you hope to live and are somewhat unhappily surprised when it dies.
but but again like i said that only works in very, very narrow fields. you are better off with a group of nagas or cains to do that. paper their dps is lower with the same number of ships but their application is much higher. a lot of it seems to be “use a carrier because they are fun” not because they are ever really the best tool. and that really sucks. ccp had a great idea for carriers but their execution killed them
know what i would settle for an even more minor change at this point. give them 4 launch bays 3 lf tubes and 3 support fighter tubes. wouldn’t save them (particularly with how big fighters are) but at least they would have a use as utility capitals
I don’t disagree at all. Their utility has marginal value… but it is technically there. Mostly just playing devil’s advocate.
I agree they are made irrelevant by a wide variety of hulls (nagas, haws, supers, etc). I agree that they cost too much for what they do.
On the flip side of it all though, it’d be REALLY hard for carriers to be what they originally envisioned (anti-subcap) because they’d simply be too good at it or not worth the cost. At least, that’s what I feel the end result would be.
I’m pretty sure we both agree that turning carriers into anti-smallstuff boats would be utterly fantastic for the hull, and probably not overly hard to balance in the current meta. You’d have a LOT of frigate/destroyer doctrine lovers screaming bloody murder, especially combat cepters and T3Ds, but only because they’d finally have a hammer to drop on them that wasn’t called “all the ■■■■■■■ corms in the world”.
The only change needed if they did that would be a rework of their bonuses… swap everything to SS fighters - something to partially counteract the SS fighter dps reduction against subcaps, something to increase fighter speed, and increase fighter durability.
all they would have to do is go back to what they were b4 the ratters bitched.
high damage low cycle time HRS with nearly a 3.5min refuel if all HRS were used. back when the turrets were more of harassment at best but the HRS smashed through cruisers+. it was at such a good point. they could not fully alpha any of them. cruisers BC and BB all needed to be under half shield.(~35-40%) this meant supporting a fleet they had about 9 shots they could use to break reps. now you are lucky to get even 10% of the main tank with a HRS. but then you can’t crab in them and we all know nullbear isk is more important
I suppose something else that might be useful would be to look at moving some of their bonuses to actual support fighters… for example, thannies have their siren bonus, give their sirens a speed bonus as well. Basically, allow a Thanny to run a Siren and two SS.
Your thoughts on HRS are good. I like them. I do feel though that only makes carriers useful again against cruiser+, without handling the role overlap they share with HAWs and Supers (neither of which have any real use against frigates and destroyers, same as carriers).
Letting carriers be a good answer to frigs and destroyers, and be an okay answer for kiting cruisers, where HAWs/Supers are okay for heavy cruisers and a good answer to BC and BS (HAWs and supers have more than enough utility distinction between them) allows everyone to not only be effecitve at what they do, but not feel crowded.
On the flip side… what good is a subcap support fleet at that point? Hmm.
that’s why i liked my idea back when support fighters were first coming out. giving them each a charged abuility similar to the HMS. so the ecm get a powerful ecm burst. the siren get a scram. the nuets get an AOE nuet. and the webs get a TP. then you have something you can give the carriers a worth while bonus to on the support fighters.
the HRS were set apart from the HAW at that point simply because while HAW were decent DPS the HRS could overwhelm logi. it let the two exist w/o overlap.
i would much rather the SS fighter idea still. and there is still plenty of room for the support fleets. HAW need them to apply and SS fighters are still outrun by cruisers and bellow so they would need them for tackle. not to mention they would be much more help with dealing with the fighters ecm and what not. not to mention nuets to shut off tanks and weapons. it would just shift their roll further into support and i see no issue with that. its already the use of them in large capital fights and it would not have much effect on smaller fights compared to now
finally having wd effect fighters (with an added buff to ecm resistance) would also help make sure that sub caps stay very much needed
I agree, for the possibilities I still think SS feels like the best fit for them. But if they got buffed to handle frigates through kitey cruisers, I’d still want to see them get SF bonuses as well. More than what they have. That way they can support against battleship fleets in a different capacity.
Running 3 siren squads (in the case of a thanny) would allow a carrier group to tackle an obscene number of battleships. Perfect time for the heavy fighters to come in and lay waste to everything.
A charged ability as you describe for SF would be fun too… not sure I like the aoe neut, perhaps just a “heavier neut” that they can use to more rapidly break a ship’s cap. But the charged scram, TP, and ECM burst, my my my those open up some very interesting options. As long as they belonged to carriers (for the sake of avoiding role crowding). Besides… supers have burst projectors to meet that need already.