So it could. But ask yourself, how does that stack against say an AF? You can dual prop an AF just as easily. They have slightly less sig tank (but still more than enough), whilst having more damage and more tank.
An AB bonus collides with the sansha line, so I can’t see that ever getting implemented. It does give them a very broad buff, but I’d be concerned that having MWD speeds with an AB would be seriously broken. If it’s not MWD speed, it doesn’t fill the role that you describe.
At that point, I’d probably bring a combat cepter instead of a tackle cepter, because you’d only be able to kill it with a SB.
It wouldn’t be stepping on sansha toe’s because it wouldn’t have an ab bonus the base speed would just be built in, it wouldn’t win a 1v1 vs an AF but it doesn’t have to, it can intercept a talos with it’s lower sig while in mwd, while an af’s sig would still be higher causing it more problem’s trying to catch up to a bc.
Something like 17% sig reduction while in mwd (85% compared to fleet inti’s 75%) + 20% to base speed (same mwd speed)+ 3 mid’s min I would feel as if that would be worth something in combat.
But now you’re describing a tackle cepter. Giving it slightly more sig reduction and slightly more speed won’t really help it because whatever could kill it before would kill it now. You’re better off in a tackle cepter, staying outside of scram range or diving in for a scram if they’re going to MJD. A dual prop tackle cepter does the exact same thing.
Ok let’s put it into a situation, your in your combat inti lets say a claw, you jump the gate and there is a hurricane + stiletto, with these change’s you would be able to burn 30km’s away from the hurricane and then go for the stiletto. It scram’s you so you scram it back activate afterburner and burn it down, your higher speed + low sig reduces the incoming damage from the hurricane enough for you to kill the stiletto and then warp off after its dead.
The only other problem I see here is that combat inti’s have low tracking (if longer ranged weapons) so with faster speed’s it would be even harder to hit the stiletto so might need more tracking focus as well.
I don’t disagree that in concept that works. The stilly is a soft enough target that a combat cepter can kill it. But is that a good enough reason for you to hop into a claw and roam in it? Killing the odd tackle cepter in a wimpy gate camp?
This can be multiplied in big fleet’s as well thou, killing of tackle while they tackle your fleet mate’s and having enough tank to last long enough to peel them off.
The lower sig in theory will be able to tank a great number of people than an af with a greater tank, if the gun sizes in general are medium and up, if they are small guns and high tracking gun’s then the af will tank harder.
In a bigger fleet, you’re just gonna gate face-■■■■■■ by the first guy to get a good angle on your transverse. Or a jackdaw. Or any RLML cruiser. Etc.
Your scenario only works because the hurricane can’t track you while you burn out. Multiple people, they should be spreading out so that no matter which direction you travel, you’ll be flying at a good vector for their guns. They’ll also have a more varied comp. Heaven help you if, like most proper gate camps, they have a Huginn.
Honestly, I don’t know. When the changes first came out I just wanted them to convert all of the combat cepters into their tackle cepter equivalents and do away with the problem entirely. But if I had to pick:
We’ve all roamed into a carrier at some point. It’s reasonably easy to defang them, but if they’re smart they can launch their fighters, volley, and recall before you can do too much damage. Giving them an SS role, they become exceptionally useful in larger fights. But my playstyle is nullsov stuff, not LS/FW. The only two frigates I ever fly these days are retributions and bombers. Maybe a scalpel, sometimes a stilleto.
A 500% damage bonus against drones could be handy, but I doubt the code will allow for that, sounds amazing actually, technically a neut and drone set are the only thing’s stopping a inti from killing bigger ship’s so a bonus vs drone’s might make them pretty damn strong.
I like it i’m going to borrow this idea from you :].
Have a look at the bonuses and “modules” SS fighters have. It makes them excel at killing fighters, while making them “better than nothing but pretty sucky” against frigates and worthless against anything else. There’s no reason at all that you couldn’t extend that to drones as well, although I don’t think that the impact is significant enough… defanging a drone boat is often times harder than just killing the drone boat. I suppose properly buffed it wouldn’t be.
A gang of 15-20 dudes in combat cepters, if they had significant SS bonuses, would in my mind be able to rapidly defang a hard carrier drop during a large scale fight. Their speed, sig tank, and everything else would make them hard for regular subs to kill (and all but impossible for caps to kill). Frees up the rest of your subs to fly in other hulls, rather than just Ferox all the time (hyperbole but still).
Fighter mechanics would have to be changed for that be feasible. As it stands, fighters have a “dps cap”. So even with a 500% damage modifier, you’d still only be applying a set dps to fighters so you aren’t volleying multiple fighters in the squad at once.
However, i think the niche is very narrow for a couple reasons.
Why bring 15-20 combat ceptors when you could just bring 15-20 carrier’s with SS fighters? A cyno is faster than inties could ever be. Plus they can then switch out to normal fighters and actually do damage to other things that aren’t fighters.
Carrier fighters still apply quite well to frigs and with these interceptors sitting at 0 on fighters trying to kill them will be pretty easy for a carrier to pop them. Or other carrier’s fighters to swoop in and pop them. Especially if the carriers have subcap support (webs/paints or use projected bursts).
They could be OK in small gang where its more common for small number of capitals to be giving trouble, but small gang players will choose a logi ship or 100mn self-tanking ship and slowly wittle fighters down (or ignore them), rather than a ship that can really only do 1 thing in a very niche scenario.
While the “its better than nothing” attitude is true, i think there are probably some other avenues that could be explored to making combat ceptors more viable.
Perhaps splitting interceptors into 2 categories:
Fleet Interceptors: High warp speeds
Combat Interceptors: High subwarp speeds
As mentioned, people have said “interceptors are meant to intercept”. Yes, but sometimes they get too focused on the warp speed aspect.
This may require some nerfing of fleet interceptor subwarp speed (minor), but then increase the subwarp speed of the combat interceptors. So they now perform 2 different roles. One is fast warping and bubble immune to get in front of something. The other is a little slower in warp and not bubble immune, but much faster on the field. Allowing them to tackle kiters or other fast ships on grid where you want more grid control. Or to burn pings on grid much faster than a normal fleet ceptor.
This gives each ceptor a dedicated role, rather than just shoehorning combat ceptors in a niche that they still may never be used for.
I agree, and I’d support changing that mechanic. I always thought it was annoying that the best you could ever do was volley a single fighter off. It’s not like carriers are underpowered at the moment, their Achilles Heel has always been getting defanged. Making it happen faster wouldn’t be overly harmful to them.
The skill point requirement for combat cepters is magnitudes lower, allowing pilots that aren’t able to fly capitals to participate in a combat cepter
Replacement subcaps can literally be ejected from supporting capitals for ages
Cepters can be titan bridged, while still being able to use wormholes to rage burn, and are much easier to stage at a ping on a grid
Subcaps are inherently easier to control than fighters in tidi (although tbf rip cepters in tidi)
Carriers can certainly switch out to normal fighters… or they can start with them if they’ve got supporting cepters that are more effective.
You can warp to pings/probes to more rapidly close on the carriers that are 1000km away
Reasonably well, yes, I’d see them have advanced SS modules, such as a 20km fighter-only scram, “evasive maneuver damage control”, etc. The goal would be that killing these with carriers would be basically impossible. I’ve always felt that capitals must have subcap support, and that lacking subcap support, they should die in a fire. One such combat cepter should be able to defang a carrier before it can do any noteworthy (edit: rather than noteworthy, “efficient” seems a better term) damage. It’s easily countered by subcaps, yes, but that’s the point. Another one of the things I’ve always hated is homogeneous doctrines. It’s boring as ■■■■ when you’ve got 200 dudes in feroxes, 30 dudes in logi, 20 huginns, and a couple links. Anything that gives more snowflake roles, to the point where “everything is a snowflake role” is ideal to me.
I don’t at all disagree with what you’re saying, it would definitely need fleshing out. But I feel that the “anti-carrier subcap” niche is underpopulated. Rock paper and scissors are still supposed to be a thing, generally speaking.
In theory, yes. In the age of injectors though, people aren’t telling newbs to inject into combat ceptors. They’ll just say “get into a carrier so you can krab, kill every subcap and defang other carriers”.
This was one thing i was going to bring up but forgot. I feel like doing a “defanging” role in TiDi would be terrible and even more unfun than being in a capital during that time
With the amount of capitals in game at this point, its not unreasonable to think any large alliance could just sit 10-15 dudes/alts in strictly defanging carriers. Then when their job is done, switch to normal fighters.
Fleet ceptors can do the same thing. Carrier’s also have a huge range of influence, so even if enemy carrier’s are 1000km away, another carrier group can just send fighter’s their way and cover 1000km in 45s.
I’ll be honest, and i mean this respectfully, as i don’t necessarily disagree with your points; This seems too messy as a way to bring combat ceptors out of obscurity.
For one, some of these sound like a coding mess, like the 20km fighter only scram. Maybe if fighters had .2 warp core strength and the special fighter scram had a .5 scram strength (making subcaps immune to it). Then CCP is making a new module (2 with the evasive DCU thing) w/ stats, plus modifying all fighter stats.
The other thing we need to be careful of is not making these almost impossible to hit by subcaps. If you want them to be nearly immune to fighters, the “evasive maneuver damage control” would basically have to increase their speed and decrease sig radius. That has the same effect on subcaps as it does on fighters. That means they’ll just be put into a role of a nigh unkillable tackle frigate as nothing can do damage to it in a reasonable amount of time.
We already see similar issues with things like jaguars, where between ADCU, t2 resists and speed/sig, it becomes a massive pain in the ass for anything larger than a frigate to hit and kill it.
I 100% agree and am totally for more subcap counters to capitals. However, we can’t ignore the current state of the game and how all the big alliances will game/ignore changes.
Combat ceptors being specialized defanging ships just doesn’t seem to really tilt the board in favor of the subcaps all that much, especially when their “role” can be done by other carriers with only minor differences, mainly in things like wormholes.
Something like battleships being able to fit point defense that only targeted fighters would be more significant as it can function as AoE and bring battleship back into the meta, instead of just being cannon fodder for capitals.
Ironically it would go a long way toward fixing the TiDi mess haha.
Absolutely true. Our doctrine, carriers have nothing but SSF and a squad of sirens in the hanger. The supers are the ones with LGFs and Heavies. Carriers are literally only there to support supers. They’re expected to die quietly after their CHE runs out.
BUT in most of those fights, mains are expected to be in the subcap fleet, and alts are expected to be in capitals. So if we’re going to field subs anyways, why not field the ones that have the greatest impact? SSF are good for it, but there are tactical advantages as outlined in flying a sub over controlling fighters.
We’ll have a race then. You burn your SSF 1000km over, and then either abandon or burn them back, and I’ll warp to zero. We’ll see who lands first. Better yet, I’ll start my cepter on friendly caps, peel off any priority targets (heavy bombers and the like that booshed over) and then warp to the pin on their carriers when it becomes strategically valuable to be there and not defending our caps from heavies.
I’m not saying SSF are bad, because clearly they aren’t. But these could be far more effective. And in a large fight, a significant amount of subcap effort is devoted towards killing fighters.
That’s fair, and true. It is messy. Your concerns about new modules, about the implications for sig tanking, all of it, fair and true. Although your point about the Jag just shows that an “EMDCU on a claw” wouldn’t be any more difficult to deal with than an ADCU on a Jag. To me at least. The cooldown baked into SSF evasive maneuver, and in the ADCU, are “balancing” factors.
Their ability to survive subcaps in addition to fighters would feel fair, given their limited utility against subcaps. They’d certainly be able to tackle, but they’d be no more OP than an AF. Given the choice, if planning on dealing with subs I’d rather bring an AF.
Also fair. Considering battleships… a carrier group against a battleship group, the battleships SHOULD lose badly. But if you had a few of these combat cepters, it turns into a very different fight. Like bringing your own SSF carrier. They can, as mentioned just above, be useful for tackle while your gang is out roaming and catches a sub (thus filling the “interceptor” role in their name), but when the ■■■■ hits the fan, your battleships are now going to stand a much better chance when the hammer drops. Unless they bring HAWs ofc.
As would the claw… there are always exceptions as you well know.
I think for people to start choosing these over “just bring more carrier’s”, we’ll need to start seeing a diversion in the meta. Both in that these would be VERY strong and also that carrier’s would lose significant application.
Again, it comes back to the situation of “yes these are good at killing fighters, but only fighters, but what else could we put people in that will yield similar results but ALSO be able to do more than shoot fighters”.
1-3 dudes in super strong combat ceptors nuking fighters sounds fine. But once you scale it up, and say, you have 15, 30, 50, 100+ dudes. Now, you have much higher attrition and you don’t really even need those combat ceptors, as you just have so much damage that could potentially apply to fighters (and other ships), you don’t need to chase them down with a small wing of combat ceptors.
Again, it falls back into being very niche. Not that its necessarily a bad thing, but the real question, is it worth the development time?
I’ll refer back to the first sentence. What you describe could still be done by a normal fleet interceptor, at least as far as pings go and warping.
For strategic value, if they warp to enemy carriers 1000km away, their fighters won’t be there next to the carriers, and the carrier pilots (if they have a brain), won’t bother recalling or putting their fighters on the combat interceptors. So, now the combat ceptor still functions like a normal fleet ceptor, pointing/tackling a carrier 1000 km away. We would assume that those carrier’s fighters will be within the fighter/drone blob at the center of the fight. Which is still the same place that all your dps will be anyway. Which again comes back to, why not just put people in more carriers, or even a blob of RLML caracals instead of combat ceptors?
Except a Claw’s sig is 64-68 w/ MWD on and a Jag’s sig is 127-136 (depending on number of shield rigs+MSE). A claw is normally armor tanked. I suppose its possible you go with a single MSE on a claw in your proposed role and just not use a scram and go all dps. Regardless though, its sig will still be significantly lower and speed higher than a jag. Combine this with a “EMDCU” that bonuses speed and sig further, and you’re met with a ship that could have a ridiculously low sig and would almost be impervious to missiles. Combine this things like halo implants and X-instinct booster, and i think it’d be very easy to get close to light drone sig levels.
Now it becomes something nearly unhittable by a lot of missile subcaps and would be a major pain for turret subcaps in a non-fleet environment. Sure, if you have a double web huginn/loki or multiples, they are probably not as big an issue in a fleet fight. But in other scenarios, like lowsec, small gang, hunting, people are going to exploit that as far as they can by being an extremely annoying tackle ship.
Going with a strong X-instinct, HG Halo+Omega and lets say a 25% reduction in sig radius with an “EMDCU” (just spitballing numbers here, not sure how much of a reduction you had in mind), that brings the lowest possible sig radius to 34. A light drone is 25. This doesn’t even factor in to if you fit an afterburner/dual prop on these. Granted, its unlikely for a claw to be purely AB fit, for shits and giggles, an AB claw with those things mentioned is 15m sig. Add in links and its at 12.75m with an AB and 29.25m with MWD.
Which, as it stands, we already Have Halo or Snake ramjags running around all over, and they’re extremely powerful, and they have a much larger sig than this supposed claw fit. I’d expect these to start replacing jags as the dedicated “ramming ship” and be even worse since its faster and has a smaller sig.
So, even though its role would be “anti-fighter”, it could easily be exploited in other area’s and quickly snowball into something OP once everyone catches wind of what its capable of. EVE players being who they are, that would not take long.
It would be a very specific scenario for that to actually work. I fly battleships almost exclusively. There are 2 different kinds of battleships. Small gang and fleet. Small gang BS are normally much more paper tanked and a carrier can volley through their reps pretty easily minus some exceptions like rattlesnakes, leshaks and some specific fit marauders. A fleet battleship is max tank/buffer fit and can rely on logi (cause what fleet doesn’t have logi?)
For a combat ceptor to matter in either situation, its reaction time would have to godly and able to nuke a fighter group in seconds. At which point, for small gang, it would be better to have a capital specific comp to just rep through fighters and focus killing the carriers, as time is a factor before they cyno in 10 supers. For fleet, these ceptors would need to be nuking fighters every couple seconds to actually matter enough over time for them to be useful instead of more logi, more carriers or more dps ships.
Which comes back to fighter mechanics needing changing for this to work, along with combat ceptors doing some insane damage to fighters to kill them in that speed and have the reaction time/ability to appear around the grid in the seconds. Which as mentioned before, seems very messy and like its trying to do too much to fit into this niche.
To be fair, the EDCU wouldn’t even be needed if they just nerfed carrier application to subcaps.
Yea agreed, part of the massive problem in eve atm is that fighter’s are > everything else in game if you have them you don’t need anything else and this is becuase of its ridiculously good tracking
