-The HAW nerfs are great.
-The Super and carrier nerfs are “OK” your missing the real primary problem which is sirens and dromi’s but overall its fine.
-The Subcapital balances are fine. The ferox nerf isn’t ideal and will not change anything realisitically but its something i guess.
-The mining nerfs overall are “ok” to me. But i don’t see a need to nerf ice harvesters as the resource is already so limited.
With that all being said, the core thing which i think you had not perfected is the rep changes. While I think the core of what you have designed is workable the numbers as you have them are not. The Diminishing returns on reps capping at 10% is far too harsh and will likely result in a major drop in supercapital content. With no real counter remaining to a 300 person dreadbomb of which every major bloc in EVE can field it will create a sort of dead zone.
Forcing opponents to try and fight each other with dreadnuaghts versus being able to use supers. at 10% final rep power reps basically hard cap around the 100 dread range. That means in a 300 man dreadbomb effectively 200 dreads are shooting for free. times 8k dps thats a titan dying every 30 seconds. With basically no way to counterplay it aside from a resounding boson into the group as they land. the 10% cap is FAR too low and MUST be arguably double to 20 or 25%. These numbers WILL matter and they will have massive consequences for the shape of the game.
Even with dread insurance nerfs this will make it all but impossible to come out even remotely workable in any capital engagement for the supercapital fleet. And in most if not all cases those supercapital commanders will chose not to engage and the game will suffer as a whole.
Too many nerf for my liking and way too heavy-handed in my opinion.
I don’t like spending even more hours on the boring PvE in this game just to get the income to sustain PVP activities.
CCP is the only game company that continuously works on making their product less appealing and more tedious and of a chore to its customers.
For me, it’s time to take a break from this game especially with the summer approaching again.
A lot of these changes are quite good, but I think some of the changes are a bit heavy handed and create massive balance issues in terms of there being zero counterplay/balance.
Fax reps:
-For the sake of small scale fights and the groups that participate in them. I disagree with the fact that the rep penalty starts immediately after the first rep. The scaling should only start after the 10th rep or a relatively low bar to preserve the effectiveness, as it stands, of smaller engagements and reps. It would be a relatively minor change, but at that level, every bit of rep counts.
-For large engagements, due to the mathematical limit of reps at ~10% effectiveness or 100k hp/s, you have essentially created an artificial cap to the amount of reps something can receive, while having no limit of the damage it can take. Now to break a target, regardless of how many defenders there are, all you need is X amount of dps/dreads and it is, according to game mechanics, impossible to survive/tank. This is a massive boon to the super large alliances and coalitions and dread bombs as a whole, who regularly drop 200+ dreads. These changes will make it impossible resist or survive such dread bombs. I believe the lack of any potential counterplay to mitigate the damage from cheap, dime and dozen, throw away dread bombs that we see so often from these large alliances/coalitions is a bad mechanic for the meta.
-The diminishing returns changes are unnecessary. Up until now, you could always drop your own titan/super fleet, or dread fleet, and kill faxes, which cant receive reps of their own while in triage, and then focus on bigger targets. The proposed changes upsets that well known play/counterplay with something that is inherently unbalanced and has no counterplay at the larger fleet engagement level.
-The only change you need to fix the lack of “Pride and Accomplishment” (Thanks EA) for dread bombs not being able to kill anything is remove capital insurance. That way, the defenders get to kill expensive dreads that arent SRP’d by concord, and the dreads get to kill juicy faxes and potentially then supers, all of which have no SRP from concord. The whole point of insurance is to coddle noobies when their ship dies. Why do cap pilots need that? Its utterly unnecessary. It is a good first step to reduce it, but honestly, it should go away completely for capitals. It would make those massive large scale dread bombs much more meaningful if 80% of the cost wasn’t srped by concord, for both sides. It is utterly unnecessary to force artificial RR caps that 100% guarantee that supers will die when one side has X dreads over the RR cap when there are much more nuanced approaches available.
-If you are going to make this change anyways, at least do not apply it to subcaps. Subcap logi is well balanced and doesnt need any nerfing, even if only a few %'s.
HAWs:
-Why not just limit HAW to dreads? Nerfing HAW on titans to the point where literal BS guns/launchers do more damage just seems utterly ridiculous. Proof: https://i.redd.it/xjcpi9jwexl21.png
Everything else good neutral or good (yay harbie love and gila drone HP nerf). Also, 15 years late on shield slaves, please give.
Agree with your post overall. However, Supers not engaging as much does not cause the game to suffer.
These changes widen “the zone” for dread-sized engagements. FCs will think twice about escalation to supers again, like the old days when if you did you risked PL getting batphoned. More dread engagements are good because dreads are cheap so people readily risk them and of course they are immobile so positioning them well is important.
Have you considered giving capitals a weakness? I was thinking something along the lines like adding a hackable node(s) on a capital ship that could debuff it. This would make flying a non capital important in a long capital fight because you give sub cap pilots a bigger role.
Ideas like.
Slow the cap recharge, shield recharge rate.
Lose targeting on a few already targeted ships.
This new feature will be applied to all remote armor repair, remote shield boosting, and remote capacitor transfer effects, but we expect capital scale remote repair and shield boosting to be the areas effected most strongly with the numbers set as they are now.
Has me concerned, as this implies ALL (Small, Medium, Large and XL) will be effected by the Change: We are planning to introduce a new diminishing returns system for the effectiveness of all remote repair and capacitor transmitter modules.
This will make logi frigates, and cruisers a complete waste of time, as it is they’re a key target of fleets/gangs, with reduced output and nothing to make them more than a sitting target the chances are CSM have screw over yet another ship role.
Also if this is the case how will if effect the Triglavian cascading remote armour repairers?
Hate to say everytime CSM have done an “balance” it makes been scared they’ve just killed yet another feature of EVE.
Hopefully I’ve miss read the Remote module comment, and it’s only the XL versions that have been effected. But know CSM, I have a feeling it’s written as it is and now we have lost logi ships, and Nestor DS fleets.
Supers not engaging as much is why they live long enough to form these ridiculously massive supercapital fleets. The more using them is seen as risky (even if it’s not terribly risky), the less they’ll actually blow up. To get them to blow up, make them feel cocky, overconfident. May them something people aren’t unwilling to risk.
All of them will be subject to diminishing returns, but…
A) Rise and the devblog both claim that there’s going to be a modifier in place that means that subcaps rep will be less penalized, presumably the smaller it is, the less it gets nefed. HOWEVER…
B) The graph Rise says demonstrates this… doesn’t look like it really does. We’ll need to wait and see how it maths out when they’re willing to give us the math (or when it hits Sisi, and we can mathhammer it ourselves).
Your premise is wrong, supers not dying is not why we have massive super umbrellas. We have umbrellas due a combination of cheap minerals and skill injectors.
The goal of CCP right now is not to get supers to blow up more, it’s to prevent them from blowing up everything else and making other ship classes unviable.
Saddly the remote module balances (as CSM and CCP put) don’t just effect FAX’s, all ship size modules, I see the death of Roam Fleet logi, Nestor DS fleets, and other small operations fleets that used Remote Reps/Caps to help maintain a fleet under heavy assault.
This could end 1/2, if not more of the DS components being on the market as less players will risk a Nestor Spider Fleet against Drifters. As is you needs a minimum Nester Fleet of 5 just to do a lvl4 site, so no idea why the blanket Remote module balance.
Eve encourages players to invest lots of time, effort and often money into skilling-up characters and then buying or building and flying advanced ships. Capitals are considered by many to be the pinnacle.
And yet, in each of CCP’s so-called “balance” passes, why is it that players are punished for working hard to achieve those very goals? Ship specs are repeatedly nerfed, which devalues the very things that we’ve often worked so hard and so long to achieve. It feels like CCP is actually stealing from us, or at the very least, defrauding us in a serious way.
Why is it that high-end, long-term players are so rarely rewarded for working hard? Newbies have been getting a lot of love, while those of us who have actually shelled out hundreds or even thousands of dollars and put in multiple years of time and effort, are repeatedly ignored and brushed aside.
CSM is clearly a joke. They certainly don’t represent me or the things I value. In fact, CCP’s entire “balance” process has been broken for years. Instead of coming up with cool, creative, lore-compatible solutions that don’t feel like theft, they instead insist on heavy-handed approaches that do nothing but alienate their most loyal customers. Whenever a niche is discovered that’s particularly effective for players, CCP’s response is to smash it, smother it, kill it. Maybe that’s their version of PvP.
My premise is not wrong. We had massive supercapital fleets before we had excavator drones. We have gotten even more massive supercapital fleets since, but again: that is because we do not risk them when we expect a significant chance of defeat.
