Dreadnaught is badly broken (and not in a good way)

Council Of Stellar Management Assembly Hall
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Going to keep this short and sweet. But as a recently returning player who wanted to play Bombeldo style dread battles… basically consider myself a casual. I have observed the following.

  1. They are boring AF… the concept of siege module, paralyzed and non-maneuverable is just boring gameplay on it’s face.
  2. In the real world… larger vehicles aren’t necessarily slower, they have more inertia but they can be very fast due to their immense power and inertia.. Boeing 747 us much faster (if less maneuverable) than the 737, A320, and other narrow bodies.. Aircraft carriers in the Navy, Battle ships during WWII were some of the fastest ships in the fleet… a modern nuclear carrier can leave destroyers and cruisers (modern day) in the dust.
  3. The idea that a multi billion isk carrier is easily susceptible to basic mechanics like warp bubbles, and other tackling methods is also unrealistic.
  4. their grid power requires too many tradeoffs… you should be able to make a very tanky AND very powerful offense without major tradeoffs..

In a nutshell.. they’re boring AF… and only have use in major alliance wars which for the average casual player are about as frequent as matches with an actual 10 who’s not a bod on Tinder.

My ask? Make them more fun, more powerful as mobile platforms and this more likely to be taken out once in a while …

Should they be able to stop a well organized gank by a fleet of battle ships? no… but right now, a well equipped battle ship or couple of heavy cruisers and a warp bubble is all you need to take on out (maybe it’s my skill) … at a minimum you should be able to GTFO if you need to before all defenses are gone.

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Bigger =/= better.

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If you want to be able to GTFO when overwhelmed I suggest you fly a nano kitey ship, not a dreadnought.

Dreads are about long-term decisions being stuck on a grid 5 minutes at a time in return for massive firepower.

It sounds like you don’t wish to fly a dreadnought.

But in EVE they are. Here bigger ships are slower for balance reasons.

In EVE bigger isn’t better. It just trades a few things for a few other things. In return for paying more ISK and being slower, bigger, easier to shoot and easier to catch you get more firepower and more hitpoints.

Try smartbombs, I hear they can kill bubbles if they’re close enough.

On the other hand, you may also want to have heavy neuts in those slots, to drain the ships that are tackling you.

In fact, the best way to use a dreadnought is to have allies in subcapital ships to support your massive firepower. Have you tried that?

Fitting a ship in EVE always is about making choices.

Repairs versus buffer, range versus dps, tank or firepower, you will need to make choices and can’t have it all.

Still, a dreadnought has plenty of offense and defense if you commit to being sieged, it just won’t have mobility on top.

Have you tried a mobile ship instead?

For example instead of dreadnoughts a ship like a black ops battleship has far better capabilities of getting into and out of fights before backup arrives, as those ships do not commit to combat for 5 minutes at a time.

To conclude, it sounds like dreadnoughts aren’t broken, but you just wish dreadnoughts to be a massive fast overpowered ship with offense, defense and the capability to just run away when you get overwhelmed.

Too bad, EVE has more sense of balance than you do.

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Thats pretty much a DST, not a warship. I’ve heard DSTs have multiple ways to avoid being killed.

Then fly a carrier. Did you know that you can fit a Nidhoggur for Speed and be pretty quick?

You are talking about a SIEGE WEAPON here. It’s not a moving warship, it’s a Tribok, a Catapult, a Ballista… with some tiny wheels to get it into position. But largely immobile during a fight, able to raze down city walls and devastate opposing units in a single impact.

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Exactly my point… why does it have to be? this is beyond boring. I can see a fit option to make it a siege weapon for the current purpose, but to make the game play more fun, there needs to be a variety (such as the HAW) that is more mobile and more of a threat to sub caps… All I’m saying is the game play loop is lame, and this is born out by the fact that nobody ever takes one out, even for PvE… except Bombeldo

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People take dreadnoughts out for PvE all the time.

And for PvP they’re the top tier pick too once the fight has escalated to caps.

The only thing dreadnoughts aren’t really good at are solo PvP, if you have the intention not to just kill a lot of ships but also to get out alive.

You won’t get out alive without support.

And I don’t see why that has to be a problem. It’s a huge ship in a multiplayer game, why not cooperate with others?

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Sry man, you clearly know the wrong dudes. Dreads are used both for PvP and PvE all the time.

And they are everything but boring, especially under hard pressure.

They don’t need to be more mobile, because if you would want that, you simply use another ship. A Carrier. A Battleship. A Command Ship. Whatever.

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Hate to bring it to you, but dreads are THE PVE meta for quite a while now, and they overshadowed carriers in pretty much everything.

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Someone should conduct an actual study on the apparent inverse correlation between a player’s level of gameplay participation and their propensity to post detailed proposals for rebalancing things they have little or no meaningful experience with.

And I don’t even mean “skill” in the sense of killboard efficiency or being some elite PvP god. The control group doesn’t need to be good at EVE. They just need to demonstrate something resembling the median experience of an actual player: a reasonable number of hours played, some history of undocking, some ships actually flown, some things actually accomplished, and preferably more than a passing familiarity with whatever mechanic they’re proposing to overhaul.

The variables would be pretty easy to establish. Compare measurable gameplay participation — time played, ships flown, ships lost, kills, activities completed, time spent using the relevant ship or mechanic, etc. — against the number and scope of balance proposals a player makes on the forums.

I’m particularly interested in whether there’s a point on the curve where actual participation becomes inversely proportional to confidence. Not necessarily skill, mind you. You don’t have to be good. You just have to have actually played the game enough to have encountered the problems you’re proposing to solve.

My working hypothesis is that the further a player falls below the median in actual gameplay experience, the more likely they are to confidently explain how some part of EVE they’ve barely experienced is fundamentally broken and requires substantial mechanical rebalancing.

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so what you’re saying is only the experienced and hardcore players should have a say in how the game mechanics work and new players or players who quit for a multitude of reasons opinions shouldn’t be listened to… (never mind that by CCP’s own figures over 90% of new players give up after 7 days) but I get it. I guess the same 25-35 thousand active players can just keep the in breading going - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

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That’s an impressive amount of arguing against something nobody actually said.

Nobody said only “experienced and hardcore players” should have a say. I’m not proposing some kind of EVE aristocracy where you need a 95th-percentile killboard before you’re allowed to post on the forums.

The point was considerably more modest: there seems to be an inverse relationship between actually playing the game and confidently proposing major balance changes to mechanics you have barely experienced.

You don’t need to be a hardcore PvP player. You don’t need to be exceptionally skilled. You don’t need to have lived in a dread fleet for ten years. You don’t even need to be particularly good at EVE.

You just need to have something resembling the median player’s level of participation — actually spending a meaningful amount of time playing, undocking, flying things, using the mechanics you’re discussing, and accumulating enough firsthand experience to distinguish “I don’t understand why this works this way” from “this is fundamentally broken and needs to be redesigned.”

New players should absolutely have opinions. Returning players should absolutely have opinions. Anyone can post whatever they want.

But there’s a rather substantial difference between having an opinion about something and confidently presenting yourself as qualified to diagnose its fundamental design problems after barely interacting with it.

That’s the phenomenon I’m suggesting we measure.

And if your response to “perhaps actually playing the game to some reasonably ordinary degree gives you useful information about how the game works” is “so only hardcore players are allowed to have opinions,” you’ve managed to demonstrate the exact reasoning problem I’m talking about.

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my point stands .. over 90% quit within a week… that’s speaks volumes.

Right now it is basically an aristocracy where alliance leaders, and to a lesser extent corp leaders play raid boss with a bunch of doctrine wielding players and the small minority of casuals (like me) who don’t have time to invest in a video game are left with nothing to do.. God forbid you take a ship out solo (gasp) .. and that 90% get a whiff of that, and say “adios” ..

BTW, my solution? Easy… Eve needs two servers. The current one, and a casual friendly PvE focused one.. but I digress.

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And somehow we’ve now gone from “dreadnoughts are badly broken” to “EVE is an aristocracy,” “casual players have nothing to do,” and “EVE needs a second, PvE-focused server.”

Nobody is arguing that casual players shouldn’t play EVE, or that you need to be a hardcore PvP player before you’re allowed to have an opinion. My original point was considerably more mundane: there appears to be an inverse correlation between how much someone actually participates in EVE and how confidently they propose fundamental changes to things they have barely experienced.

You don’t need to be exceptionally skilled. You don’t need a great killboard. You don’t need to lead an alliance or live in a capital fleet. The proposed threshold was basically “have you actually played the game enough to have some firsthand experience with the thing you’re proposing to redesign?”

Being an ordinary, mediocre, casual EVE player is perfectly sufficient.

But there’s a rather large difference between “I am a relatively inexperienced player and I’m finding this difficult” and “this is objectively impossible for players like me, therefore the game is fundamentally broken and needs to be redesigned.”

And the particularly funny part is that your own original post indicated that you wanted to emulate Bombeldo’s solo-dread style of gameplay. So you’ve literally watched someone doing the thing you’re interested in, presumably thought it looked fun, and concluded that you wanted to do it yourself.

That’s perfectly reasonable.

What’s considerably less reasonable is then jumping from “I’ve watched someone successfully do this and I haven’t figured out how to do it myself” to “this is objectively impossible for ordinary players.” The fact that someone else is doing it on stream rather rather neatly establishes that the activity is, in fact, possible. The remaining problem is apparently that you’ve watched the gameplay rather than accumulated the experience necessary to reproduce it.

Which, again, is completely normal for a newer or less experienced player.

It just isn’t particularly strong evidence that the game is broken.

And this is why I keep coming back to the original point. You don’t need to be good at EVE to have useful opinions about it. You just need to have actually spent enough time playing it that you’re distinguishing firsthand experience from assumptions you’ve formed by watching somebody else play.

The remarkable thing isn’t that a relatively casual player has opinions about EVE.

It’s the confidence with which those opinions apparently escalate from “I haven’t figured this out yet” to “the mechanics are fundamentally broken” to “the entire game needs a second server.”

That’s a considerably more interesting phenomenon than anything wrong with dreadnoughts.

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and 99% will probably never even sit in a dread…

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My original point which I should have stuck with is the game play loop for the dread is boring (largely due to the siege module mechanic) and while Bombeldo is entertaining to watch and enticed me to return to the game after years of inactivity… it’s unsustainable to bring out a 7B dread and die every time for most of us. (He Always dies)

I meandered into PvE servers and other observations as a possible solution .. as I hate when someone complains about something but doesn’t provide a solution.

But I feel many players in this game suffer from a form of “learned helplessness”. Sort of the opposite problem us inexperienced players suffer from which is many too much fresh perspective and not enough in game time.

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Calling this “fresh perspective” is giving yourself an enormous amount of unearned credit.

Wanting dreads to be effectively safe solo powerhouses isn’t some insight that experienced players have become too helpless to see. It’s an ignorant design expectation that’s fundamentally incompatible with the balance requirements of a PvP-centric game.

It sounds like the crux of your complaint is that you rather childishly want the dread yeeting experience without the dread-yeeting expense, and if only they didn’t have to be sieged and were impossible to tackle, you reckon maybe you could pull it off without having to get good first.

If what you actually want is to fly around in an enormously powerful ship by yourself without having to worry about the expense or consequences of losing it, you may simply be looking for a single-player game.

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Yeah, good thing. Capital ships should be a rare sight, used (and usable) for very special purposes only. Not an everyday tool to throw at any occasion because it’s easily replacable.

HAW guns / Rapid Torpedoes are already too good in applying to targets smaller than battleships.

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There are places for SOLO Capitals, they are niche and hard to abuse by powerblocks.
But if overpowered stuff is accesible by everybody, you will win nothing.

EVE is a Submarine Simulator not bounded to the Rules of Real Life.

If you run away from a missle (Cruise Missle 50kg Payload) …
in EVE you get less Damage cause you super small and you running
in RL you DIE.

If you stop your engine in Space while full speed.
in EVE you slow Down
in RL you will keep your Speed

If you shoot a missle in full speed while in space.
In EVE the Missle will go the desgined speed
in RL this missle will getting the ship velocity on top of the own propulsion.

We are CLOSER to World of Warcraft than to the EXPANSE.

A Capital is a constructed SHIP in a RPG Universe where N+1 is kind of a KEY Element.

Yes, i agree with you… in RL you would not kill a Carrier with a Destroyer.
The Carrier would sneeze and kill dozens of Destroyers.

If i give you a powerfull plattform, the large Groups will also have access on them.
And there is nothing which prevents them to bring more of these bad Boys to the Party.
(N+1)

If my Naglfar could see this post it would be really upset.
Luckily it can´t read due all the Ductape on the windshield.

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The problem with comparing EVE ships to 747s, battleships, or nuclear carriers is that EVE doesn’t actually model movement like aircraft, surface ships, or real spacecraft.

EVE’s movement model behaves much more like submarines moving through a fluid.

A submarine doesn’t shut off its engines and coast indefinitely. It loses speed because it’s moving through water. Larger submarines also have enormous mass and momentum, but that doesn’t magically make them faster or more maneuverable. Moving that mass through the medium takes power, and changing its direction takes time.

That’s basically how EVE works. Shut off your propulsion and your ship slows down. Bigger ships generally accelerate more slowly, turn more slowly, and take longer to align. That’s completely wrong for a spacecraft in a vacuum, but it makes perfect sense if you think of New Eden as having an invisible “fluid” that ships are moving through.

So using real-world spacecraft, or even aircraft, as an argument for how fast a dreadnought should move doesn’t really work.

EVE has essentially been a submarine simulator in space for 20+ years.

And from a gameplay perspective, that’s intentional. A dread trades mobility for enormous tank and firepower. Siege takes that design to its logical extreme: you plant your ass on grid for five minutes and, in exchange, become an artillery piece from hell.

If you remove the commitment while keeping the firepower and tank, you haven’t fixed the dread. You’ve removed the tradeoff that defines it.

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The last two answers were well writen and explained, thank you and they have been helpful in my understanding of the mechanics of the dread from the Eve sweaty players perspective, and I’m not here to solo change a 23 year old game… Just pointing out the reality as a casual player who has returned after 5+ years of total inactivity that as a fresh set of eyes, I find the dreadnaught game play loop utterly boring, and I assume the same can be said for Titan and Carriers.. of course video games need to balance classes, and of course nothing should be totally dominant in all aspects, but 74 m/s on a ship that spans 4KM in length is bordering on stupidity .. Truthfully even battleships tops speeds are a bit slow.. the game needs to be sped up 2-3x to my minds eye… but I’m likely in the minority and that’s fine.. I’m just one man with one vote.

Forgetting speed for a moment, I am also a bit bothered by the abiltiy of a small ship to tackle a dread or even a Titan with the same (if not more ease) they tackle frigate… The vulnerability of these massive ships with massive price tags to be disabled by tiny ships is also very unrealistic and breaks emersion at a minimum.

Not saying capitals should be totally immune to bubbles and ECM, but it should take another capital to ECM a capital, just like it generally takes another capital to 1v1 destroy a capital.

Thus my original comment about it being broken… it’s much more than just speed.