- Panther → Grappler bonus
- Sin → Heavy Scram / Warp Disruptor bonus
2 Likes
Please make vorton guns use positive standings towards edencom as muliplier of damage. Would be more usefull for the game overall than increasing the amount of hit targets.
4 Likes
I would bet isk that there are many that would disagree with your assessment of the uselessness of the RR bonus on the nestor.
4 Likes
Woohoo! Thank you. This is amazing stuff.
The increased cloaked speed of the Cheetah is straight out of my dreams. All the folks in here saying the scan deviation bonus is clearly stronger, you wrong!
Oh man, even more WINMATAR!
Please keep an eye on my kb for upcoming blops losses due to excite! 
2 Likes
A while back I ran some statistics on covops frigate lossmails (from that point, 5 pages - 1k lossmails). The Helios and Anathema (making sense as they actually have higher base PG at 20MW over 15 MW of the Cheetah and Buzzard) don’t fit MAPCs usually, but the other two very much have to.
Micro Auxiliary Power Core fitted:
Buzzard: 56.76%
Cheetah: 45%
Anathema: 13.41%
Helios: 2.91%
So yup - Cheetah/Buzzard have a solid PG problem there.
3 Likes
Yep since they remove the weapons bonus, they should remove some of the ‘dogma’ from the weapons systems which is applied to the hull stats.
Helios is decently strong because it has the best pg and second best cpu and so can use the extra slot well and just seems to have better ehp.
In a covert tackle type role they have ehp of -
5.83k Helios (shield)
4.72k Anathema (armor)
4.43k Buzzard (shield)
3.73k Cheetah (armor)
fit: tank, mwd, web, ship scanner, scram, cloak, covert cyno, combat probing
I think that 40% spread in ehp from lowset to highest is too much and should be brought down to 25% with the Helios gaining 1k ehp or so to start pushing out the prospect from its role.
1 Like
Just because people fit a power core doesn’t mean those ships have fitting problems. Power cores are very effective on frigates because of the flat power grid increase, so it often is a good choice even if the ship already has a lot of powergrid for a frigate.
I fly my cheetah without power core, as it is unnecessary. And if you want more power grid, the Anathema is perhaps more to your liking, although it is a bit slower.
2 Likes
You would probably win.
And I’m not against the RR in general, I just don’t understand the reason of having it the way it is currently. An Exequror can be fit to have better RR range and performance even without drones, while also being infinitely cheaper.
With my drone upgrade, the Nestor would have 7.5 effective heavy logi drones, which also includes shield and hull rep ability. Not to mention that the Nestor isn’t exactly cap-stable as a logi ship to begin with so making it the best drone-based logi seem like a better idea in general.
I think it would be much more useful for fleet operations that way as a cloaked mobile base. And with increasing the RR range to the range if the drones, it could also be more useful in the middle of a combat.
A question about the CovOps frigates:
Is the 5% increase in cloaked speed/signature drift per level (as in, 25% at lvl 5)? or just 5%?
Per level, at least that’s what I saw at the test server yesterday.
1 Like
People fit a power core because of the following:
At all 5, the Cheetah/Buzzard have 18.75 MW powergrid, a Compact MWD uses 14 MW.
For cheetah, this leaves the ship with 4.75 MW and 3 of each slot type and most modules use at least 1MW power.
Fitting a Cloak + Probe Launcher takes up further 2 MW, leaving 2.75. If you fit a nullifier (+1 MW) you are already mostly out of space (barring fitting modules, of course)
Mids can commonly be either capacitor (rechargers take up 1 MW each, batteries more), scan arrays (1 MW each) or exploration equipment (Analyzers also cost 1 MW each). Of your 3 slots you have room essentially for two without rigging for PG.
Low slots, granted, you can take modules that don’t incur a PG cost to use.
The Buzzard is in a worse spot as it has an additional mid to fill up. Which again kind of stacks up with what I got out of my data set - 18% Buzzards flew with at least a mid empty and it’s 16% for the Cheetah.
EDIT: Yeah, subtracting 2MW leaves 2.75, brain took a right on the left turn there.
2 Likes
that’s nice. A bit strange that they’d remove the attack bonuses, to then make the buzzard and the cheetah faster. What’s the point of going faster cloaked…from a can to the other?
Nonetheless, I’m glad the helios has an extra higher slot. Probably gonna be my go to for nullsec exploration.
Looks like a melted crayon, but I’m a hoe for those midslots.
Give the mining barges the ability to jump with them.
Or remove the ability for the prospect to fit a covert cyno altogether?
Do you not want to do 31337 PvP in a T3C?
ECM is different to all other EWAR, in that the effect is subject to #RAND. All the EWAR needs to be moved to #RAND, or none of it should be impacted by #RAND. This should include disruptors as well as scrams, make people work for that point on target, just as hard as ECM has to.
Jump fatigue has already been nerfed into irrelevance, if anything jump fatigue needs to be increased.
If CCP saw this as a problem, filaments would need to be changed too. Since CCP seems to think filaments are ‘fair and balanced’ then both problems, are not problems.
Which is the core issue CCP consistently fail to address. One black ops battleship can bridge in an infinity people given enough isotopes. The micro jump field eventually had limits applied to it, this group jump mechanic is a great opportunity to balance bridging in the same way.
Do you remember when people used to put projectiles on amarr battleships because they did not consume cap and the amarr ships had no bonus to their lazors? Oh wait, they are still doing that. My bad.
This makes a lot of sense, as the bargest is the only large missile boat dangerous in PvP because the missile lag is mitigated.
Can’t that kind of be done already with fleet clones and carrier maintenance bays? Though sure, a blops group gets to cloak right away, where as capitals that cyno in are kind of hard to miss due to that big beacon in the overview.
Point made, though this only seems to be of benefit if the target getting dropped on is a carrier/dread and the idea is to punish the widow pilot by making them easier to hit with fighters or regular siege weapons.
Like people who still mine with drones in a vexor?
You know that the ship is poorly balanced when the price doesn’t shoot up 100 million each hour for like 8 hours after the release.
Hey, nice idea, works for the pacifier, right?
1 Like
So yup, maybe you should have started off not with “covops have a serious PG problem” and instead that the cheetah and buzzard have a PG problem.
TBH I’ve mostly only flown a Helios and Anathema and have never had a PG issue fitting, so I honestly didn’t know that the other two are much tighter on that. However you didn’t specify in your original post otherwise I would have simply given you a like.
Well as one example, an Exequror cannot be fitted with enough RR AND DPS to run say, C4 wormhole sites, while 2 Nestors easily can.
They can be quite useful in some small fleet situations as they can simultaneously act as fleet logi AND dps.
Scanning ships currently have a non-insignificant place in baiting pvp, the loss of combat bonuses will affect that negatively, probably not a -100%, but less variety is less fun.
Apart from that lukewarm changes.
1 Like
So after a bit of thinking about this pointless update while watching Jeremy Clarkson make a mess of farming, I’ve got some ideas for how you could encourage actual fights.
No one fights because ships cost stupid amounts these days, that’s problem number 1. As mentioned earlier, no one is going to commit blops unless they’re certain they can insta-blap and run away. You want to encourage content and these ships to be used? We need targets that can fight which don’t exist, bringing me onto issues two and three…
Everyone runs the second someone enters local and for good reason, they’ll get instantly killed. To combat this, delayed local for covert ships only would allow a hunter to run around undetected. It would of course have to be finely balanced to prevent becoming overpowered.
Finally, the issue that fights don’t really happen is again possibly either related to the extreme cost of ships (which of couse would result in risk adversity) or the fact that that ships just die, immediately. You either get caught and die or you run and don’t die. There is no fighting. Even the rorqual’s panic often isn’t enough to scramble forces together to beat back whatever is attacking.
You want these ships to be used? Instead of buffing them give them reason to be used. Because right now there are no fights, there are no targets. Damn with the prices of supers and rorquals, content will soon dry up completely unless you consider insta-blapping ishtars orbiting havens “fun”.
5 Likes
As it stands right now, what exactly are they planning to do to the Pacifier? Are it’s bonuses being removed as well? Is anything changing on the ship or has it been left out of this update?
Thought that odd as well. When I explored for a living, I was never cloaked in a site unless there was someone else in there–it was full MW from can to can to complete as soon as possible. I can see a huge advantage in cloaked speed as a tackle ships for a BLOPS fleet, but of hundreds of BLOPs drops I only recall using a covert ops a couple of times that way–the ship class is poorly designed for that purpose (a tank + or sig size bonus aka prospect might change that).