So much fun to this. Ccp has this thing where every ship has to fit neatly in a slot, and if something can be used for dual purposes that’s wrong.
No. You can’t cyno into a system with a cyno jammer.
Make them covops, though, able to use a covert cyno? And they can.
Except, you know, if the target you’re dropping is a single carrier/dread… they’re jammed.
And yes, that brings back the problem of ‘oh, in 1v1 fights, you can’t fight back against someone with jams’. Here’s how you fix that: jamming in EVE, much like actually jamming active sensors, should be short-range. So you can just run the hell away, or at the very least, get to longer-range to rain down death on the jamming ship. And it, along with every other form of EWAR, should be high-slots.
I mean, it’s ridiculous that half of the ships in the game sacrifice tank to fit ewar, and half don’t. They either should, or shouldn’t. Make it a high slot. While you’re at it…
Does the module affect another ship? High-slot.
Is it an active defensive/engineering/performance module? Mid-slot.
Is it a passive defensive/engineering/performance module? Low-slot.
Yes, that moves armor hardeners to mids. It moves shield extenders to lows. You know what else it does? It makes fitting ships about a billion times simpler to learn, for new players. Hey, @CCP_Dopamine @ccp_rise, @CCP_Fozzie: give that some thought for a few minutes, see what kind of possibilities you can come up with. Damage Control in the lows. Assault Damage Control in the mids. Madness, I know!
Hell, you might even want to try looking at the four basic ship lines in terms of ‘If I’m a cluster-spanning empire, what roles do I need ships to competently fill, and why do all four of these navies fail at doing that?’
It might even give you ways to differentiate HACs from Battlecruisers in terms of ‘progression from Cruisers’, beyond just ‘HACs do everything better, but BCs are cheap’.
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It’s entirely unchanged right now on Singularity.
I’m hoping the Pacifier picks up the new CO bonuses, given the hull’s cost.
This seems like an extremely specific situation to me.
Do you have any opinion on allowing the Nestor to use a CovOps Cloak? This way it could support blops fleets too especially with the fleet hangar, while not being a blops battleship itself.
It lets you reposition/avoid decloak attempts more effectively. You can also MWD-cloak to move surprisingly fast for a short duration.
It was an extremely specific single example…
There are plenty of small fleet situations where nestors are used as they can be both Logi and DPS at the same time.
I love cloaks. However given that Black Ops Battleships cannot use covert ops cloaks, I doubt they would give the Nestor that ability.
Is SISI broken? Fuel consumption for a group jump is a consistent 1,000/LY topes no matter the amount of ships bridged. This doesn’t seem right.
My logic is that SoE is the cloak faction, so if anyone can figure out how to put CovOps cloak on a battleship, they could. Even if they weren’t able to do it originally, the Nestor was introduced before the black ops battleships (if I remember correctly), so maybe the research of the empire factions on cloaking systems could provide them the data they need to upgrade the Nestor.
Also, I specifically don’t want to turn the Nestor into a black ops battleship. The only thing that would change in this regard is the cloak.
You aren’t. Black OPS Battleships were introduced in 2007 while SOE ships were not introduced until 2014.
It isn’t a lore problem, it’s a balance one. CCP could have introduced it with that ability when they brought it out. I highly doubt for balance reasons you’d ever see a covert ops battleship.
another thing that needs buffing is the T2 explo ships CPU and PG. they can hardly fit anything at full capacity without being hindered down by their limited PG/CPU restrictions.
If you are combat scouting/scanning in a hostile setting, the cloaked speed is a serious bonus. Moving around in bubbles, getting to a good spot for a warp-in, making bookmarks, etc. I already fit overdrives/nanos to combat scanning Cheetahs for the extra zoom while cloaked.
worth mentioning, Black Ops ships have still worse sensor strength as thier T1 counterpart and didnt recieved the cargo buff
The 8 hour move ops to get from TKE to Querious say otherwise, without the timer that would have been at most an hour affair.
You forget about wh where is no observatories, so in , for ex, shattered will be easier to settle for farming, and gangs could live in your home wh so you cant nothing to do with them.
The idea of making prospect more mining ship then cyno is good as for now venture is much better in a term of sp+isk/profit for mining gas. Some extra buff for gas yield with hull debuff will be perfect.
The Sin bonus for drone logi feels out of place.
Redeemer:
Uses Large energy turrets + Nos or Neut.
Small conflict here as both energy turrets and nos/neut require high slots, but at least it can fill the spare high slot with a bonused neut.
Would be nice to have one less turret slot and extra damage bonus to compensate for the lost turret to free up space for another neut.
Widow:
Can use ECM + Missiles.
Shield resist bonuses are nice as it opens up possibility for mid slots for ECM without sacrificing much tank compared to the other blops.
ECM is still weird though, as you would rather not have people shoot your 2B battleship.
Panther:
All the bonuses for Large projectile turrets. Great synergy!
Sin:
Unlike the Panther, no synergy here at all.
It uses hybrid guns and damage drones, but also cannot use damage drones because it uses logi drones, which means the drone damage and tracking is wasted. What is the purpose of the Sin?
Hybrid damage isn’t bad, but is rarely used. The logi bonus and other drone bonuses conflict with eachother. With those bonuses, the Sin is forced to always neglect one or two of it’s bonuses and likely will still neglect it’s hybrid damage bonus in favour of neuts.
My suggestion:
- Swap the Logi drone bonus for a useful non-conflicting bonus.
- The initial idea of a bonus to EWAR would be welcome (sensor damps)
- A second bonus to hybrid turrets would be welcome (tracking or range)
- Anything else that doesn’t require me to stop using damage drones would be welcome
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So, i’ve just logged onto SiSi to check these changes, see with my own eyes how this disappointment will get to me. Well, mission accomplished, i guess.
Removing the combat bonuses has essentially defanged what little damage CovOps frigates could still do without going stupid with bling, along the addition of a relatively useless and currently non-functional ship max speed bonus while cloaked (at least on the Cheetah).
Since i’m mostly a Cheetah user, i’ll use that hull for my argument:
Current
New
Although the extra low slot is welcome, it does little to help with the already atrocious lack of Powergrid.
On top of removing what little edge the hull had in combat over its t1 variant, this leads the Cheetah (and likely the other CovOps frigates) to become nothing more than nerfed, more expensive variants of their t1 siblings for anything that isn’t strictly, exclusively, probing.
Since it’s clear you do not want CovOps to fulfill any direct combat role anymore, then why not remove all turret and missile hardpoints while at it.
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Covops changes: Improved scan deviation ? It does not reduce the number of scans it takes to get a warpable result (only probe strength does that unless I’m mistaken My mistake, it does reduce the number of scans), only the distance you need to drag them for a new scan. So, this instead of combat bonuses ? It looks like it takes away variety and resilience, more square pegs in square holes (like we see in all of the asteroid changes for instance).
Blackops changes: while any attempt at improving this class is good, very mixed feelings about this one.
- even at old prices these ships were considered high risk because they drop into the middle of hostile territory where anything can happen. At current (and climbing) prices the risk only increases. They were fielded only when the risk was considered low enough, a slam-dunk. Increased dps shortens the time on grid hence the risk, true, but in combination with the rising cost of the ship perhaps a very untimely “buff” ?
- Adding a fleet jump capability is a cool feature IF you want to put a high risk ship on grid - see point 1) As long as you can achieve the same result with less risk of painful ISK losses, that will be the option sensible FC’s will take. The reduced jump/bridge fuel cost to move a fleet is nice, but of course not in balance with the ship’s value. No one will put a blops on grid to save a few bombers or even a t3c, let alone some isotopes. It probably can’t save them anyway.
- the added bonuses: questionable in the case of the Redeemer, Sin and certainly the poor Widow. Giving the Redeemer a neut/nos bonus forces pilots to pick a task (you can’t do both), so in essence an attempt to lure more pilots to field their high value t2 battleships (same philosophy as for the newly buffed marauders). As @Gerard_Amatin has pointed out, the same goes for the Sin. The whole idea of logi in a blops attack is counter to the notion that time on grid with blops should be as short as possible - there is no time to mess with logi. And there shouldn’t be, because blops attacks are already hard enough to counter. These mutually exclusive bonuses and roles may look interesting. But they also fall in nicely with the scarcity/shortage/depletion approach of the economy/industry changes, which attempts to take isk out of the game. That could work if people were stupid. However in EvE stupidity can only be as big as your wallet, and after a few losses that cannot be replaced reasonably any more, that will not work. In any case, a Legion can do the neuting, costs less and is more resilient. The Widow with its silly Shoot ME bonus is still the runt in the litter.
The risk/benefit ratio in the current economic meta is simply too bad to field blops on grid. 3 years ago, this might have been sufficient.
My prediction: 1) fleet jumping will be a new niche gameplay, that is once an FC figures out the correct target and conditions, limiting risk, and scores a few attention drawing kills. Until then, bridging will still be the main occupation for most of these hulls. Luckily, blackops bridging is one of the coolest things one can do in Eve.
Side note: Some people are thinking out loud about taking away blops bridging, and replace it with only the fleet jump+covops cloak. It would simply be the end of the class, once the silly people lost their blops, not to mention that force projection via bombing fleets would stop immediately - and kill the related NPSI gameplay too. Literally no one will risk a blops just to field bombers, or to use a covops cloak. There is a reason why blops weren’t allowed to fit covops cloaks in the first place.
2) asteros will become more popular
How to improve the class ? Reducing the risk via the defense attributes (resists, sig radius, sig strength, etc) would look a lot more appealing and result in more blops on grid. Or let them lock on to enemy cynos, lol (j/k). And the Widow, yes, the Widow, that ECM …
Typical CCP, failure once more.
Black ops - take a thing that needed a nerf. Buff it the ■■■■ up.
Vortons - take a thing that needed a buff. Do something irrelevant.
Frigates, especially Helios - take a thing that was fine. Make it not fine.
Take everything else that needs fixing - ignore it.
F for Helios and its loss of unique role the two high slots provided it. It was the best ship until CCP found out and ruined it. Before you could trick people into complacency by fielding a cloak and launching probes, which calmed people down with a line of thought “oh he has probe launcher and cloak, and only 2 highslots, he doesn’t have a cyno, leave him be”, then you refit to a cyno and catch people.
But not anymore. CCP just had to ruin that for no reason!
Another “■■■■ you too, CCP” for this update, I guess.
I mean, a gang living cloaked in your wormhole is already a thing…nothing new here