Februrary Balance Update - Assault Frigates and Assault Damage Controls

From the logic here, its more than likely that all Hac’s gain speed/cap and that the vagabond gets rapid lights, which would make it almost as broken as the Orthrus lol…Munnin will probably stay the same and no one will fly it. I guess I better start training up all those missile skills.

But I hope this is not the case as it would be nice to have the Hac changes be abit more personalized to each of their strengths, they do deserve it they cost almost 400mil fully fited and atm a 250-300m faction cruiser is a lot more cost effective.

But this will all depend on how much time CCP gives Rise to make good change’s if he is rushed to make them then I really don’t see how we can expect really well thought out changes.

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Not sure how many made this point already this is 221 replies already or something but:

Please consider giving the Ishkur same bandwidth as drone bay (50m3).

Also:

Please consider increasing the time of the module. In a fight that is anything but a frig 1v1 where both frigs have no sustained tank, 13-15 seconds is not enough. I think 30 seconds would be a better proposition. Just my 2 isk.

HACs on their last balance pass got cap tweaks. Most HACs are fine on cap and even perma stable with a cap battery and active armor/shield tank (see vaga/deimos/eagle/sac). Most HACs are ok on speed. Outside the eagle and maybe zealot.

Slot adjustments and fitting i think should be primary focus. Along with adding drones to certain hulls and changing traits

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Yes that would be a much better approach:
Something like + mid for muninn, vaga.
.+ drones for Zealot.

But yea a lot more things that each struggle with.

I did. No jaguar has beaten my Hawk.

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There weren’t many of you but we do care about you.

Yeah, I can totally see that. Thanks a lot for making me leveling things I never meant to level to switch to Wolf and cope with my shield skills being next to useless for it. Really, that’s some player-friendly approach we see here.

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Would be nice to add a timer for both the Assault Damage Control activation duration and activation delay.

Irregardless of the buff, assault frigates are still vulnerable to neuts from large ships so they still don’t make them good hard tackle.

The new jaguar buff is pretty good. Nailed 1 destroyer and 1 frigate with it. I got like 200.3 dps off the jag (with drones). Couldn’t find a hawk to fight on sisi (saw Elitatwo but he logged upon me entering the system in sisi).

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Quite an odd change for me since there’s an balancing habit of giving Caldari ships explosion radius bonuses and the minmatar explosion velocity. (Typhoon)

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I’m not complaining radius seems to give more damage than velocity.

It does indeed give more damage - x% explosion radius increases application as 1/(1-x), while x% explosion velocity only increases application by (1+x). For example, 5% explosion radius/level increases application by 1/(1-0.25) = 1.333, while 5% explosion velocity/level only increases application by (1+0.25) = 1.25. Explosion radius bonuses can also in some cases increase damage even when the target is stationary, where explosion velocity bonuses can’t.

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Now you cannot deploy athanor as need vulnerability hours allocated which have been removed. Well done

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sorry wrong error message - should be add name to structure not set vulnerability hours i think

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Jaguar model should be changed to the Breacher.

Because I like the look of the Breacher more.

AF’s now actually fit in well as a sort of hard tackle as opposed to interceptors which are light, this will be extremely useful vs things like orthrus, ty ccp!! xD
Thats as opposed to t3d which are really still antitackle ships.

I’m not so sure about this rebalance on some level.

Wolf - still has a role as an alpha monster, more mobility now with better cap … it still overlaps a little with Svipul but overall in a nice place . ADC will either be useless on it or buff it.
Jaguar - either horribly OP or nicely balanced, one has to wait and see. Some crazy fits out there already for it.
Enyo - a pocket Deimos without the obnoxious repp bonus, either awesome or not that great … not really sure. ADC might make it capable of shredding some T3d’s (like svipul).
Ishkur - why ?; why buy it when it has just an application bonus ?; Worm is just slightly more expensive, has buffer tank on shield (better mobility), a 60% drone damage bonus (after recalculating the hull bonus for equivalent 5 drones) and applies well with capless LML’s. I can honestly not see a reason why one should buy the Ishkur with it’s bonus to optimal of hybrids … is it supposed to be some kind of light drone using rail sniper ?; Maybe i’m missing something here, because no matter how you swing it, it feels 1 med slot short of ideal (even for 75mm rails fit for fw pure fit).
Retribution - gank coercer instead of pulse locus coercer, but faster and pricier … no tracking bonus on 2 med slots. :frowning:
Vengeance - still super tank from hell
Hawk - might be an insane scram kiter now.
Harpy - super sniper longbow cormorant style.

Ishkur and Retributon still feel very much confused tbh.

Out of curiosity, have you considered that maybe one of the main reasons the AF’s were so bad was maybe because of T3d’s being so cheap ?
Confessor is currently at 45m in Jita, Svipul sits at 50m.
If they were at say 85m, wouldn’t AF’s be more of an alternative and not require a buff to make them another flavor or rock/paper/scissor ?

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Ishkur could of used alil more fitting tbh. Basically the ishkur can pump out a good chunk of dps and has some damage selection through drones (unlike the enyo). Theres an all in blaster ishkur that is basically an enyo with drones. The better fit imo is the scram kite ishkur using 125mm rails. Its basically a rail comet with t2 resists and more drones.

Its a little strange they went with drone tracking, its not terrible, but doesnt add much to its utility, except maybe against succubus. An armor rep bonus on it would of been interesting, or even a drone speed bonus along with fitting to make a kite fit more viable.

I agree that t3d should be priced alil higher. But with t2 materials being all jacked up, even t3cs arent too far off from some HACs now. Maybe when t2 mats settle down a lil that will differentiate the prices better.

The ishkur drone tracking bonus is actually pretty interesting because it lets you do strange things to your drones like add 2 speed mods to them :] so that they can still track frigs but frig cant track them even with a web on, I feel as if the new ishkur is a better kiter than brawler now.

@CCP_Rise Hi, I have a selfish request for heavy assault cruisers. Is it possible to boost their warp speed a little, we tend to use mostly cyna’s and smaller ships in our small scale pvp roams (sometimes with a single t2 warp speed rig) as slower warp speeds tend to leave us vulnerable to much larger fleets chasing us back home xD Would this kinda of buff in your opinion make Heavy Assaults more usable for roam’s without making them too op, thanks.

Reason: Even with 2 t2 hyperspaces Hac’s (5.02) warp slower than Interdictor’s(5.5) so its very easy to get caught. Compared to a Cyna with 1 Hyperspacial (5.6)

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Last i checked, drone speed bonuses apply to its mwd speed only. Its orbit speed is still the same. I could be wrong though and maybe theyve changed this since iv been away.

Problem with speed mods is you cut your cpu on an already low cpu ship if using a rig or giving up a mid that could be a web or cap booster. Its do-able, but seems like a big sacrifice for niche fights.

Ill still fly the ishkur though, i like it more than the enyo.

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Damn, would have been a cool little niche thing but o well.