Over the years, the high sec incursion runners have gotten more and more try-hard. Following the slippery slope of the ISK/HR cheese. HQ-site runners in particular. The sites have not been adjusted along with the ships. I am looking specifically at marauders. But also the Vindicator.
HQ sites were likely not designed to be facerolled like now. Why else would the battletowers have so much HP? It used to take several minutes of full fleet fire to destroy them.
This small break is important by design. For many reasons. Developers should be aware of this.
A solution to this is to make the arguably unbalanced HQ-site meta ships just as (un)viable for incursions as other ships:
Vindicator - Create randomized or several smaller Sansha spawn points with frigates in the sites, that are impractical to web down by battleships. They would have to be webbed by fast and nimble ships or long-range web ships.
Add resistances to the battletower to make blasters even with other weapon systems.
Marauders - Create a secondary cooldown to remote assistance after bastion ends. Lasting long enough to make them un-viable for HQ-sites. Or remove damage bonus of bastion / replace it with other bonuses.
The benefits of this will be lower ISK/Hr, which is good for the economy. And more focus on having fun which is natural when the ISK/Hr tryharding is reduced. Which is good for the community.
You do realize these ships are used for more than just Incursions, right? So you want to nerf them for everyone just because you’re jealous that players use optimal fits to complete Incursions in a timely manner?
How does other players making a certain ISK per hour affect your gameplay directly? It doesn’t…
For the Vindicator I only suggested changes to the sites, not the ship.
An extra cooldown to remote assistance after bastion ends would arguably not change anything for most marauder pilots outside of incursions.
Again, what difference does it make? Are you upset that you can’t out-DPS other groups or what? Use the current meta like everyone else. There are players in nullsec that make ten times what I do per day. Doesn’t bother me in the slightest or ruin my “fun”…
Paladins are a nullsec fleet doctrine and they run a bastion module. It’s usually off but being unable to receive reps after bastion deactivates would definitely affect marauders.
AAAAA this would have huge implications outside of incursions. If you alter the rats, that’s fine. Don’t change the ship to fix a site, because that will impact the entire rest of the game. If you change the site, that’s fine.
My suggestion is to just fill Incursions with diamond rats, and make them red to everyone (no good-Sansha-standing cheese)
I think that Incursions are definitely in need of a rework to adjust sites to new ship stats and usage scenarios. They should also be much more dynamic in their response to fleet compositions present on grid.
On the other hand, they are a feature from 2011. I don’t think you can implement these changes into their code. They should be removed completely instead and replaced with a new feature from Sansha’s Nation. It has been over 10 years and Sansha must have abducted Trillions of people by now. CCP should replace Incursions with a new PVE feature coming from the Nation. What happened to “Sansha’s Nation wishes to expand its borders”? 20+ years of empty promises.
No, it would not if it’s only the case in incursion sites. It should be easy enough to implement in-site-effects that interfere with Bastion or other siege modes. The effect would polarize the hull to prevent remote assistance after the deactivation of the modules, and which would have to subside first.
On the other hand, dumping Marauders on everything like no tomorrow is not exactly healthy for the game either, especially in ESS sites where you cannot counter them with capitals. Such a polariziation feature would also be interesting in ESS sites to curb Marauder dominance there.
I may remember this incorrectly but I believe that Sansha NPC are much stronger than Diamond NPC. What should be implemented at the very least are the dynamic spawn mechanics of Diamond NPC, however.
As said, I may remember this incorrectly, but as far as I know they have better tank and more DPS/ewar strength. They are just not as “clever” as Diamond NPC when it comes to spawn behavior since they are hard-scripted. Someone please correct me if I remember that wrong.