Let me put it bluntly: The Cenotaph is not overtuned, it is gratuitously game-breaking.
A guns + missiles + drones Cenotaph can pump out 800 DPS without damage mods. That beats every other battlecruiser in the game, with the sole exception of a fully spooled Drekavac. Did you notice that I neglected to mention breacher pods? Yes, even if you deprive it of its primary weapon, and covert ops cloak, and web resistance, and shield bonus, the Cenotaph would be one of the strongest battlecruisers in the game. When you give it all those things, it is, IMO, easily the strongest brawler in the game, beating almost every subcap in every brawling situation, ranging from solo to fleet fights. In a fleet setting, its maximum possible damage output compares favorably to sieged dreads using short range anti-capital weapons.
CCP desperately needs to change this ship, and they need to do it before it breaks the game. As a starting point, this is what I would suggest they should do:
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Give it the Triglavian treatment. Much like the Cenotaph, Triglavian ships have an extremely powerful single slot weapon. However, the Drekavac is partially balanced by a lack of slots. It has 18 total slots, vs a normal battlecruiser’s 20, or a faction battlecruiser’s 21. I would suggest giving the Cenotaph a 5H, 7M, 3L, 3R slot layout. This would would allow it to fit a breacher pod launcher, a full suite of one type of secondary weapon with some damage mods, and a command burst or cloak. It would force people to choose a single secondary weapon type and force meaningful tradeoffs between cloaks, fleet assistance, tank and damage.
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Drop the shield boost bonus. They’re strong enough without it.
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Tone down the projectile and missile damage bonuses dramatically. The Cenotaph has what is arguably the strongest subcap weapon in the game; it doesn’t need strong secondary weapons. A 7.5% bonus to missile damage per level as its Caldari bonus and 7.5% bonus to projectile damage per level as its Minmatar bonus seems like plenty to me. Then move the web resistance bonus to a flat 25% role bonus, to keep it in line with how other faction bonuses work.
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Reduce fitting. I’m not the best as calculating PG/CPU, so I’m not going to give specific numbers, but at high skill levels, it feels a bit too easy to fit everything you want, and it will feel even easier if the ship losses slots.
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Give breacher pods a big downside. Breacher pods break the meta by bypassing resists, having perfect application, and doing percentage-based damage. You could get rid of one, two or all of these traits to balance them, and that may be a decent option, or just straight up nerf their damage. However, I think there’s room to keep breacher pods strong, achieve balance, and make their gameplay more interesting. I would suggest that breacher pod launches should have a spooling period, which is visually obvious. While they spool, the ship losses all resists. This would give the ships some counterplay, reward skillful play that keeps damage off the ship while they’re vulnerable and significantly reduce the ship’s capacity to simply replace other brawlers in a solo/small gang setting, because they’ll get punished for launching pods straight into the guns of another ship. It also has the added bonus that it would be easy to implement, because under the hood it would do the exact same thing as a hardener, modifying a resistance stat. Finally, this would be a good way to balance the ships. If they’re too strong, extend the period; too weak, shorten it.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject. Let the discussion begin!