Do you write that name on your pencil case?
I think this sounds more appealing here. It would be a significant change but not too harsh.
The proposed changes would make the least popular ones pretty much unusable.
Yes, totally agree. Apostle is far more superior than the others.
so the little guys are going to smashed again, the big guys couldn’t kill the little guys so lets fix that… great
I really doubt this is the cause, but I do think CCP needs to be a lot less vague with exactly what issue they’re attempting to fix rather than just saying vague nonsense like ‘it’s OP’.
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Holy crap I can’t believe I still see people talk about DR on logistics themselves. Have you guys never played another game in your lives that had a dps-healer dichotomy and still were able to reach a balance. If you have you’ll know that EVE is severely lacking in this area which leads to the problems we have seen for years, not just now.
Lets think wow, I’m sure most people have played that in the past or at least understand it enough to follow along. In arena matches a single healer is typically able to keep their team alive despite being damaged by multiple dps yet people still die. Why? Healers in wow can push out enormous hps compared to their dps counterparts. Well, simply put, there are tools available to both sides that we simply do not have in EVE.
Between the dps’s defensive cooldowns and the healers own cooldowns they can mitigate these times of incoming burst damage. This is similar to our own ability to overheat modules, adc/edc, prop mod, etc. So far so good.
One way for people to die is for their healer to run out of mana. This would fall under the same situation as our fax/logi running out of capacitor. Again, everything seems good. However, we have a problem now.
In other games, restoring this resource requires you to be out of combat to get anything over the base regen. In wow, you must get out of combat so you can drink, but in eve you just start cycling your cap injector(s). So balance step #1, do not allow the use of cap injectors while triage/weapons timer is active.
Okay, that helps, but now you do have to recognize how cap inefficient the reps really are and tone it down a bit since now the primary way of restoring their capacitor has been removed making them far more vulnerable to their own reps capping them out, not just neut pressure. Healer and fax have very large cap pools, you just need to look at passive regen or actual rep cap usage to bring balance to this situation.
On to the next missing piece of the puzzle. Crowd control effects in other games like stuns and silences exist to halt healers by stopping their ability to act outright or by hampering their ability to heal effectively through healing debuffs to either reduce the amount of healing done, increase mana usage, or increase cast times. However, you will never know what abilities the enemy team may bring to bear (you don’t know who you’re facing ahead of time) so can only prepare for the worst. In eve we are left with only damps and ECM as a comparable equivalent. This is my second and third suggestion to fix a piece of the balance puzzle. While ECM would be the equivalent to stunning a healer, as it stands ECM is entirely random and suffers no DR for each consecutive successful jam. CCP’s solution was to make triage immune to ECM. ECM should be reworked such that once jammed, a target cannot be jammed again for a period of time as well as any ECM immunity removed from any existing modules. This also means that people have a decision to make when using ECM versus burst jammers. Do they want to knock out a group’s lock or keep a single target jammed for a duration. A decision must be made because each would trigger this cooldown on any effected ships.
The third suggestion following suite would be an anti-logistics weapon which would fall under the E-war line as it would reduce incoming reps on the target. Like other e-war modules, would suffer a DR such that only a certain % (around 30%) of logistics could be reliably countered. When combined allows for situations to appear which currently do not where normal dps can be applied to kill a target but not such that it will always line up properly. The ideal module for this would take charges similar to a bomb with a longer travel time and load time but only strike the single target. This means multiple would be need to be brought to a fleet and allow prepared defenders to counter this mechanic wither their own wave of defender missiles. At the same time an unprepared fleet would be open to this mechanic, but only so many times as the attacking force came prepared to lob their way when not on cooldown. Meaning timing your vollies to align with jam cycles and anti-logistics applications becomes an actual important tactic in warfare.
—TLDR—
-DR solves nothing and has no place in eve. It just creates a larger problem of just forcing brawl fests with no logistics at all in large engagements. Also punishes people entering into more common small to medium engagements by reducing the role of logi pilots.
-Balance step 1: Do not allow for cap injection with active triage (or weapon timer). This will require a host of other balance passes on logistics cap regen/pools as well as logistics modules cap usage.
-Balance step 2: Rework ECM such that there is a period of invulnerability after being successfully jammed. Remove Ewar immunity/resistances from hulls and modules that currently have them. This opens up stun like mechanics to an area desperately needing them while removing their entirely oppressive nature by no longer allowing chained jams.
-Balance step 3: Targeted anti-logistics module which take a while to travel to a single target with noticeable reload cycle. Ammo is large so amount carried into battle per ship is limited requiring logistical planning to bring more in. Can be counted by already existing defender missiles. Suffers from a DR as any other e-war module meaning there is a cap to this reduction that can ideally be overcome but creates an opening which does not currently exist to be exploited.
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I believe fax’s are fine as they are, we need to define what eve the game is;
Rock, paper, scissors?
Poker?
Chess?
A combination of the three?
It should be difficult to kill when faxes are around, as people point out corporations will just field more faxes, if people what to hunt whales of a pod of killer whales you don’t go in half ask.
Like poker if you call you better be ready and know you have a great hand, if not your hand is weak then you need to bow out.
Just like people who complain when a cap fleet gets dropped on them, if you don’t like to lose then don’t hit above your weight class, a victory is better when it’s fought for.
Not exactly true. There are abilities that restore mana without exiting combat. Seal/Blessing of Wisdom and Innervate come immediately to mind. These are primarily other people buffing your regen, of course, analagous to the cap chain, but EVE already removes that from triage.
Those buffs are basically our boosts which decrease cycle time and cap usage. And to some extend cap regen modules. Cap boosters are more akin to drinking. But I know what you’re talking about. The actual mana regen abilities that exist/did exist like evocation and life tap were specifically dps cooldowns, not healer. You can make a case for innervate, but that was a cooldown not something they could use at a moments notice repeatedly like boosters - and it was limited to druids.
Now if they wanted to give the lif and ninazu a bonus such that they can cap injects but give them an even smaller cap pool, that could be interesting. But arguably make them more worthless than they are now.
Anyway enough wow talk as this is not wow… Attaching that limitation to triage itself keeps other uses of cap injectors unaffected. It also allows for ccp to buff the ninazu and lif such that it could boost even more since it couldn’t be used to maintain reps while in triage, but instead is a cap chain alternative when drifting out of triage.
The Lif and Ninazu don’t really need buffing. They’re already the best remote repair platforms out there. The Apostle and Minokawa have better buffer tanks, and provide more utility to supercapital fleets that will need to get capped up before they can extract. The Ninazu, though, has a tremendous local tank without sacrificing tank slots for the cap injectors, and the Lif’s ability to fit CASBs means that it can fill the low slots with PDSs (preferably CN or Thukker for the extra shield amount) while minimizing its own capacitor drain.
Both of them provide both armor and shield reps, as well, which is a level of versatility the buffer hulls really don’t approach. It means that (especially for smaller groups, who don’t necessarily have the money to own 2 different hulls for both armor and shield triage) you can swap over the remote reps, and use the same triage hull on any fleet you need it for. That means that for the triage role as it exists, ie providing triage for both capital and subcapital work, the Ninazu and Lif are actually much stronger options than most tend to think.
As for the ‘cap chain alternative’… anyone who’s cap chaining faxes is a fool. Without the bonuses the true cap chaining ships get to transfer amount, the cap chain’s a net negative (which it should be). You’re just draining out everyone’s cap by running a chain.
If this is balance of WH caps which it seems to be, then you should also consider dreads into it - after splitting dread weapons to small and large target, you also removed most effective counter to triages that was in game - now you can bring dread that can either kill caps but be useless vs subs or bring dread that can do damage to subs, but damage is too low to actually do anything to caps
as written above - if this is about WH, then allow dreads to utilize both types of their weapons in single fight (bigger fleet hangar so it can bring another set of weapons, or dual weapons which can be switched outside of siege …)
Feeding cap into a fax that just came out of siege is really common I’m not sure what you’re talking about. If you thought I meant they cap chain while maintaining reps then you must think I have no damn clue how this game works or something. All I’m saying is those 2 hulls could rely on boosters rather than their buddies feeding them cap so they can reenter triage. I literally brought it up as being an option for these hulls to make them more reliable as solo logi specifically for subcap. In the end, if triaged cap injection were to be removed a lot of these infinite tanks would disappear immediately, but at the same time would require rebalancing their current base stats there’s no two ways around that.
That’s also picking at a single idea, what of the other 2 I brought up? Do you not agree more should be done to allow fleets to create openings within current logistics to allow for kills to occur?
If Vily’s got you using fax fits that need that, then Vily’s not nearly as smart as I remember him being.
In general, I think EWAR immunity is ridiculous, but it’s a result of the ‘cannot receive remote assistance’ that prevents things like remote sebos from being used on the force auxiliaries.
As for the third suggestion… there is an anti-logistics weapon. It’s called ‘blow up, jam, or neut the logi’. Or just have more DPS than the logi can rep. Or enough alpha to prevent the logi from being able to do anything.
Overall, I think probably the simplest solution to the problem of subcaps receiving fax reps… is the scan res bonus triage modules give. Remove that, and they don’t have the time to lock up much of anything beyond the FC and a few important people as pre-locks.
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No, but we’re not the only people who use fax… I should say they do have transfers fit, but it’s typically for the titans/supers that need it and capping up after a battle. Using them in battle is cap intensive but in smaller engagements you see this take place to get other triage ready to reenter.
Edit-
I think a lot of the ewar immunity stems from the fact that it can be chained. Limiting this is some way would alleviate the binary nature of it and allow it to be used to create openings, not keep someone permanently out of a fight. This goes for normal roaming fights as well, not just logistics.
Just blowing them up isn’t an option in smaller engagements and you know it, as well as jamming under current mechanics. If it was people wouldn’t be rushing here to cry. The removal of the scan res bonus could be a fairly simple solution to it as they would make it nearly impossible to quickly swap between targets needing assistance. So +1 to that idea. And while neuting is one of my favorite options, apparently there are fits out there that make this too tall an order with cap injection which is why I suggested #1 in conjunction with a balance pass.
I guess we’ll just wait and see, but I can say for certain the changes CCP has suggested will fix nothing and just make everyone inject up more fax alts… unless that was the idea.
Oh, it’ll do more than that.
Here’s how it plays out in wormholes:
Faxes are no longer viable as an offensive tool. You can’t bring one into an enemy C5/C6 and have it be capable of providing reps and withstanding any kind of serious dps. So people won’t. This weakens attacking groups.
Defending groups, OTOH, won’t have the mass limitation to worry about. So they’ll bring 2-3 to the hole to fight. What’s the attacker gonna do, bring in one dread? Good luck with that. Because they can still use faxes, even if they’re diminished, the defensive force has a significant force multiplier advantage over the attackers, who have to use subcap logi: Not only do they have the stronger reps, they have them with fewer pilots, so more of their numbers are in DPS ships or EWAR/Boosting/etc (call 'em ‘Command and Control’) ships.
Which means j-space may get a little bloodier in the short term, if people keep doing their normal ‘let’s go screw with the neighbors’ thing, but the losses will mostly be on the attackers’ side. The balance of power shifts even more heavily toward defense. As a result, the long term picture is fewer fights, and the ones that happen are more often eviction-level events, where the aggressors spend a week rolling holes and moving capitals in slowly.
More stasis. More gestalt. More calcification of the landscape, because the advantage is shifting to defense.
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Defenders will always have an advantage. Even if I took your scenario for granted, I don’t see anything in the (walked back?) changes that would make the scenario play out differently. If defenders bring two or three FAX to support themselves, and those fax are more effective because nothing changed, how do the attackers with a single fax and not enough dps to break the 2-3 defender faxes suddenly become victorious?
Like you pointed out, defenders have no mass limitation to worry about, so as long as a FAX can outrep a logi cruiser they’ll likely always be preferred when the situation permits.
You seem to be attributing a change to only one side of the equation despite your scenario calling for FAXs on both sides. You can’t cite mass limitation as the reason for this imbalance because that part of the equation doesn’t change with any FAX rebalancing. If it’s 1 fax verses 3 before, and 1 verses 3 after, the defenders still win. Unless you’re going to claim that a single FAX currently can outrep damage from a fairly large subcap fleet concentrated on it’s own subcap group but somehow the defenders don’t get that credit? Even if they did, if one FAX can outrep a 3:1 DPS advantage, isn’t that precisely the sort of reason they should get taken down a few notches so a small group of people can’t end up being nigh-invincible until you bring 5:1, 6:1, 7:1 damage?
Let me summarize. Explain to me how in your scenario, only the attacking FAX is nerfed. I’m not being facetious either, I’m having trouble visualizing how your scenario plays out.
It’s not. But in the current structure of things, the attackers can viably bring one. I’m not saying it’s not currently skewed toward defense. It is. I’m just saying that these changes exaggerate that skew even more.
The upshot is that reducing the effectiveness of ‘a’ fax isn’t really going to address the problem any more than it would make k-space groups less likely to use faxes in support of subcaps. And if the changes don’t actually correct the problem, then what is it they’re supposed to do, again?
It’s like saying ‘my arm’s broken, so the doctor shot me up with morphine and gave me a blindfold’. Sure, you’ve temporarily addressed a symptom (the pain), but mostly what you’re doing is masking that the problem is there, and fixing nothing.
This is why I say the whole ‘we just want to twist some knobs’ approach is a bad one. It doesn’t actually fix things, it just kicks the can down the road and pisses off the people who get told ‘we’re totally fixing this!’ and then find out that no, it didn’t fix anything. Half-assing your troubleshooting and problem-solving procedure doesn’t work.
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Well the scenario aside, I read over and completely agree with your post. Especially the point about this just being an instance of kicking the can down the road.
besides overpowered self and remote tank it also seems that cap boosters are kinda problem here - how about removing booster bonus from lif and ninazu - give them cap regen bonus instead - basically mino and apostle would be buffer tank + buffer cap while lif and nina would be regen cap and regen tank - this could also make them more usefull in WH situations - maybe completely remove local rep bonus from lif and nina and give them some bonus that would make them more usefull for WH and apo and mino should get something to be more usefull for big blobs (which they alredy got by resists bonus)
just replace cap booster bonus with 5% cap regen per level and replace local rep bonus on ninazu and lif with something more usefull for subcap fleet + cap logi (maybe 7,5% RR range per level, 5% cap ewar immunity or something like that … or most crazy idea - let capsuleers dock into them and give them huge ship hangar so they can bring fleet through WH or by jump in their “belly”)
I’d like to see a separate balance with regards to wormholes, a mass balance.
Right now a FAX can tank several times its mass in dreads and given that mass limits is a major constraint on wormhole fights the mass of a FAX should reflect this. In terms of piloting the additional mass can be offset by tweaking the inertia. Such a change would likely need to involve tweaking the jump mass limits of capital sized wormholes.
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