I have had this idea in my head for a couple of weeks now and mulled it over and I have decided to share it with you guys.
So. Assault frigates. What is wrong with them?
-Slow
-Price vs T3D’s and other effective ships.
-And some just suck.
But other than that a lot of them are actually good ships they have just been superseded by the introduction of T3D’s thus their use has dropped off.
So what do they need?
-More speed? But then you have a tanky interceptor.
-More tank? That wouldn’t really benefit them very well.
-More DPS? No that won’t fix the issue at all.
So what they do need is something unique something to give them a role. A role that fit’s a frigate class hull all the while playing to the ships current stats.
So.
Give them a fitting bonus to Heavy warp scramblers , Heavy Disruptors & Grapplers that will allow Assault frigates to fit them for the same fitting and consumption cost of there normal variants.
This will do a few things.
-Make them one hell of a frigate menace. But that’s where the slow speed balances that.
-Let them catch those pesky stabbed frigates in lowsec fac war.
-They would likely play a part in camps along side interceptors.
Now again I am not saying this would fix them all but it would give them there “Thing” and once they have there thing balancing them becomes a rather simple job for CCP.
The thing is the Malus Navy get’s a range bonus so actually it would still reach further would it not?
And the thing with a grappler is the rapidly falling off effectiveness from range. A Dare Devli can get what like 12km with faction web but the grappler is only at 100% effectiveness at 1.5km.
Doing that to Assault frigs would be cool but don’t give HAC’s neut resistance. There is enough HAC’s running around with batteries they don’t need more resistance.
An option, yes, but there’s a strong fitting choice involved that completely goes away by giving magic resistances.
It should be hard to make an AF resistant to all forms of ewar - unless you were sacrificing something else like prop or tank - but it should be easy to make any AF resistant to a specific form of ewar.
Giving them a fairly low base resist to ewar should have a similar effect without making it either pointless fitting modules to help or using ewar on them
Give them too big a bonus and they become an overpowered counter to an Ewar ship, Ewar ships already tend to make significant sacrifices to do their job.
Give them too small a bonus to module effectiveness and it becomes pointless trying to make specific use of the slot, since frigates get very few slots to start with, so the only fits with the modules would be ones that already have the modules.
A small but flat bonus (I’m thinking like 20%, or maybe 5% / level or something as the high end of my image here) is easiest to balance to an always useful but never overpowered level. And gives the Assault range a unique character of their own that is always on, rather than reliant on ‘you only get your class bonus if you use a specific module’.
Neut resistance would be welcome, but resistance to ewar doesn’t really seem appropriate. Damping or ECMing an AF off of an ally seems pretty legit. HACs and AFs should probably have lower than normal ECM resistance and lock times.
The ones that have range bonuses seem silly as they are outmatched by all destroyers. They should just give up everything they don’t need in order to brawl really well.
Web resistance would fit in very well as there is no module to counter webs.
A fixed mass penalty reduction when using afterburners would work pretty well too, and wouldn’t have any benefit when using 10MN ABs. That would give them a close quarters advantage in speed and transversal, while not really stepping on the grid-ranging abilities of interceptors or other MWDing frigates.
Grapplers wouldn’t even obsolete the Daredevil, no more than it obsoleted the Vindicator. Or the Vigilant for that matter. These ships still got to apply their 90% webbing at full range.
So, a DD could still engage and win against an Grappler fit AF by using range control.
I kind of disagree with your basic premise here and this is where I think it falls apart:
There is a huge range between where AFs are sitting right now and Interceptors. You could quite easily buff the speen on AFs by ~50m/s across the board and still have a decent gap between the fastest AF and the slowest Inty.
That change right there would put the Wolf at 407 while the joint slowest Inties are the Raptor and Taranis at 420m/s each, followed by the Ares at 425.
Plus Inties have lower mass and better base align time, meaning they can use their speed better.
Also I should stress that that’s just the fastest AF compared to the slowest Inty, most AFs don’t even break 300m/s, and the fastest Inty hits 480m/s, so again there’s plenty of room between AFs and Inties without AFs stepping on Inty toes at all.
Then you have a ship that has pretty good speed, tank, and DPS all at the same time where as the T3Ds have to pick one at a time by swapping modes.
I think you are right here, but if the AF is faster then it begins to outclass dessies.
Sometimes I think the AF is just a bad idea. It is like someone forgot we already had destroyers, and so they made another class of small ship that is good at destroying (assaulting?) small ships.
That is why I really like the OP’s basic idea to give it a role as heavy speed tackle with neut resistance.
Then the into and interdictor class are for fast grab and point, and the AF becomes the ship that maximises group DPS by tying down the enemy.
Maybe give it a boost to painter as well, and cut the tank some.
The T3Ds are still going to have better fittings and plenty of options, plus the option to situationally outclass the AFs, so they should still be able to win it’ll just take more skill to make a T3D shine than an AF.
As for the T2 dessies that’s a non-issue. Interdictors and Command Destroyers are specialized ships with unique bonuses and roles that other ships flatly can’t replicate. Their raw combat potential is pretty much secondary.
Plus stuff like solo Thrashers will still have the things that make them fun and unique because they’re not actually losing anything here, and a change like that shouldn’t put AFs actually above where T3Ds are now.
AFs and HACs are both holdovers from the pre-tiericide when some T2 ships were basically just “T1 but better”. Back then Destroyers were just bad and both hull types had a pretty unique role. Then Eve moved on.
CCP have tried to preserve the gameplay around them as best they can, and people clearly want that gameplay or there wouldn’t be so many calls to do something more with the ships. I just don’t think OP’s suggestion is particularly good. It, like so many other AF rework suggestions, seems to be trying too hard to be novel and hasn’t really considered the balance implications of the actual suggestion.
Letting AFs fit Grapplers would make them OP against other small ships, because the big disadvantage to Grapplers is that they’re mounted on big slow battleships that everything else can keep range from. Giving them Heavy Scrams and Points would make them the ultimate anti-cap tackle because no cap short of a Carrier, and then only maybe, is going to be able to peel off a properly tanked AF.
Web immunity would be ridiculously OP though, because if you’re immune to webs you can keep transversal where your enemy can’t, and in a frigate duel you can pretty much disengage at will.
Destroyers are exactly what you describe: large sigs, long range “small” ships.
I thought assault frigates were supposed to be tough brawling frigates? mwd with sig bonus means they can get places and speed tank a bit better as a complement for a hefty tank for frigates. They deal damage better than T1. More tools to enable them to survive at close range and fulfil their roles (sensor strength, resolution but not range and resistance to other forms of EWAR, including cap warfare and webs) is what they seem to need to be great brawlers.
Kiting and sniping is not really what “assault” evokes.
edit: @Cade_Windstalker it doesn’t have to be immunity though, it could just be resistance, or a “minimum speed” so they can still move around and brawl instead of being dead in the water.
Small point of order here, AFs aren’t particularly large sig ships by default.
Also it’s not good to get tied down on names here. Names are easy to change if needed. People made the same complaint with the “Marauders”. What a name evokes is always going to be at least a little subjective.
If it’s enough that it matters then it still runs into the problem of the AF always being able to disengage from the other ship so long as it too has a web and the other side doesn’t have a range or effect magnitude bonus.
Plus even if you do find a sweet spot here you’ve still got the slow base speed of the AFs to content with. They get out-run by very nearly everything in their weight class including the T3Ds most of the time. So ironically the sweet spot for a bonus like that is likely to be in a place where it’s not actually useful because even with the bonus whatever the T3D is fighting is still faster than it.
Against larger targets webbing the AF you still run into the same sort of issues, where either you’re negating so much of the web that it feels unfair, and probably is, or it does nothing and you still get blapped. Plus from a speed tank perspective the current MWD bonus is better against large targets anyway.