We can’t really say this with any certainty here, we haven’t even seen hard stats on the changes yet let alone their impact.
Also this would require that anyone actually fight over small sites in FW instead of running away when contested… /s
Seriously though, I get the concern but most T1 frigs already didn’t have much of a chance against an AF (or most other T2 or Faction frigs), and an AF still won’t have a huge chance against a pair of T1 frigs barring either a fairly massive SP gap or a decent sized skill gap.
Key words “most” and all three of those have a directly stronger AF or Navy counterpart so at best they’re competitive with the better hulls and more cost effective, they’re still not going to win against an equally high SP opponent unless he makes a fairly significant mistake.
This would effectively create a second required module on the ship further limited fit diversity on a class of ships that are already pretty slot poor. Same goes for the cap booster bonus idea.
except i can think of one AF that doesn’t already require a cap booster on the majority of its fits so it doesn’t really add a required module as much as it bonuses an existing one.
… when it comes to AFs i fly hawks exclusively >.> old school duel asb fit. But ill be the first to admit even a N. Hookbill is better in most situations. Hell even my beloved kestrel is better bang for your isk
Sorry for my OCD response here but “old school” would a medium shield booster (the still meta 4 one) and cap injector, where you put navy 400 cap charges in to over-fill your 342gj lol-capacitor.
For solo and smaller gang stuff sure, but you can get away with not on fleet and PvE fits.
Also part of the point of improving the cap is opening up more options, as opposed to buffing the solution to cap issues everyone is already using and thereby further entrenching it as 2-3 slots you have to use no matter what the rest of your fit is doing.
Would only fix them in small gang, where their role was never that significant anyways. HACs are generally more useful in medium+ gangs of 30+, such as nullsov gangs.
EWAR does not scale well, which means it’s generally not used. Sure you’ll see a bit of it (webs and painters on the dps primary for example) but beyond that, you won’t really see it. EWAR resistances would not help them in their niche.
As for AFs and their ability to always MWD, same thing. In small gang that would matter. In large gang, it really wouldn’t do a thing because the only one getting scrammed is the one that’s about to go pop. You’ll still have dual/triple webs which means they still go pop.
Seeing their EHP get pushed into the battlecruiser level (or battleship+ for the HACs), on the other hand, means they won’t go pop before logi can start landing reps. I’m warming up to the active module they’re proposing.
Biggest plus I can see, brawling HACs vs null alpha volley fleets. I hate alpha fleets so much (boring as ■■■■). Anything that becomes a hard counter to them has my support.
I don’t think it will be as much as a hard counter as you think.
Dread fleets are like that now with their special damage control they simply switch off primary and come back once his module has run out.
My biggest thing’s with them don’t know if good or bad yet but…
-AF’s could forgo any resists in favour of this damage control as most frig fights are less than 30 seconds anyway.
-Buffer Hac’s can remove some resists and then still be extremely high ehp ships making them very dangerous in close quartars.
-And finally ships like my 100mn stable Vaga gain an awesome module that won’t be used in a fight but does make an awesome GTFO module and give time for my 100mn ab to spool up and escape web’s and the like.
I am more looking forward to the rebalance that will happen at the same time though tbh as that has more potential to shake think up fast than this module.
There isn’t an alpha fleet out there that can effectively track them once they get inside the guns. Even still, getting under the guns can be difficult as it’s usually impossible to maintain transversal on everyone - only takes 7 or so battleships will still be enough volley you, out of a fleet of 200. This module will help them survive that volley with ease.
