Buff battleships. Battleships can be an excellent capital counter.
Buffs:
increase buffer (buff the buffer baby!). At least double, preferrably triple. They still can’t track subcaps, so it doesn’t really affect balance against subcaps much… just makes it harder for supers to volley them.
make target spectrum breakers impart substantially greater scan res penalties (making them useless against subcaps) without breaking friendly locks
Increase their travel mobility to make them viable for roams.
Net result, you’ve got battleships that can be used offensively without titans. You’ve got natural ways to donkeypunch faxes, carriers, supers.
Heavy neuts will mess up faxes. TSBs and burst jammers mess up carriers/supers. Long range projection offers a very viable counter to HAW fit dreads/titans.
They’d still need support against subcaps, and that’s good.
How would doubling base ehp change that in any meaningful way. since you are talking an active rep fit there. Ok it becomes slightly harder to get you via leak through to armour on volleys.
But would otherwise do very little to your golem.
And it’s your buffer tank that lets you do that, right? Or is it maybe your… active tank? Same as before, you’ll tank the second coming of Christ until you run out of navy cap charges. In other words, no change.
Buff battleships? Haha. CCP has a massive hateboner against battleships being viable for years. With only QoL changes thrown their way recently (cargo buffs/targeting range).
Capitals were over buffed. HAW Dreads do nearly the same thing as marauders and are far cheaper. Dreads and carriers are more mobile (cyno) and they lock faster or at comprable speeds than most battleships. Bottom line is capitals shouldnt be a one size pwns all ship line.
Historically, EVE is balanced by the larger in size your ship goes, the harder it is to hit things smaller than you. Thats completely broken with carriers and HAW dreads. Buffing battleships doesnt fix the fundamental flaw in the current capital design.
And before anyone points out “but muh capital ship is expensive, it should beat everything else on field”
No its not, dreads, fax and carriers are cheap after insurance. Also price is not a balancing point. If someone wants to claim it is… then a proper fit marauder should be able to dunk 2-3 dreads solo cause it costs more. But capital pilots dont want that same principle to apply to subcaps, they think capitals should remain OP because its their toys they’ve “saved” up for (in time or cost). Its strangling the meta and any form of roaming when you need to check nearly every opponent on zkill to see if they have a cyno or use caps.
Tangents aside on caps, BS could use some tweaks:
-I agree on an EHP buff, not a x3 recommendation, but 20-30% buff would be a good starting point. Also, BS not tracking subcaps, wat? As someone who flies battleships and BCs almost exclusively, they track most subcaps just fine.
-Fix their damn scan resolution, for example, the rokh and SNI have 93mm scan resolution which is worse than dreads and on par with some carriers. All battleships need a minimum of +25 scan resolution added to help distance them from caps. This will help make them a little more user friendly and not have to wait 30s to lock a frigate.
-Mobility is fine, time exiting warp isnt great, but the only way to fix that is buff warp speeds. Which means everything else gets faster as well (basically add +1AU to all ships except capitals). But its not a major concern with BS usage in the meta imo.
Those things wont really matter until capital proliferation is reigned in a little though. A 300k EHP BS will still get stomped on by a dread, carrier, super etc all the same if they all can continue to apply as well as they do now, for as cheap as they are.
A fitted dread will cost more than a fitted Marauder. Marauders only cost more when you bling them. Hull cost is roughly on-par, and capital modules all cost more than their subcap equivalents. Point in case, even faction large turrets cost less than T2 capital turrets.
That said, I do agree that HAW dreads completely invalidate almost every contribution that a marauder could offer to pvp… ofc marauders aren’t intended for pvp… but sandbox yo!
There’s nothing wrong with capitals being a one-size pwns all. Keep in mind we’re talking about fax, carrier, supercarrier, titan, and dread. They basically cover the whole gamut. No specific capital should be able to, but as a class, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Remember that capitals lack mobility. It’s extremely easy to out-maneuver capitals. That’s why capitals always need subcap support.
Might work in LS, but in null anything less than 2-3x the buffer will just see them gibbed. At the end of the day, extra buffer won’t save a BS that was going to die pre-buff. And going on tracking, no, they can’t track for ■■■■ against an intelligent opponent.
Can’t argue with this, although I would say that it would lend more support to the “anti-capital” role they COULD offer. Scanres is moot when you’re targeting something that big.
Definitely disagree with this. Getting waterboarded, bubblefucked, or having to travel 50 jumps along a roam route is entirely not an option. They need to warp faster, and they need to get into and out of warp faster.
Yes, a 300k EHP BS will… but a 900k ehp BS, now we’re talking. That’s why I say 2-3x and not 20-30%.
A proper fit marauder (one that does all those cool things and that can survive for any length of time) is 3.5 to 5b. Some marauders base values are more expensive than comparable dread (paladin/rev, varg/nag).
Yes the weapons are the main investment of a dread. Especially suicide dreads. However, unlike marauders, dreads/carriers get t1 insurance. So when its all said and done, its much cheaper to lose a dread than a marauder.
Did a quick zkill look at a nag. Zkill estimate shows 2.5b isk loss. After insurance, you lose about 1.5b total (including ammo, nanite, fitting/rigs). So a typical dread total cost is 1.5b. A Marauder’s base hull cost is 1.5-1.7b and only insure for a couple hundred million. With fittings, ammo, nanite etc, you will be well over the cost of a dread. Unlike dreads, for marauders to perform, they need pimp, so fitting cost will be quite a bit higher than a dread.
Capitals dont lack mobility. From a strictly subwarp speed, sure (though niche fits like nano nids/nags are comparable to armor BS, but i digress). But actual mobility across the map? Capitals can cyno, no other subcap can jump to a cyno except BLOPs. Also with mwd trick, most caps can align just as fast as subcaps.
As far as support, that is highly debatable. We get solo HAW dread videos all the time slaying fleets solo. Or carriers being dropped on anything that moves in a region cause they dont need support to blap that BC, BS or cruiser. Hell, with SS fighters a carrier can pop a ceptor with 0 support. Have to deal with that stupid application against ratting carriers when roaming.
I think youre going about trying fixing caps in the wrong way. If battleships have 900k EHP on average that severely skews the balance of subcaps just to try to fix cap proliferation.
Battleships are vulnerable to smaller subcaps, if they become a 900k ehp brick, they will start dominating against everything smaller as they will have plenty of time to start defanging smaller ships. This can be done through grapplers, heavy neuts, extensive drone bays, missile fits etc. Right now, 150k ehp is pretty easy for a gang to chew through. 300k EHP would buff them without making them OP HP bricks.
A 900k ehp BS still dies to a capital when one is cyno’d on top of it with no other ships assisting the capital. Capitals apply too well and are too easy to get into. Its causing a ripple effect in every gameplay style, not just fleets. They do too much with little drawback.
Yes, they can track intelligent pilots. Heavy neuts work on dumb and smart people. If you have no cap and grappled or your prop is off, youll get tracked and popped.
Actually its one of the biggest sticking points for me. A carrier can lock a battleship and apply damage before the battleship has a chance to lock fighters in an attempt to defang.
A properly fit dread is 4-4.5b. Obviously, if you’re going to be suicide whelping them, you don’t fit anything more than guns, damage mods, and a T2 siege. But at that point we’re comparing apples to oranges. Marauders aren’t even meant for PVP, apart from the bastardized uses that some players do in lowsec.
Regarding insurance, you’re very right. But, I would argue that a T1 cap requires a HUGE amount of extra training over a Marauder. So, for the SP investment, you go back to a T1 hull with much better insurance.
I’m talking about grid mobility. In terms of travel, yes they have jump drives, but take it from someone who just burned across New Eden in a cap last night; they don’t go anywhere fast. Regardless, on-grid mobility is the tactical concern… once they drop, they’re committed.
No, they don’t slay fleets, they slay idiots. There are MANY counters to a HAW dread, such as burning out of gun range and going around them. You aren’t forced to fight them. Choosing to fight one is like choosing to stick your hand in a blender… sure… you can… but why?
Yes, capital umbrellas are an issue - I agreed with that already. But rather than nerf faxes (which won’t do a lick of good there) buff battleships. Make them viable counters to capitals. Carriers in general… consider TSBs and burst jammers. Fighters are now useless.
Regarding your comment about the cepter, are you saying that carriers should not be able to kill a single frigate?
Battleships in general suck. They’re so far from the current meta that it’s retarded. The only time you see them is in alpha fleets, or snowflakes in LS that don’t need to travel. They need to be buffed to remain relevant, because right now, they aren’t. As I said before, extra buffer won’t help them if they were already going to die. All it does is make it so you can’t volley them. Now, arty/sniping fleets aren’t the only mainline battleship meta.
300k EHP still gets chewed through fast. At the end of the day, the exact amount of EHP is moot when looking at BS vs subcaps. If it was going to die, it was because you were breaking their active reps (be it from remote logi, passive regen, or local active). Whether they’ve got 300k or 900k ehp, that will remain true. They will live longer, yes, but honestly even at 300k they still onyl live for less than a minute. 2.5 mins isn’t much to ask for a battleship.
As for battleships with neuts, neuts and nos’ work both ways. You can cap out a battleship retardedly fast, especially if it’s running heavy neuts. Always roam with neuts!
Right, but if they had triple the buffer, that wouldn’t mean anything. THey’d have plenty of time to lock the fighters and gib them. Fighters die insanely fast. And as battleships should be supported, their logistics will have plenty of time to rep up the damage from the fighters.