Nerf about Marauders

PvP Gameplay Center PvP Ships & Modules
1

During this year’s AT feeder stream, there is a preview of the update for Legion expansion. A part of it relates to nerf of Marauders again. So after extending the bastion cycle time, removing its resistance to E-war modules (both from Viridian expansion), and removing the attributes for buffer fits (in Revenant expansion), Now the marauders which rly lost its position as a doctrine (golden fleet) and buffer fit for pve fleet like sansha incursion and pochven flashpoint, has yet received another nerf regarding its pvp and pve capability.

But first I acknowledge that there are some good rebalance added, like the one that let bastion module boost less with hp per cycle for booster and boost more on booster cycle time. At the same time, it is really good that the capacitor bonus is also get added to make cap pressure consistant across rebalance. This, according to CCP devs, aims to nerf XLASB marauders, spesifically I assume they are talking about Vargur and Golem triple XLASB fits. Which do matter somehow, but these fits are not really strong due to their need for a cap cart like gnosis to bring them enough cap charges. So I personally think this is a minor nerf, but a huge bonus for armor based marauder like Kronos which literally need a armor plate so that they do not over repair with duo rep.

All of these sounds pretty good, even the part about Vargur nerf is not that bad since Vargur do appear really frequently in all kinds of marauder brawls. However, the part that the MJD bonus is removed to potentially limit its mobility outside bastion mode, and marauders are directly banned from fights inside ESS site is really confusing.

I want to make a statement here that all the points I listed below are based on ESS fights because: first I am playing in null sec, this is the part where I am most familier with, and second, ESS fights is a big part that contribute to marauder kills and losses (not really losses since there are many multiboxing, potentially script-driven, marauders in Pochven). And from another perspective, a huge part about ESS fight is those great marauder brawlings.

First is the rather ok part, the removed MJD bonus do give marauder a large nerf that basically eliminated its capability to take fight outside ESS since for marauder to be attacker taking fight outside ESS, within minutes there will almost certainly a dread (or more) landing on site and instant kill the marauder (which is basically why there is few marauders hanging outside ESS gates). And for marauders as defender outside ESS, now with no MJD bonus the mobility is largely limited, making them have a mobility more like a bastioned battleship rather than cruiser (in CCP’s stream they use orthrus to compare with) and potentially eliminate or greatly lower its capability to constantly delivering dps over a long time regardless of hostile’s manuvering. This aspect, just as I said above, is a nerf that limit marauder’s potential a lot, but still I can get the point, at least marauder is allowed to warp to ESS acceleration gate XDD.

The next part, which is actually the part that I really do not understand, is to ban marauders to enter ESS acceleration gate, to go into ESS sites. First of all, though I am not that pro to marauder pvp, but if a roaming fleet I attend is going to enter ESS, we are for sure expecting marauders rather than anything else. Maybe CCP thinks prohibiting Marauders to enter ESS can stimulate players to use other faction battleships, but I cannot think why they should do so since these two types of ships have such different identities determined by their stats and attributes. The scenario I can think of is either the local standing fleet choose to bring a leshak heavy armor doctrine (which they will bring regardless whether marauders get nerfed or not, and they do not want to enter ESS for sure. And the leshak fleet is the most expansive one I can think of, more frequently what you may see are just FNI fleets, CFI fleets, Rokh fleets, Hurricane fleets, or other doctrines), or a multiboxing dominix fleet with neuts and remote rep on their highs with all kinds of e-wars on mids together maybe also a huginn. Sometimes the dominix will be changed to eos or other drone boats depending on skills for the player who is multiboxing, but thats all (if I am wrong please point me out but I do not think any other solo ships can get the kill or even take the fight from the attacker like the marauder). And you may notice that there is no more solo in ESS, making fights inside ESS less interesting and more difficult for single farmer who is willing to take the fight to defend. To be honest for me this ban for marauders feels more like CCP is giving up balancing the eco system inside ESS and said f it, marauders are used a lot in these fights, so I just want marauders get nerfed.

I really want CCP devs to discuss on this topic further if marauders are really that strong that they need to be explicitly banned from all other options in ESS fights, for other part of the nerf, I tend to hold my opinion and let time determine whether they are good or bad.

2

I don’t understand that change either.

ESS gates allow cruisers, battlecruisers and battleships. Now they want to remove Marauders but keep other battleships in there?

It feels inconsistent.

Besides that the bastion change seems nice and the MJD nerf seems… I don’t know. I don’t use Marauders often enough to really know if they deserve such a nerf. I wouldn’t think so.

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3

most comfuse part is, anyone use Marauders oudside ESS to pvp(not include Pochven)?
if not allow them enter. Only use Marauders for PVE?

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4

So null once again is going to get my Paladin nerfed that I use for lvl 4 missions?

5

Most of the changes seems reasonable.

  • The Bastion changes are actually great: It allows the Standard Dualrep-Armor Marauders to manage their cap much more efficiently. That is actually a reall nice buff for Paladin and Kronos.

  • At the same time it greatly nerfs the amount of eHP generated by TripleAncillary Shieldfits, which were crazy imbalanced until now. You could literally get 2-3times the amount of eHP from fitting ASBs than you could from fitting pure buffer. Thats not what was intended with these mods and it is nice that this is finally fixed. I still don’t understand why there is the need to even allow multiple ASBs on one ship, the AAR is also limited to one per ship… and even needs cap while running with Paste, the ASB does not… so it’s still imbalanced in favor of ASBs, but the gap has been closed quite a bit.

  • the MJD bonus removal definitely is a nerf, especially for L4 missionrunners that could greatly increase their performance by fitting the much more powerful shortrange weapons and use the MJD in missions that have multiple NPC groups pretty far away from each other. Now that will only be possible less often, probably increasing mission time for some missions a bit. Not for all missions, in most you don’t even need the MJD, but for some. Yeah it’s a nerf, but really, not one that significantly hurts anyone income wise. Yet, some people will claim it “cripples their playstile”. It won’t.
    For PvP on the other hand, it finally achieves to stop Marauders from constantly following even mobile gangs and threaten them with the Marauder’s extreme damage projection. It will be easier to manveuver away from them now but still stay on grid to keep fighting. Good change!

  • further falloff nerf for the Vargur… hmm. Don’t really think that one was was nessessary. The loss of effective DPS is very very noticable, which is why the Vargur is PvE wise already quite a bit behind the Paladin and the Kronos right now. I had rather taken away lockrange from it, so it keeps its damage potential, but it would have to sacrifce a slot (Med, Low or Rig) to really shot to more than a 100km.

  • ESS changes. Hmm, undecided on that. Yeah, cloaked Marauders that were pre-placed in there and just sniped an incoming Small Gang to death without those being able to really do anything since they couldn’t use MWDs or MJDs… not a very good design. Maybe it would have been enough to consequently disable cloaking devices over the whole ESS grid and then look if the problem goes away.
    I can imagine, some people loved to “trap” Marauders by baiting with a small gang robbing the ESS, then the locals tried to warp 1-4 Marauders in there to scare them off but the attackers had a reinforcement gang ready waiting to come in once the Marauders were on the ESS grid and couldn’t warp out any more. This now isn’t possible any more.

6

I kind of agree with other parts about marauders like the MJD part and Vargur falloff nerf, but the triple anci vargur is definitely not overpowered that much I think. They need support from other cap boost charge cart or it is just a matter of time to kill them. The coil vargur is much more powerful for tanking (like literally one or two constant running Pith X-type X-large booster under the cap pressure of two curses on grid). I tend to insist my point that the only obvious advantage for triple anci vargur is that it is super cheap compared to any other pvp marauder fits.

Also my opinion about allowing multiple ASB on ship but only one AAB is that an anci armor booster can have its rep amount tripled when loaded with nanites, and you can have tons of nanites in your cargo hold. ASB only get its rep amount boosted by 10% and not even completely immune to cap pressure since shield resistance mods need cap to run. Kind of a hard to balance thing but I personally would not fit a single ASB if the ship is designed to brawl. And the XLASB marauders get nerfed actually does not effect the whole system that much I would say.

And for the ESS bans, I am pretty sure that there is much more solutions to fix the cloaked marauder snipper, one on the top of my head is to simply extend the area that you cannot cloak to 500km, which would directly solve it (unless people then decide to still bring marauders in and prop to 200km without cloaks, cannot think of a reason right now why they should though). The ban for marauders to enter ESS is just not a really polished solution to my perspective, I just did not see a reason why such a direct spesified ban would be on the list. Also for the marauder “trap”, yea that may be a little imbalanced, but for the most of the time if I decide to go into ESS, then either I can deal with the marauder landing on grid, or I can stay alive with the marauder on grid and have a fight with other reinforcement (just a curse or arbitrator in the fleet can do the work), the problem is that normally fitted marauders are powerful, but not that OP in current environment that worth someone to bait, (an AT ship like cybele may worth a try, and one did get killed several weeks ago in ESS) so I just cannot think how this ban can do anything good enough to counter its potential negative influence to current ESS environment.

(Other changes are really fine for me, they are just reasonable rebalance across versions, but the ESS ban is really improper to my point of view)

7

The point is that the Triple ASB Vargurs weren’t really used for active tanking. The ASBs were simply used as “buffer” and there never was the intention to tank for long, like in Blingfits. The only goal is to have so much effective HP that the opponent needs to destroy, that you can survive until you are out of Bastion and then the Logiwing of your fleet catches you.

I’ll give you a simple example:
A well fitted triple-Anc Golem can overheat when being primary and has like 140k eHP from the shield, plus 350k eHP x 3 from the ANCs. That means, roughly 1.2 Million EHP. Without Implantset. Without extreme Bling Fit. Yes, thats insanely OP. While still having Damagemods in the Lows!

Try to build anything like that on an Armorship. Absolutely no chance. If that 1 Million eHP from the ASBs is now cut down by 40%, thats 400.000 less eHP to grind trough. Now we are talking.

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8

That actually makes sense to me. I guess the ASB is just with different role in shield tanking compared to anci reps in armor tanking. And the triple rep bonus for anci armor rep makes armor marauders guaranteed to over rep while in bastion before this bastion tweak.

Thanks for correcting that, but still what I rly care about is the ess change XDD

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Yeah I agree, really not sure if outright banning them was the right move. Disabling Cloak could have been a first move and then checking if the “problem” would go away.

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10

Remove marauders from high-sec!

11

Simply no

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12

Marauders in HS are a good thing.

It’s an aspirational goal for PvE players as well as a tough expensive ship for other players to hunt that isn’t impossible to kill.

13

an orcas too, remove all them.

14

Orcas are mainly useful in HS. If not there, where?

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Pirates need to leave their comfort zone and operate in low- and null-sec if they want to hunt big whales. If your goal is mining in high-sec, use a Porpoise, and for ratting a battleship, plan accordingly. For everything else, whether you’re playing as a carebear or a pirate, step out of the high-sec comfort zone and bring 0.5 back to low-sec, even 0.6!!!.

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People in low and null sec use and hunt Rorquals as top mining ship.

Orcas are mainly a HS boat.

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A LOW SEC boat… every Orca kill in high sec is a carebear losing their ship to NPCs. :rofl: