Its time to do some work on some of the deploy-able things to spice the game up a bit.
For a start small warp bubbles need to anchor a lot faster than now and a lot faster than large ones.
Cyno beacons need a hp buff and a size decrease in half.
Mobile scan in hibs need to actually inhibit directional scans. Or at least only appear on very focused angles like 5 and 15.
We could also use some new anchor like:
Mobile sensor boosters platforms.
Mobile Statis bubbles.
Rapid limited cloak scatterers (can de-cloak stuff in a small area with a good chance).
Mobile Remote repair platforms.
Mobile resistance buffers and de-buffers
Mobile capacitor fountains. (spew capacitor for say 3 min in a 25km area for example)
Signature dispersion fields (disrupts blob primary target calling) Like a sig radius suppressor.
Theres so much potential to shake up the battlefield with deployables. And loads of ways to balance them. From anchoring time, to range, effect fall off, numbers in a grid and so on.
Certain ships can even be designed around them with a dedicated bay.
Or maybe ships can have band with for them like drones.
Point is there is tons of content to be had from them thats being missed
Small ones do already anchor a lot faster than large ones.
Large T1: 8 minutes anchoring time
Small T2: 1 minute anchoring time
I think 1 minute anchoring time is short enough already, you can set one up when you see hostiles incoming in the next system and be ready.
If you want instantaneous bubbles use non-mobile alternatives like interdictors or heavy interdictors.
Why?
Cyno beacons are non-combat alternatives to regular cyno modules on ships.
They are designed to be intentionally bad in combat situations with their delayed activation and low hitpoints.
Combat situations where every ship had access to a cyno were bad for the game, which is why CCP eventually heavily restricted their usage and only allows very few ships to carry a cyno nowadays.
As this restriction made it hard for players to move their jump-capable ships, CCP added non-combat alternatives in the form of these mobile cynos.
These are intentionally easy to kill, so improving their hitpoints or decreasing their size would not be a good change.
I think what they were getting at is that the mobile scan inhibitors shows up like a red flag, ie: make it harder to detect these. I could be wrong, of course.
Okay, that would make sense, but I’m not sure if it’s needed. Mobile scan inhibitors may be a red flag, but they do what they’re supposed to do: hide everything else around it.
Also mobile scan inhibitors are only noticed if:
the player using dscan has their filter to show mobile scan inhibitors (which not always is the case),
the player notices the scan inhibitor amongst other results, and
the player knows what an inhibitor does
It’s such a rare sight that I bet most people wouldn’t even notice or recognise this ‘red flag’.
And they do what they’re supposed to do: hide everything around the mobile scan inhibitor. You could plant a whole lot of bubbles at a gate, including an uncloaked fleet and people wouldn’t notice.
All those people with covert ops cloaks who just bypass the bubble and camp need a nerf. How dare those Buzzards and Asteros bypass an honest gate camp?