On the issue of Kiting vs Brawling:
Overall the balance of Kiting and Brawlers should be that kiters (by definition) have longer range weapons, to hit brawlers from far away, but brawlers should have faster speed to catch said kiters, so that there is a tradeoff for both kinds of players. Brawlers can catch kiters, but during the chase, they are taking damage, and if there are multiple kiters in a gang, then potentially from multiple sources. So Brawlers need to have the tank to actually take the damage and still be able to catch and kill the kiters. Kiters need to be slow enough to actually be caught in a reasonable time by said brawlers, to actually make the tradeoff viable for both kinds of players. To this end i propose the following changes…
- Garmur / Orthrus / Barghest:
~ Warp Scram bonus range removed (i.e. bonus range only for Warp disruptors)
~ -15% base speed
These ships are the ultimate kiters, with long range disrupters, and very long range weapons with good application. On top of that, they can fit longer range scrams to prevent any brawling ship from ever catching them and landing a scram on them. This leads to the current meta with snaked and blinged garmurs/orthrus being uncatchable and unkillable. No frigate can catch them to land a scram, since a faction scram with garmur bonus overheated can stop any chaser’s MWD from 20km off, all the while keeping point on him and applying dps. So unless the garmur pilot makes a ‘mistake’ and stays on field too long against long range damage, there’s literally no way to kill such kiting ships. To even the field for brawling ships, these kiting ships need to lose their scram bonus, so they can at least be caught by a well fit Dramiel… and there is at least some skilled counterplay to these ships.
- Triglavian ships:
~ -30% Speed
~ +10% Hitpoints
Trig ships are faster than most other ships of their class, while also having great damage and excellent projection. These three factors combined make them very good at kiting. I propose to have their speed cut down and brought down the level of other ships of their class (looking at Kikimora, Vedmak, Drekavac, Leshak). This would still keep these ships as very strong brawlers, with their scaling up damage, and still make it very difficult to kite these ships with their long range weapons and good dps. However it will prevent these ships from being kiters themselves, instead making them great brawling ships with great anti-kiting weapons.
On a side note, it really makes no sense for a faction destroyer (Kikimora), to be 35% faster than T3Ds in “Propulsion” mode?? This really shouldn’t be happening…
Regards,
Solarus