So I was thinking this morning. Ships die too fast. It feels far less epic than it could be. This is in GD because I’m not suggesting it, I just want a discussion on it. It’d be a massive change, of which the implications are unknown.
We all (well… most of us) know how it feels when a good fight goes on and on. Everyone’s buffers are inching down, reps are landing JUST in time, anci reps are reloading just in time to save you while you’re in structure. It’s the best buzz I will ever get from Eve.
Compared to… 3, 2, 1, volley. Okay, next target, 3, 2, 1, volley. There’s no counterplay, there’s no reps, there’s no fun. It’s cold, methodical, and effective.
And then there’s the “okay if we don’t volley them down before they catch reps, we’ll never kill anything.” which is by far the worst of the three.
What if:
Buffers were doubled across the board
Remote reps were cut in half, with no logi ship being cap stable with all reps running (chained basi for example)
No change to local reps (you can’t bring 50 local reps to rep through 150 players)
Players can still brute force it, like they do now. They can still bring more numbers to alpha things off. THey can still bring more logi to keep things alive. But they must bring more. Much more. Arguably, double what they have now.
There are few, if any groups that can do that, because they always bring everything they can and often times it’s only just enough.
Concerning your idea on the logistic, I think people using them massively will feel like an Overwatch player maining Mercy after patch day ^^
For the “3, 2, 1, volley, boom” thing, my opinion might be hard to understand (as always), but imagine you have a fast car, and you try to see if you can go fast enough to go trough a restricted area with it and come out alive. When you’re half way done, you see a tank shell blasting in your direction and boom, it hit the car right in the middle, destroying it, with the driver, in a single shot.
Of course, a sport car isn’t made to survive a hit from a war machine. Which, in EVE, can be translated as “a cruiser can’t withstand a battleship volley, simply because it’s shield, armor and hull aren’t engineered for that”. So yeah, I understand that there’s no epic-ness in being blown off the grid by a single shot, but it entirely depend of the scenario
(Well, except for those guys that do all those complicated math things just to know what way will get them the best ISK return…)
But if it’s not fun for you to be destroyed in a single shot, maybe it is for the guy sitting on the good end of the turret (or missile, but I think it’s harder for them to do alpha strike, like Artillery), that simply want to feel the power of his ship, being able to tear appart an advanced spacecraft by a simple button.
As we say here in France (dunno if it’s translated that way) : “Your freedom stops where the one of another begin (Ta liberté s’arrête là où celle d’un autre commence)”
It’s only fun insofar as winning the fight is fun. Certainly we all enjoy winning… but that doesn’t mean it’s a valid reason for such a tactic to be as effective as it is now.
I can certainly concede though that some people may enjoy that playstyle. I would argue that they are probably in the minority however, excepting those who like it “because they can/will win”.
Tweaking the numbers doesn’t change the overall feel. I’m not against larger initial buffers on the Bc & Bs. as both feel low relative to their slowness. However if you double the base ehp of a bs it’s still only about 20% increase for a buffer fitted ship after plates. And if you increase plates/extenders the ehp gap between cruisers (especially t3) and everything larger shrinks more.
But if you really want to control ttk and force it to be longer than an instant volley you have to use damage caps like citadels have. it could be a soft damage cap or a hard damage cap, but hard caps are much easier to balance. Because then you can enforce logi caps including cap transfer that are lower than the damage cap. Still makes logi useful, means local reps matter even in fleet fights, and puts more on individual pilots and the fleet hierarchy rather than just the fc.
Personally I agree. the epic moments are when you have time to see death approaching and fight back with all you have.
IMHO the frigate, destroyer and cruiser fights are good. You can fit either for max tank or max DPS and everything in between thus to a good degree choosing how long it will take you to die.
Caps on the other hand take way too long and need to die much faster. This would actually help out with balancing stuff such as cap proliferation and carrier ratting just for starters.
The troubled area are battlecruisers and battleships. They die too fast for their lack of mobility, increased sigs, slow lock times, etc. and need a significant boost in both flat out overall base EHP as well as being more damage resistant vs caps. I would actually like to see some shield extenders and armor plates that give slightly less EHP then regular ones do, but offer more vs XL+ weapons. The numbers would of course have to be tested and then adjusted, but I would like to see a balance between battleships and dreds along same line as it is currently between cruiers and battleships.
