Pirate battleships used to 1-1.5b a while ago. Back then, Isk was worth even more than it is today. I think plex was around 300m a pop. So it wouid of taken 3-4 Plex to get a pirate battleship if you were going that route.
Do i want pirate battleships to be 1.5-2b now? No, and i will agree that some fine tuning could be done here either by nerfing the outright drop rate from DED’s, maybe going for a 25% or 40% drop nerf, or playing more with the cost through LP. Though, like you said, DED’s supply the bulk of pirate battleships, so messing with LP will only have a marginal effect.
Now with that being said, even if you feel DED nerf is drastic, the end result is that we still want pirate battleships to be more expensive. Ideally in the 600-800m range. Consider the interaction between Navy Cruisers/Frigates and Pirate Frigates/Cruisers compared to Navy Battleships and Pirate Battleships.
Lets take a short look at navy/pirate comparison in other classes:
Slicer/hookbill/firetail/comet - 14m to 25m (depending on location/LP)
Garmur/Dram/Daredevil/Worm/Cruor - 50-65m
So roughly x2 to x3 more expensive.
Same with navy cruiser to pirate cruiser comparison, in general (again location and LP dependent), going from navy to pirate is x2 to x3 cost increase.
So, after LP adjustments and a class rebalance for Navy Battleships, ideally, they’d slot in around 300-350m. Which means with a x2 or x3 cost increase, pirate battleships would vary around 600-900m. Which the Barghest is already achieving. Whether that includes nerfing DED drops, nerfing LP costs and introducing other methods in low sec to get the desired effect is fine with me. I’m flexible on the numbers/% and agree an outright removal may be too heavy handed. There is still plenty of room to fine tune to find a good medium.
Obvious, this is ideal/perfect scenarios with no manipulation. I’m just using it as an example.
Bhaalgorn see’s a fair amount of usage and i believe is 3rd or 4th in movement for Pirate battleship sales in Jita. Bhaalgorn is used in numerous anti-capital doctrines and home defense fleets. With it being so cheap, a lot of people are just throwing them at anything that comes into their space. Just some numbers to consider for volume/cost of Pirate battleships (you can reference this website for the numbers i got)
Units sold is per day in Jita
#1 Rattlesnake - 2435 units sold in Jita, 410m average cost
#2 Machariel - 1610 units sold in Jita, 370m average cost
#3 Nestor - 1565 units sold in Jita, 390m average cost
#4 Bhaalgorn - 1031 units sold in Jita, 240m average cost
#5 Nightmare - 715 units sold in Jita, 490m average cost
#6 Barghest - 273 units sold in Jita, 865m average cost
#7 Vindicator - 145 units sold in Jita, 400m average cost
Per Zkill “recent” ranking:
#1: Machariel, Rank 101
#2: Rattlesnake, Rank 105
#3: Bhaalgorn, Rank 150
#4: Nestor, Rank 194
#5: Nightmare, Rank 206
#6: Vindicator, Rank 245
#7: Barghest, Rank 313
So, both the quantity per day being sold and usage metrics both match each other very similarly. Bhaal is #3 in usage out of the pirate battleships due to it being so cheap and having additional roles as anti-capital neuts.
These numbers may not pertain directly to our conversation, but you may still find them interesting nonetheless to see that a lot of Pirate battleships are used quite a lot and easily surpass Navy Battleship usage/market movement.
Correct, Mordus can only be gotten through LP or low sec belts. Technically, per the data, Barghest has more movement than Vindi’s and Vindi’s remain cheap. Though Vindi’s are involed in more kills/deaths. At the same time though, as we’ve already discussed, there aren’t really any doctrines that a barghest can do, that a T1/Navy raven couldn’t do. The point bonus is not a very useful bonus in fleet comps.
I would be interested in seeing how removing maybe 50% of the supply with an additional 30-40% was put into lowsec would effect prices. Just as a thought experiment. Unfortunately, we can’t rely on the barghest data as there is no doctrine or hard farming occurring in lowsec for those ships.
Thank you for the information, i have some additional things to consider. I am still solid on my opinion that Pirate battleship BPC’s need to be rarer with higher LP costs as well, but I can go about it slightly less heavy handed.