Tech 3 is great. Tech 3 is actually about using modular subsystems to customise your ship’s purpose to fill a niche that Tech 2 does not currently do i.e. a Covops HAM Tengu with the right offensive subsystem to enable gangs to sneak up on targets unnoticed and then take out them out quickly. You get to mix and match the different subsystems to fulfil a niche purpose or your own play-style. It’s great. And many of us want to see that expanded to other ship classes.
I’ve always wished that the Nestor had followed closer in the footsteps of the Astero and Stratios. Wouldn’t mind a version where you could choose between 3 options: larger clandestine miner, larger data/relic hacker, or combat probing for wreck ninja looting. Sacrificing gank for tank overall, while allowing for a rotation through different modules/configurations for different activities. I thank CCP has plenty of other areas to spend their resources, but…you asked.
I have. And I’ve seen dreads stung by a multitude of bees. It was just an off-the-cuff idea.
IIRC back then there was a lot of negativity towards having battleships that could use covert ops cloaking capabilities and they tried to do something with the Nestor that was a little more unique - I still think in a more limited capacity it should have been black ops capable though.
The concept is great, sure.
In practice, your covert hamgu is entirely OP. More damage, tank, and mobility than a recon (a ship literally designed for covert stuff), covert ops cloak, not to mention all the other inherent advantages to things like heating.
Yet, if you brought them down to where they should be (generalized, not better than the relevant T2 at any specific role) it would be a worthless boat that nobody would fly. Which is why T3Cs are horrible - they excel at EVERY role.
T3Ds were better because they made them a LOT less flexible than T3Cs with their modes as opposed to subsystems. Which in turn made them much easier to balance, and much more T2ish in nature. They only have one role, killing things, which they excel at. Yet, they’re still OP relative to their cost.
Going a bit off topic really but I think one of the problems there is just how different Eve became versus the vision for force recons especially I think there was some notion they’d be capable of a certain degree of “standoff” engagement with the target(s) until the main force arrived but in reality that didn’t work as well as it sounded on paper as they had neither the speed/agility or alternatively tank in the reality of the game.
My main complaint with T3Cs there was as always that if that cloaky T3C had that level of tank (which personally I was OK with) then it should have come with a bigger sig radius and less mobility than a recon.
Mine was that as a generalized boat, it should never be able to do any thing better than a T2 boat.
For example, if you fit it with a covert sub and use it for cloaky shenanigans, you should not be able to do said cloaky shenanigans more effectively than a recon. If all you intended to do with it, for example, was cloaky shenanigans, the intelligent choice would have been to bring a recon.
If you combat fit it, a HAC should be more effective in a fight. If all you had intended to do was fit up a loki with artillery and blast things, you’d have been better off with a muninn, for example.
An ewar fit, combat recons would be better.
Logistics, exploration, everything. Because that’s what a generalized boat is. The jack of all trades, master of none. The flexibility of the boat, however, would mean that you could sneak into a system with a covert sub, refit off a depot into a combat fit, and then refit and sneak out again. Or switch from dps to logistics, or to ewar, etc.
And at the moment, even after nerfs, a T3C is still the better choice for any of those roles, except POSSIBLY logistics… but even then, it’s fringe as to whether a T3C or a T2 logi cruiser will be the better choice.
My perception of what T3Cs should have really been was a bit different to that - for instance I thought if you wanted a tankier recon you’d use a T3C but get some penalties i.e. less mobility than a recon, if a recon wasn’t mobile enough for you then you’d configure a T3C as a more mobile but it would be less tanky than a mobile recon, etc. and extend that thinking to the rest - I was never a fan personally of the concept of taking a T3 then adapting it at the destination for a different role, etc. especially as the way people used them mean they usually just stored up a bunch of T3s in different configurations anyhow - though the ability to configure on the fly depending on what a fleet needed isn’t necessarily a bad thing but rather difficult to do unless you surgically have EFT/Pyfa implanted in your skull or completely change how modules and fitting worked on Tech 3 ships.
I was never a fan of the jack of all trades, master of none approach as you said before the reality is you just end up with something no one actually wants to use.
Fairly new to Eve compared to some so don’t know if this has been suggested, but how about ability to fit a neutron bomb type weapon that kills life but does little damage to ship structure, so after winning the battle you can dock up then warp your pod back to the victims ship and board it ie it becomes yours.
Interesting idea maybe something that could mesh with Triglavian tech - or a twist on that a Tech 3 industrial that one ability is a one shot chance to salvage on a wreck and get some form of the ship either a blueprint or packaged hull or something of that ship.
Everything. Start with the hull of whatever ship class then add modules… except don’t limit to race.
For example: Take a shield-bonused BS hull (non-race specific) and you want to use laser turrets. Then you choose between range/rate-of-fire/dmg/falloff/rep/etc bonus. You get a hull bonus slot for ever level of ‘T3 BS Hull’ skill.
Make ships customizable from the ground up. FFS, at the very least T3 in every class. EVERY class. It is time.
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Bump! I’ve detailed an example subsystem for the Tech 3 Battleship in the opening post 
What has T3 done for the game besides making huge amounts of T2 ships obsolete?
They are cool ships that allow you to customise your ship’s role to the next level from Tech 2. I love Modular ships, and lots of others do too…
Personally I loved the opportunities with T3Cs to do something somewhat unique to myself with them - kind of like why people play RPGs in the first place - they supported a level of modularity and more than one approach that was missing (and not really needed) with normal ships.
My old copy of EFT has 261 Legion fits, 239 Tengu, 446 Proteus and 519 Loki! in comparison I had around 12-16 fits for each of the normal cruisers.
Yeah but that’s exactly the problem. You can do everything with a T3 so why bother with any other ship. There are plenty of roles the T3C’s are simply better at than dedicated hulls.
Lot of uses for normal cruisers where you don’t want to risk a T3C and/or you wouldn’t even consider putting modules as expensive as you would on a T3C as a normal hull even if T3Cs didn’t exist.
Personally though I thought a lot of the T2 alternatives got left behind by the game - due to the lack of skill loss and cost we’d often consider T2s first but they’d always come up lacking i.e. recons just too squishy for higher end PVE or PVP scenarios. We’d use shield huginns in a C5 pulsar sometimes but that was with the system shield bonus, shield links, faction invulnerability fields that cost 300m a pop or something at the time and I’d still be sitting there running 3 overlapping reppers to keep them alive constantly bouncing off like 5% shields left under the fire of a dozen or so Sleepless Guardians - in PVP they’d have gone down hard. Loki meanwhile held up fine.
A t3 variant to all classes of ship would be cool, t3 modules, and get rid of SP loss.
In some ways, though more restricted, mutaplasmids produce a kind of t3 module albeit limited in what modules you can use them on and roll the dice on trying to get stats that are useful.
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