The nerf to fighters ability to hit subcapitals was the wrong nerf.
Carriers and supers should hit subs and hard,
Its what they do. They screen a capital fleet from smaller ships getting to close.
The right nerf was to seriously increase the refresh time of the MWD ability on fighters. Like triple it or even more. The issue with fighters in pvp was not that they hit sub capitals. It was that they way to effectively eliminated the advantage of maneuverability sub capitals had. I will conceded lowering the optimal range on heavy long range attack fighters was needed but the ability to track and hit small stuff was the wrong nerf.
The ability for fighter swarms to get on top of a fleet and stay on top a fleet of sub capitals then escape being killed off if dragged away even to 200 or 300km was the main issue. Now we just have carriers with no real role to play. Instead of balancing their role you destroyed it.
A quite reasonable point of view and something I would agree with,
I have used carriers but am now in hisec. It is really sad that they cannot remove tackle. I was going to use a carrier to do some risky logistics as a project, but the inability to strip tackle ended that plan.
I liked the nerf, carrier groups where way to oppressive against subcapitals. And it’s not THAT bad, they still apply decent damage against most subcaps if you fit some application modules.
I guess they nerfed the application and not the mobility (would also have been a good approach in terms of pvp) because they also wanted to reduce the efficency of carrier ratting.
In general, i think carriers shouldn’t be the screen for the other capitals, the subcap fleet should be. At the moment, we have mostly a subcap vs subcap and capitals vs capitals gameplay. Would not hurt to shake that up even further.
Also, carriers still have a nice and can do a lot of things other caps can’t:
Apply damage at extreme range
Utility for the cap fleet (Sirens etc.)
Profit from the remotereps of FAX’es
Are very mobile (for capital ships) and have a bigger “gtfo” factor because it doesn’t have to be sieged like dreads
Cheap pricing (yes, for some people thats a factor ) and relatively small skill requirements.
One of the defining moments for me that propelled my decision to stop playing the game in any serious capacity hence no longer subscribing was watching the presentation they did before the first round of major capital changes and 2 out of the 3 developers most closely involved in the changes couldn’t even get the basic terminology for capital features right and spent a lot of the time talking about things in a manner that no one like myself who’d spent several years at that point using capitals in wormholes and focussed low/nullsec PVP and some casual nullsec PVE use would even recognise as being a representation of how capitals were used in the game.
Rroff’s sentence could definitely do with some punctuation, or even conversion to a paragraph. But it makes perfect sense. Quite well-structured too (for a run-on sentence from &hotplace. anyway
Perhaps the eccentric format is an “idiot trap”? Or maybe he wrote it on a phone.
You could point out how CCP isn’t clueless in the context of capital changes. Though my post wasn’t intended to be as binary as that - as I mentioned 1 out of the 3 people I alluded to didn’t seem to be as inexperienced as the other 2.
) and relatively small skill requirements.