Unpopular Opinion: Aren't the Marauder buffs just power creep?

Hi space friends.

I’m a little perplexed by the latest patch and the buffing of Marauders to such an extent. I’m not dense enough to not see the appeal in smashing hapless NPC’s with your überboat from a player’s view, but I’m am a little skeptical of this choice from a game design perspective. I mean, most missions and other dated (and largely untouched) PvE content in Eve has already be massively trivialized by years of ship buffs and new releases. Does it really need to be made even easier?

And while I am sure playing on EZ-mode will be fun for a short while, and make the farmers happy a little longer, won’t players just quickly adjust to the new normal? Is there anything fundamentally different about the game play of a Maurader now other than things die faster?

I’m curious, aside from the transient joy of getting a massive buff to your ship, do you think there there will be any real change to your game play? Are you concerned that maybe this will make things a little too easy for you?

Please, discuss!

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no
marauders needed a buff
i mean , rattlesnake should not be the king of pve

edit:
nightmare etc are still amazing ships
and i see dudes doing marauder alpha strikes in PVP in the future
30 second siege , take that , mjd , cool af

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Marauders for sure needed a buff. They are too expensive not to be great ships. I just don’t think a huge dps buff made any sense. The 30 second bastion timer was probably all they needed. The sensor strength buff is also easy to agree with. The ships still have huge capacitor vulnerabilities - if these had been buffed instead of raw damage output, I think that would have been a much more interesting change.

The update took their status as highsec PVE blingwagons and doubled down on that.

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ya lot of content to code etc

dscan should be disabled for marauders.

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Maraders are massively expensive ships. They are sitting ducks if a gang in null finds one in bastion mode. Whilst they can clear lvl4 and anomalies quickly they are at a higher risk of getting caught and destroyed.

Still hasnt made them fun though.

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Funner than entosis links?

You get to zero fun and theres no point measuring further

The funny thing is that Marauders are not good for the new PVE either, even with the buffs. They cannot run Trig sites conveniently, they cannot do incursions, they cannot do FOB well, they cannot do Sotiyos. Hence, they are still largely pointless ships that can only run the old content in high sec and only in high sec because they are just an expensive bullseye everywhere else.

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Maybe then that is part of the thought process. Looking at the MERs, most ISK isn’t coming from content that Marauders will be great at farming, perhaps with the exception of wormholes. And given that the “old” style PvE in highsec is likely to get a Dynamic Bounty System in the coming months, perhaps CCP has decided just to turn the power creep dial up another big notch and turn this old content into a meaningless shooting gallery since they will be tuning the rewards shortly.

Make the new content harder (not just reward “moar dps”) and pay more to entice players there, and make the old content super easy and build in a dynamic payout system so they don’t get over-farmed. I’m still not entirely sure this won’t push the old content from “easy” into “completely boring”, but maybe even that is also the point? If you don’t want to mess with mission code but also don’t want to deal with the tears of switching them off, then just make them trivially easy to the point they are so boring (and adjust the payout accordingly) that players stop doing them.

That is at least plausible to me. Thanks forum for your thoughts!

It’s not power creep. They needed a buff. They were way too expensive for being so shitty.

According to the MER, most ISK comes from wormholes and abyss, which are things Marauders cannot get into at all.

The old missions already have a dynamic reward system.

Why would you do that, though? Missions are more fun, more engaging and more varied than any of the new PVE concepts CCP has introduced since 2011. Depending on how much you want to Min/Max or just enjoy them, you need a variety of ships for the various missions you get offered.
We don’t need them to be turned off or relegated to boredom, we need CCP to start working on them again and introduce more missions. And above all else, more meaningful missions. As I have suggested in the past, special missions should appear around special locations like incursions or Trig MVs (since invasions ended). New agents should dynamically appear around these areas to give you special missions to aid or counteract empire forces in these areas. That could even be a thing where Marauders could shine as you could be sent into the MV system to run the mission there, which means you could potentially need the tank of the Marauder on the gate if Trigs camp it (unless you want to scout and wait for them to disappear).

The rewards for missions that are being farmed the most will go down under the current dynamic reward system. If they want people to use Marauders to turn missions into triviality, cranking up the power creep dial sure looks like a plausible thought process from them. But if you don’t use a Marauder or another Min/Max’d ship, many missions still pose a real challenge for your ships. As said in the past, I like to run L4s with a Dominix and certain missions against empire factions are a real tank test and DPS race to remove as much DPS before my cap or armor buffer runs out.

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Really?

I mean, you really feel this way?

Did you stop doing missions after the second or what?

dear OP, enjoy the carrot - a bit exclusive but still a carrot :carrot:. No carrots ever last, this is EvE.

I really feel this way. Why should I not? Anoms and Rated/Unrated Plexes are the always same setup every single time. So are Abyss and Trigs. Ship variations are a joke and present in missions, too. Not even the “harder” NPC are a unique to Abyss or Incursion, thanks to Burners, and if you so desire, you can run Burners in a variety of ships.

With missions and even within just Security missions and the small subset that I run, however, I have combat heavy missions where location on grid matters (DED blockade for instance), I have speed missions combined with combat or tank runs (Recon), I have multistage missions (Navy Armada, Police Invasion), I have Burners, I have missions with erratic NPC behavior (Pirate Princess Scarlett) and so on.

Tell me, where I get all that in any of the new PVE contents. Sure, most of the processes of all these missions have been figured out, but there is still lots of variety compared to any of the new PVE contents.

That wasnt the point I was making.

The point I was making was pretty much all missions that a Marauder is suited for involve MJD 200km away from targets, clamp anchors and fire. Mission variation is virtually non existant.

Trigs are as different from all missions as Incursions are different from them, as Sleepers are different from them as Drifters are from them.

To say that each PvE encounter type outside of missions is the same while missions offer varitaion is imho totally backwards.

You have dozens of virtually identical missions, in so far as how to approach them, and comparing that to half a dozen different forms of NPC encounter I dont think is accurate.

Its all boring toss, but at least each one is different boring toss.

You can at least MJD away from mission NPC and do your thing. With Trigs, FOB, Sotiyos, you don’t even need to do that because they come to you anyway, either warped or MWDing. There’s no need to even think about this tactics. We probably just have different ideas of what “variation means”. What you described is not variation in my opinion as it’s the ever same thing. What I described is variation because the listed missions all require different ships, different navigation patterns, taking into account different trigger behavior and so on.

I do not see variation in any of the new PVE content. All I see is just stronger NPCs zerging at you anyway in the same predictable patterns.

Thats fair.

Tbh Id just rather the oft talked about mission repass and restructure would get done.

Would be nice, wouldn’t it? The recent attempts at using a new mission content generation tool to create new missions inspire some hope that they might return to that.

However, considering CCP’s track record in terms of quality for introducing new content, I am not very hopeful that it will be a good experience. Call me negative, but I expect that they will just kill all old missions and replace them with the unsatisfying, boring and irresponsibly risky grind that Trig invasions, Pochven space, F(l)OBs and so on are.

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