Do you think it may even go hand in hand with this ridiculous new “Try a Skill Set for $x.99” package they are talking about?
Put quarter in slot, get out Battleship, zap space invaders?
I recuse myself from commenting on that. 
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They’re as they should be. Great change, now they only need corresponding challenge in HS or abyssal for Battleships
The Marauders needed that buff. They cost as much as dreads and were not nice at all.
It will mainly affect C5/C6 sites and maybe lvl 4 missions, but there the majority of the isk comes from burner missions and not the normal missions. The dps buff makes them more interesting in PVP too.
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If CCP could rework certain missions and the type of NPCs encountered and combine it with tweaking certain aspects of those specific gates that connect HS to LS, perhaps they could entice more players to gamble more frequently on entering LS to run missions. The increased firepower and low signature of Marauders when fitted for it could mean quicker completion times with less chance of visitors. CCP could add missions with plenty of elite frigates to prevent warp, accomplishing tying the player down longer as well, perhaps increasing the use of MTUs and drones, both of which then make scanning down much easier. The mission player’s choice would be between: a) quick run using MTU and drones to aid in npc distruction and loot gathering, but a higher rate of being probed down or b) attempt running the mission sans drones and MTUs making a much slower completion time, but also less likely to probed down. If enough elite drones are used, certain Marauders will probably be forced to use their drones at some time.
If combined with a much stronger gate defense response only at the HS/LS interface, I could imagine a scenario where a player sits in his Marauder at the gate he just entered wondering if the lone mining ship he sees is harmless or a scout for a hunter/killer team in the next system over. Once he commits to the mission, he has to destroy the NPC frigates quickly or risk being probed down before he can warp away.
When you say they cannot do incursions, do you mean HQ sites and the mothership?
They can do just fine in Vanguard incursion sites. 5-6 Vargurs/Paladins/Kronoses can do NMCs and OTAs quite well, and that was before this change…
But re: the other stuff, yep, not so good at most other content, where smaller/faster is often better.
Not so much a power creep as power leap.
Pirate ships were strong mission runners, but they weren’t doing twice the dps of their competitors and immune to e-war.
well tbh, Marauders (for the train time alone) should be dealing at least 50% more then strongest pirate BS at mara lvl 5
and that is not considering you are immobile target when flying one.
I’m not an expert at all but here is my opinion anyway 
I think this would be a big incentive for a player to go to Omega, and maybe inject their way up. I mean, wouldn’t this explain most of their design? 
Training time to V between the two is not that different because pirate ships require training two battleship skills.
On top of that, pirate ships are designed for high DPS. Marauders are/were for tank.
At least the Paladin doesnt look like a hideous mallet
yeah we pay premium for the golden finish
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The main problem Marauders still have, which prevents them from being used in a lot more different situations, especially in regards to PvP is the blocking of remote repairs while they are using the bastion modules. (Unless that has been changed while I was not paying attention to changes).
While the repair bonus is kinda OK I guess, in most scenarios it´s useless… in many cases in PvE it´s absolutly not needed and in PvP it´s pretty much useless. While it might be nice to be able to put on an active tank that can tank like a capital ship… a single ship with neuts and your tank is gone and you are sitting there anchored with no cap and pretty much no tank and the little EHP buff from the bastion module is not going to safe them either.
If you want to open them up for more different scenarios, just remove the RR limitation, maybe slightly increase the resistance bonus of the bastion modules, to the point that they have proper t2 base resistances while it´s running and for all I care remove the armor repair / shield boost bonus.
People used to cap chain them, back when they first came out. They were unstoppable!
Er . . . well, technically they didn’t go anywhere . . . so I guess you could just warp off. But it was tough to break the chain. Maybe I don’t remember all the details. 
But, you can’t cap chain them with the bastion modules on, which sucks.
Arond the time they came out RRing and cap chains in general was quite popular for battleship fleets.
Their advantage compared to regular battleships already back then was the fact they did not lose any firepower in order to fit cap transfer, but I don´t remember them ever being used as replacements for t1 RR battleships.
I never ran into such a group and back then all I did was PvP. So I guess it was not that common.
Either way the buff is pretty much useless in regards to making them an option for more activities, they just become more powerfull in the areas they have been used before.
Not that I really care either way, I don´t expect marauders to ever become anything than PvE grind machines that are limited to a few scenarios where they are useful.
If ccp had the intention to buff the ISK / hour of those who already use them anyway:
Mission successful
If ccp wanted to make them an option for more:
I doubt that this kind of buff will do the trick.
I mean you are wrong!
This is what CCP themselves said the state of ship balance was supposed to be like:
Though that kinda went out the window with triglavian ships now oppressing everything else.
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I mean that was never really the case, at least during my EVE career. Other than cost restrictions there was never (or at least hardly few) cases where a T1 ship was a better option than it’s T2 variant. In almost every case T2 ships do what T1 ships already do, but they do it better (more tank, more DPS, etc). Although T2 ships are, in theory, more specialized than T1 ships, because of their position on the improvement axis they are almost always an advantage over a T1 ship, whether you fit for their specialization or not. Once players can fly T2, they stop using T1 as much.
“Generalization” also doesn’t apply to Tech3 that much. “Generalization” should mean, in practice, that a ship doesn’t do any one particular thing that great, but is able to do a lot of things adequately, thus providing situational adaptability. But T3Cs don’t do a lot of things adequately in practice (they have more general potential, but once fit, are locked into a specific role like any other ship). Their position on the improvement axis of the chart is also inaccurate; I don’t fly T3Cs much so might have missed some balance passes, but from what I recall T3Cs were always better than T2s.
This is all just my dumb opinion.
And herein lies the fine-print, telling you that they are generalized. You can take of the rigs you fit on a sleeper cruiser without destroying those rigs.
So you can change whatever the cruiser is doing right now into something else and whenever you want, you change it back to how it was before, without buying new equipment.
That allows them to fit their environment without you having to buy a different ship for a different task and back again wherever and whenever you want.
That’s not generalized though. That’s pluripotency.
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I’m pretty sure during the last T3 balance CCP said they were no longer following that graph.