Widows already were some of the highest dps blops, so giving them 25% dps increase of 8 effective launchers to 10 is huge.
Redeemer-only fleets were a boring sight and the Redeemer got rightfully nerfed, but I fear people just replace it with Widow-only blops fleets now.
The Panther tracking nerf is disappointing and unnecessary too. Better hybrids on Sins are a questionable buff as they rarely use guns, and I doubt that will change as gun upgrades compete with drone upgrades for slots.
I’m OK with the EHP nerf, I think it was deserved, as well as the Redeemer nerf which was long coming (i.e. ever since the last blops iteration.)
I just wonder how many years we now have to wait until the next blops iteration where you realize the new Widow is problematic and needs a nerf.
Agree widow dps buff was unnecessary. Now torpedo widows are the “the dps is too damn high” blops bs. At least the redeemer losing a gun gives it a reason to run utility in its hislots finally.
EHP nerf overall is questionable – some fits lose 15% ehp some specialized ones lose up to 30% ehp. There was probably a better way to tweak blops survivability or whatever we want to call it.
Panther changes should have included the same buff to standard webifiers as well as grapplers.
I would’ve preferred to see their explanation for these changes since they explained basically everything else.
They are massively good Jacks of all Trade. Praxis and Gnosis have massive DPS, massive Tank, ridiculous speed, ridiculous utility (show my any other BS hull, for instance, that can scram,web,point, ewar, dual prob and have some tank as well) and are all around really great compared to all other BS. You do not need any bling on either Gnosis nor Praxis to make them a real pain in the back of any other hull class. You get all that for free because it only costs 1 Trit to build these ships. Their price tag on the market is also much lower than that of other BS or CBC.
Battleship | Group | zKillboard That’s why the Praxis is at the top of the ranking and only just recently (and interesting got dethroned by the Nightmare). Combat Battlecruiser | Group | zKillboard That is why the Gnosis is at the top of the CBC ranking and has more kill contributions than the next 2, much more expensive CBC combined.
The nerf was not needed, but SOCT ships must be limited in their use scope. No old players ought to use them because they are meant to be newbie ships.
Wormholes that connect to Drifter wormhole systems no longer appear automatically and must be scanned down.
Requiring these wormholes to be scanned adds a level of effort for those wanting to map routes through Drifter wormhole systems.
The average time of finding a suitable Drifter Wormhole was in 1 hour to 1.5 hours range - if you manage to find a suitable one at all. That’s someone’s whole play session wasted on potentially not finding anything.
You’ve just increased that to the whole aftrenoon.
What “level of effort” are you even talking about? This isn’t “level of effort”, this is “making a feature painful to use”.
Actually the metamorph could outscan the t1 frigates and if you wanted to go pew pew instead you’d still be able to outperform the offense based ones. So that one I think needs the nerf ball. But otherwise I agree, the nerfs were stupid. Plus they’re just gifts to omega players, supply is limmited anyways. Although I think the Gnosis is the worst of them even before the nerfs, the Sunesis nerfs pisses me off the most. Was this proposal announced? Like I mean if they’re going to do whatever with the game that’s in their rights, but I’d feel better if they asked player input first “hey we think ship X needs a nerf, what do you think?”.
And who said they were meant to be noob ships anyways? If that was what they were intended for, that idea is dumb and they should be more versitile than that.
I would agree with you if it wasn’t for the fact that Pochven sites are run by little more than just a bunch of multiboxers who will bubble and kill anyone who wants to daytrip, so I think they ought to allow farming in HS (perhaps at a lower drop rate) if only so that the parts don’t get monopolized.
The tank nerf reduces the EHP considerably riskier to use in the high-profile ganks in null sec. You need more time to kill a target and don’t have the comfortable hitpoints buffer any longer.
The main issue with this is reducing the ingress timer spool on the basis ‘people were complaining it was delaying access to the content area’ (as per Drake). This is absolute idiocy, as stated a huge volume of the filamenting to pochven is to use it get other places quicker/safer, the systems are sparsely populated so getting out is not a huge problem.
However there should absolutely be risk going in from, i dunno, Jita maybe…. where people buy billions of isk worth of assets than move it nonchalantly via pochven. The introduction of a timer rightly removed this from being a completely untouchable method of GTFO’ing which had no option to counter. The previous state of affairs required you to probe, warp, lock and tackle a target in a random safe within 1min which was challenging, it has now been reduced by 25% with no logic behind it at all - reducing the wait to get fleets into the combat area by 15s, that is such a huge burden of course. Nonsense, even if you filamented 4 times in an evening, which i doubt happens frequently, thats an extra minute. Whoever convinced you to do this change is absolutely not looking at the right angles.
I appreciate that someone from the dev team went back into the patch notes and added some context / reasoning to the blops changes with respect to the HP nerf.
Is it possible that the team could discuss the thought process on the Panther? Both with regard to the tracking nerf and with regard to adding a grappler range bonus but no web bonus. I feel like there are valid, separate use cases for both module types. Thank you!
I do not understand why filament spool up times outside Pochven were reduced.
The given reason is ridiculous: ‘delaying access to content’.
Waiting 45 seconds or 60 seconds to get to content is a tiny difference and barely noticable on a play session of an hour(s).
On the othe hand getting away from content that is chasing you with combat probes by reducing the time people have to chase you and find your spot from 60 seconds to 45 is a huge impact and cuts off a significant amount of time people can find you, which was the purpose of these filament spool up timers in the first place.
Reducing those spool timers ‘for content’ was a bad change that leads to less content.
This game is so reprobately broken: I tried to do remote industry just now. Found a WH, a semi-good exit, left the WH and checked range to my facility. Says 31 jumps. Okay only 6 jumps to get into range. Good enough.
Once I am in range, I open the Industry window, go into the Jobs tab, and I am indeed able to deliver jobs. Great.
Now I want to start new jobs. Switch the tab, click a BP, want to click Start … Start is not accessible, because I am not in range. But I was in range to deliver jobs.
Okay, great, set desto to the facility, 31 jumps in a different direction. 6 jumps later, I open the industry window again, the button in the BP tab is indeed clickable, I click …
The button is clickable because I am in range, but I am not in range.
Now I was really pissed. Checked Dotlan … It’s actually 38 jumps from the current location that should be in range.
This is ridiculous. The ingame UI tells me lies and misleads me wherever I go. I can deliver jobs through Zarzakh range, but I cannot start new jobs through Zarzakh. Similarly, Ansiblexes are counted for the jumps distance in the Facilities and Jobs tab, but they are not counted for the actual range to a facility because that range is dictated by normal gates only. It is so outlandish.
Starting the Campaign Trail activity was confusing. Luminaire is listed in the title of the activity but from the rest of the description I could not tell that it was the system I should start in. Maybe I’m dumb, but my brain skipped over that first word as not being obviously the destination. To be more clear, the activity description should say “Warp to the Campaign Trail Starting Line in Luminaire." The same goes for each activity after the first. Adding the location in the actual description of each step of the trail would be a small but helpful improvement.
