EVE Corporation - Page 1511

I really can't believe they nerfed the Rokh. If you want to nerf a system-wide effect out of principle, that's fine. But going around knocking ships that are barely used is part of what's wrong with EVE balance as a whole. Why would anyone use this ship over a Naga, even in its current iteration?

This super niche ship has probably been nerfed.

Pretty much every fit needs a heavy cap booster or two. Now there are at most 2 mids to really play with. I'm not sure how useful the low slot is going to be given that they didn't provide any more grid to go with a ship that suffers badly from low grid already.

Oh right, now you can easily fit two reactor controls!

The most interesting fit (imo) is no longer possible - the dual cap booster scram-web LAR fit.

This is probably the most effective way to buff armor ships - to make it so they are now shield-fitting ships.

The Megathron has a pretty decent tank even with just a DCU, but now it will be sporting an Invuln or two. It's not gonna be fast, but I could see null bears using it in doctrines, at least.

Missing out on a low slot is pretty much a death knell for any kind of armor fit as it will just lose out to a similar shield fit. What's interesting is -1 low slot and +grid. Seems like no matter what you do, you'll be able to easily fit a T2 heavy neut with Neutrons. I guess it might allow for a gunnery rig. It has little effect on fitting Rails, but extra CPU does help to fit them.

A weird change, especially considering all the moaning (and doing nothing) about armor vs. shield viability. The Mega is now a shield-favoring ship by far.

The Domi can now fill its fated role of drone flanker.

They added some mass (3 Mkg) but not nearly as much as a MWD adds (50 Mkg) so it'll be slightly more brick than before (why?). They're also adding a fairly significant amount of sig radius. I thought we were trying to buff armor ships. If we go around increasing their sig, they'll just be really slow and bad versions of similar shield ships.

Sentries are certainly going to be annoying if the optimal range and tracking bonuses actually apply to them (they might not knowing CCP). I guess everyone will just get their Rail Megas and get some sick free sentry drone kills in EC-. Beyond that, I don't see a point to this change other than to make Domi's the number one uncontested AFK rat-farming ship.

Pretty bad change that makes the ship even more one-dimensional than it already was - now with MORE 1/DPS than ever before!!!

This is a pretty massive nerf. I think they might have been better off doing a nerf to the base armor resist stats rather than just a straight 5% (non-penalized) off everything. But for battleship work, there aren't any T1 ships more capable than a Baddon, so nerfing the Baddon in some way actually does make sense. Notably, Baddons are one of the few ships not affected by the TE nerf.

Unfortunately, this pushes yet another ship closer to the "well this is similar to [insert shield ship] but slower and with slightly more EHP" side of the line. I feel they could have left the ship as is and changed other battleships to have capabilities that aren't comparable 1:1 with the Baddon.

This is a head scratcher.

There is a rather large EHP nerf in both shield and armor which is going to result in a lower overall EHP for this ship no matter how it's fit. Seems like a very odd thing to change. What problem does this solve?

I'm also not entirely sure what the deal with the cap changes are. Losing total cap and gaining a small net increase in recharge is a net nerf to the cap for a ship that fires large lasers with no cap bonus. This in addition to losing its gun cap bonus is a giant cap nerf. What problem does this solve? I really just don't see it. This ship was basically never used except in the olden days of sniping. Why throw these random nerfs at it?

It got a large increase in max velocity (20%) and is basically shedding 12.5% of its total mass. Nano Apoc might actually be a go.

Weird nerf to its drone usage. Very weird buff to its signature radius. Why buff the sig of a ship that's going to be really far away from combat and not likely to take any damage whatsoever? This is the antithesis of sensible treatment of signature radius as a stat.

Hooray, another ship that can be shield fit! The problem of armor vs. shield will disappear soon at this rate~~~

Seriously, though, they've done some odd stuff to this ship. I actually like the current incarnation of the Geddon as mini-Baddon that fits a neut, but let's have a look at the state of this ship in its new form.

First of all, they claim this ship will be very powerful. Keep that in mind.

They've removed the gun bonuses and thus removed the viability of this ship as a damage platform. They've also given it launcher slots so you can give it some filler killmail-whoring DPS like you sometimes do on a Curse.

The biggest interesting change is the neut bonus. The Curse and Geddon will have the same neut range (excepting the HN Curse ofc). The capacitor load to run neuts is the same for both ships (40% of total cap to run maximum number of neuts for one cycle). The Curse's neuts are more efficient (they drain more cap per second and are less prone to overkill if you count cycles) while the Geddon's are more effective (they have higher cap alpha and drain more overall since it's 7 possible slots vs. 5). The neuting power of these 2 ships is highly comparable, making the new Geddon a possibly very interesting ship.

Before we get to that, let's look at the other changes.

Pretty significant EHP change to this ship. Consider that these are numbers at 0 skills. So rather than getting 1789 additional hull, it's actually getting 2236. With a DC II, you are gaining almost 6k EHP just in hull. The shield EHP added is about 2.1k or 3k with an Invuln II.

They've decreased the velocity and increased mass very slightly. This was a ship that already was going nowhere (the #1 problem with battleships to begin with). Now it's going nowhere slightly slower.

Massive drone bay increase, really good buff to sensor strength, and a nerf to sig radius. So ships that we make faster (Apocalypse) get their sig size decreased, but ships we make slower get their sig size increased. Makes perfect sense to me.

They've changed the total cap amount and no change was made to recharge time. But somehow the cap gained per second is the same. CCP might want to do a bit of research into how these three ideas (total amount, recharge time, amount gained per second) are related.

I initially read this and wanted this ship to be really cool and powerful like was promised, but I'm really stuck wondering what's the point of a battleship that only has any effect at below 40km? A Curse can zip in and out of a lot of shit, particularly with a nano. But this brick is not going anywhere. It's not going to be able to project any kind of usefulness past 40km. Sure it will be reasonably useful at securing hapless gate camp victims. Yeah you can toss a few of them at a supercarrier I guess (although the range buff is useless for this so...). I find it really hard to get excited about a battleship with a 40k range of death. In fact, as someone who prefers small gang and solo PvP, this seems like just another big dumb wall that only serves to bar someone without high damage projection from actually playing the game and getting into fights.

A Curse this is not. Imagine if a Curse was as slow as a Battleship with no added benefits besides some EHP. Yeah.

I'm actually glad they didn't change this ship.

Brawler buff.

Ok hold on a second here. This ship got a mid slot basically for free. That's pretty damned good just by itself.

It weirdly got some EHP shifted around from hull to armor+shield. Don't understand that, but it doesn't introduce any problems.

It got a fairly decent buff to its mass (dual mass removal), but not enough to do anything other than making it ever so slightly easier to get into torp range.

Now here's the weird thing. It got a big drone bay nerf (they typo'd it as well). I guess it might be considered the trade-off for the mid slot, but I just don't see a Typhoon having access to a very strong drone bay as a problem.

Unfortunately, the 25% bonus to explosion velocity means jack shit, especially since the "extra" mid on this ship will likely be a web (either first or second). This should have been explosion radius or a combination buff. It will make absolutely no difference. If the bonus was 1000%, then it'd be worth something. Praise be to the arbitrary percentage gods - 10, 25, 33, 50, 100. Unless they redo the damage calculation or drastically increase the base explosion velocity, (they actually might since they said BS missiles would be reworked Soon(TM)) no one will notice this bonus at all.

I really can't believe they nerfed the Rokh. If you want to nerf a system-wide effect out of principle, that's fine. But going around knocking ships that are barely used is part of what's wrong with EVE balance as a whole. Why would anyone use this ship over a Naga, even in its current iteration?

I just can't see this ship being used for PvP. It got a very nice PvE buff with free fittings and a free mid slot (and meaningless EHP decrease).

It also got another mysterious total cap increase while maintaining the same cap gain per second.

This ship will likely be even more irrelevant than it already is with these changes.

CCP has transcended algebra again and given another magical cap bonus. Other than that, this wholly unremarkable battleship receives no interesting changes.

Battleships are something of a broken ship-type right out the gate. The combination of a few important overall game concepts cause this.

1. Hard tackle ensures slippery slope in large-scale close-range combat. This is why few fleets want to brawl (only specialized T3 fleets generally want to brawl).
2. Even with large null-style fleets, speed (mostly agility) is important. Most of the maneuvering that isn't pre-positioning is based on warp-ins and countering bubbles.
3. In small-gang warfare, "slow" can very easily and quickly translate to "irrelevant".

There are 2 big factors that keep some battleships in the game, though.

1. Projection can make up for the inherent weakness of battleships.
2. "Raw" EHP is better than "effective" EHP.

Why did Maelstroms become so effective in null? Low barrier of entry. Good damage projection. Good EHP. The alpha helped as well. Same concept with the Abaddon. Extreme EHP paired with extreme damage projection (as well as the ability to fit extra EWAR without any real opportunity cost). In large-scale encounters, the drawbacks of the Abaddon (and armor ships in general) are almost irrelevant since they can repair bad positioning with warp-ins.

If the game mechanics were slightly different, doctrines like armor HACs should be strictly superior to something like arty Maelstroms. You have a bunch of small-sig ships that can easily project 100% of their damage onto the big battleships whereas the Maelstroms' guns should struggle to deal any damage to the HACs. There are holes in this idea, though.

Signature radius itself isn't enough to save a ship. It's a combination of sig and orthogonal velocity that create a probability "buffer" of EHP. To keep your sig small, you're forced to use an afterburner instead of MWD, and ABs are really slow on every ship except low-mass frigates. The second problem is that if you are up against 100 ships, and only 3 of them need to hit you in order for you to die, they only need a ~5% chance to hit you to comfortably take you out. To put that another way, they can have a 95% miss rate and still expect to kill you. This is the current state of something like armor HACs vs. battleships - there isn't enough advantage to sig tanking because the raw damage + raw EHP doctrines have the math leaning a little too far in their favor.

So battleships are an interesting problem because buffing the mechanics behind "effective" EHP (i.e. buffing armor tanking and active tanking) could be a sort of final blow to their usefulness. I really think that battleships need a real redesign to give them all a utility focus - make them support vessels rather than the meat of a fighting force.

I remember when I first played EVE, I thought battleships were so cool. I couldn't wait to skill up to one and sit in it and be really cool. Now, "battleship" is practically synonymous with "useless" - especially because of the introduction of Tier3 BCs.

You know what the best ship in EVE is? It's the Bhaalgorn. The Bhaalgorn is so devastating and badass that its drawbacks seem minor in comparison. Battleships really need to have that flavor of a ship with really strong utility in order to survive in the realm of PvP viability. Neut phoons are a great example of this. They are a 100% support ship. It's quite sad, but Scorpions are the most viable non-pirate battleship. They go with every fleet. They can fit armor and shield. They have a well-defined role and are also a priority target. All battleships really should have characteristics like these if they're going to be relevant.

The changes I'm seeing here in these battleship updates are not making these ships more relevant. To me, they have the look of CCP makings changes here and there and possibly opening up opportunities for some niche stuff, but battleships are still mostly useless skillpoint black holes.