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Fanfest 2015 - Ship and Module Round Table #1

I made it to the first Ship and Module Round Table but not the second. This came right after the sov session which I did not get to. I have a stack of sessions that I need to watch/listen to over the next week to fully catch up on Fanfest. As always this is short hand and highly condensed.

Q: For Miners - What do they have as a risk/reward matrix with the new sov changes vs the risk/reward for high sec miners? High sec mining is risk free.
A: As discussed in the null presentation they are increasing mining output in null. They are changing ores and changing anoms so that it should make a significant difference. Be careful saying that mining in high sec in a hulk is safe. From the ship balancing we have been doing we have given procurers and skiffs serious defensive abilities.

Q: Have you considered an ore faction mindlink?
A: That came up in the session earlier an I like it (Fozzie).

Q: Rorqual bonuses should focus on teamwork.
A: The entire concept of the Rorqual is showing its age. We want to improve it and give benefits and defensive options. We considered giving it strong bonuses for supporting on grid. Something like a 100% hull resist but they cannot move. It'd give time to get a defensive fleet on grid. Stuff like that is the type of ideas we have been throwing around but nothing is in the works.

Q: Letting the Rorqual into WH would put them at risk and get them used.
A: It has a lot of potential.

Q: Have things like the bastion module and the T3D modes changed how you look at ships?
A: I think we will do more things like that. Its now easier to build modules into ships. We want to investigate the possibilities.

Q: Small ice lasers for shattered wormholes.
A: We do like the idea. It is a tricky problem because of cycle times being slow and ice only coming in 1k blocks. But this is a long term goal for the Prospect line of ships.

Q: Have the mass inside of a ship increase the ships mass. Cargo increases a ships mass.
A: Right now we don't keep track of the cargo mass in relation to the ships mass. It'd be crazy and exploitable.

Q: Supers - Drone Control Mods have no cap cost. Just make them passive.
A: That is a design decision lost back in the days of super creation and rebalance. Cap usage can be revisited. It fits into the same area as the damage control unit which they wanted as passive but the module tech wasn't there at the time. That's why it uses so little cap.
Dev Q: What is the goal of wanting them to use cap?
Player A: I just want them to make sense. So make them passive instead of active with no cap usage.

Q: Introduce a capital neut?
A: That has to be done carefully.
Q: Well when capitals collide it is hard to neut each other out and that is ridiculous.
A: There is a lot of room to add new modules. Capital neuts and capital nos are not out of the question. We like the unique quality of the ECM burst. We want to do more things like that.

Complaint: With these changes caps will be big taxis.
A: For some. Others are doing well and using their caps. We want to give them more reasons to have good capital brawls. We did want to remove dog piling and we've been successful with that.

Q: Holding down supers in low is very, very hard.
A: We are looking into that and more ways for people to hold down supers, especially in low sec.

Q: Can we get hull resists and better hull reps? The current ones are super slow.
A: The design behind hull reps is that they are slower to rep because of the huge buffer ships can get. We are looking into having hull reps rep well outside of combat. Maybe attach it to the aggression flag. Its just an idea at this point.

Q: Autocannons - Medium autocannons. Why should I use them? Large are in a good place.
A: This is a tricky area. The statement that no one uses them is incorrect. RLML overshadows a lot of usage. Autos could use some buffs in some ways. The medium and small range weapons are in equal use across all players.

Q: Projected modules like a reverse stasis web?
A: We have to be carefully with this type of things. Speed breaks the game in odd ways. There was a prototype e-war that added mas for instance. You activated it on someone and they discovered that they could no longer term. Interesting things like that are cool. These types of things might be options for supers.

Q: Fighter assignment removal is good. They should be on grid.  Now bring boosters on grid.
A: We want to.

Q: Its still hard to break remote reps. The way to break them is alpha. That is not reasonable with small groups.
A: This has been an onging talk. Logistics in Eve are very strong. We don't want to over nerf them. We'd like to have more things and ways to deal with logistics.
Discussion: The idea of fall off for reps comes up.
A: I like that idea a lot and will bring it to the other designers. Three needs to be more granularity.

Q: Missiles. Heavy missiles. I can't get a HML ship to do anything.
A: HML are not in a great place and they are on our list to be revisited. The way missiles scale on smaller targets is unique to them. We don't want missiles to behave like turrets.

Q: Cloak MWD trick. I think they have plenty of ways to do this now with stabs and things like that. Even carriers can do it. Its dumb.
A: Its a very strong tactics. We debate it internally and we are very torn on it. No promises.

Q: T3D vs Assault Frigates. There is no reason to fly Assault Frigates.
A: T3D can be to strong. AF are a bit to weak. The solution is to relook at both. T3D should be fun but the power should come from the modules not the fits. We are looking at things like mass and oversize prop mods and the speed it gives them. Assault Frigates have not been touched in quite a while.
(Note: I started to quiver in fear and mouth "My Jaguar" as I sniffed back the tears of worry that it will become something I no longer love.)

Q: Bomb Launcher - Considered expanding the non DPS bomb lineup? Like a webbing bomb?
A: Yes. There are cases we could o. The AOE stuff is not yet ready
(Note: This is a brain in the box/dogma thing which is another session I didn't attend. Poke Fuzzy Steve about it)
Q: Non-DPS bombs in low?
(Note: I moaned in horror.)
A: We can look at that. There are a lot of crime watch implications involved in low sec.
(Note: I tried to stop moaning in horror. Failed.)

Q: Vision for Assault Frigate?
A: They will probably follow the same changes are HACS. Heavier and slower.
(Note: I hear the end of my Jagar and almost left the room in tears. I love chasing down dumb interceptors. The death kneels of my beloved ship made it hard for me to focus.)
A continued: With focus on electromagnetic strength.

Q: Just erase their roles and reimage them?
A: We are hesitant to do that. They are iconic. We'd like to do as we did with the HACs but not remake the Ishtar.

Q: The Cameleon is hard to fit.
(Note: I had to do a double take and wonder if we had really strayed into AT ships. Yes we had.)
A: I want to sit down and take a week or two to redo all of the AT ships but it is a low priority.

Q: It takes hours to rep a capital in the POS. It is to dangerous to go out of the POS for easier reps. Have you looked at a way to have a POS mod that repairs you?
A: See the structure presentation. This type of thing would be addressed there. We don't want to let you repair capitals for free but it  may be an idea.

Q: Blops jumps. The first jump ruins the fleet. You can't get up and do it again. There is no point to it.
A: Blops has been hit harder then we'd like. We have not had a chance to review them. Plus we need to rebalance them.

Q: Can we get some blops logistics? Right now the only choice is an Etana or a T3
A: We'd like to do that by making the T3 a better blops logi then by introducing a blops logi.

Q: But fitting fuel into a T3 is hard as well as the fact that a T3 is not optimal.
A: Decisions. Make them.

Q: Can the Rokh get a damage bonus? The Naga does more.
A: We have to be careful to not give the same thing to everyone. Potentially there is room for more long range options.

Q: My Aion is no longer a solo pawn mobile. Its not the right thing to bring to the fight anymore. It would be awesome if there was an officer mod that let supers tackle supers.
A: An idea bouncing around is maybe a mod. We are hesitant about removing the need to bring other ships to the field. But we know holding down supers is very hard.
Discussion: Caps to have more defensive resists to be more useful on grid.


  1. High sec mining is risk free. Funniest thing I have read all week. I think I want this on a t-shirt with a hulk with strip lasers firing.

    Now this is something I would like.

    And ORE LP in hi-sec.

  2. Wait, is that correct? The Naga does more damage than the Rokh? I haven't paid attention to battleships in a long while, but that sounds all sorts of wrong. Like, never should have been allowed to happen in the first place levels of wrong.

    On logi, how about stacking bonuses instead of falloff. Anything instead of falloff. Flying logi is already the hardest job in the fleet after FC, and possibly harder. Making the actual job of applying reps more difficult is just wrong, but I'm okay with lowering the effectiveness of reps in some novel way after they've already been applied.

    And I think those are the only two things I care about commenting on right now.

    1. Err, I mean stacking penalties.

    2. It actually sounds exactly right to me. The Naga is all offense and crumples easily. The Rokh has staying power.


    4. A battlecruiser doing better than battleship damage offends my bitter vet heart. There are too many reasons not to fly a battleship now days already. :)

    5. Yeah, it's completely broken for a Naga to do more damage than a Rokh.

      They should be doing the same amount of damage. The original battle cruiser concept (and I so wish CCP would reclassify the Tier 1 and 2 BCs to the heavy cruisers they are) put battleship guns, cruiser speed, and whatever armour they could put on after that into a single hull. The guns were the same size as battleships; they didn't hit harder or longer or fire faster. What they did do was put battleship firepower on a hull that could run down cruisers and smash them at range.

      Can we please get rid of this sci-fi idiocy of a battle cruiser being the bestest combat ship ever?

  3. The problem with the argument that logi is too strong breaks down when either very large or very small groups are involved. Logi as it is now allows small groups like mine to make a living easier, which allows us to take more fights as most of us are not scrimping for ISK. I've seen self-reps that were better than any amount of logi our small group could bring to the field. Will we now be hearing that self-reps are OP?

    Alpha is only the only way to break logi once people stop thinking. I don't see that logi (and God how I HATE that term; what logi pilots do is REPAIR, not logistics) is OP. With the wrong fleet comp (or right one, depending on POV) logi can either be OP or effectively non-existent. Before we condemn logi as OP, maybe we should ask where's the data?

    As for assault frigs, well, it's early days, nothing is set in stone, why all the horror?

    1. I do not like the path Minmatar ships have been going down. I expect my Jaguar to become slow and fat and that makes me deeply, deeply sad.

    2. That last was a dig at the reaction to the concern about capital rebalance and the new structure system. Sorry, just couldn't resist :)

  4. Logi is not OP. I fly logi a lot and have been neuted to high hell and jammed out so long I could have made a coffee and kicked my feet back. You need to bring the right ships if you want to break logi and I don't consider that to be a bad thing. I'll also note that I'm a wormhole pilot and always tend to fly in small gangs. You don't see me complaining about logi.

  5. I remember being so surprised that capitals didn't have T2 weapons - I suppose that's an obvious thing to make part of the rebalance. It also would add the Capital X Specialization skills for those complaining they've run out of skills to train. I'm sure someone more familiar with captials than me has already run the numbers on what T2 Capital Ammo would look like, though that could be a fun exercise.

    Sugar, on the Assault Frigate part what was this: "With focus on electromagnetic strength."
    Maybe our Gallente AFs can now truly bond to the hull of our targets with magnetic grapples?

    1. I have no idea Jakob :P It is what I wrote down. Sorry but I'm processing a lot of info quickly and some stuff makes little sense to me. it has to do with sensor strenght differences between T1 cruisers and Hacs maybe?

    2. Sensor strength would make sense (I was mostly just joking with you). Maybe that's a thought for a small nudge on the BC/BS rebalance as well - make those big ships harder for a single Griffin to shut down.

      We tried taking out a small fleet of BCs last night and got murderized by a NPSI group three times our size in AF/T3D/Inty/FrigLogi. BCs can't really crash back through a gate like cruisers do. :(

  6. My jag wishes its optimal bonus were changed to a falloff bonus and an active shield bonus were added. Additional electronic strength is not very interesting in the frigate class and the heavy/slow alternative is well served by the wolf. Also a third assault frigate modeled as an improved breacher would be amazing.

  7. A classwide resistance to webs would be interesting


    Right there with you, Sugar. I too love my AF, and would hate to see what would happen to it with the changes they are proposing!


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