Friday, November 09, 2012

What Did I Just See?

Early this week I noticed (from bed, recovering from tonsillitis, reading on my Samsung Galaxy Note (love my new phone!)) a dev blog about the next steps of ship rebalancing and Tiericide. Go read it first if you haven't already. I'll wait. Back? Good, let's carry on.

I have a few comments.

About the battlecruisers, I'm disappointed the Ferox is getting turned into more of a Sniper while the Drake gets the nod to be the closer ranged brawler; how you can make it useful in a lineup that includes the amazing sniper Naga I have no idea. I would have preferred giving the Ferox the close range role with its traditional hybrids plus tanking bonuses and making the Drake more fragile and speedy. But whatever, I'm not going to lose sleep on it.

For battleships, it feels like they are going a lot more softly in changes than I hoped for / suggested this summer, but overall looks like that have the right idea. Missing an opportunity here though, guys, for exploring ship roles beyond lock and punch face.

The skill stuff all makes sense and as I have all the skills trained to V in question, I will have no new training to do.

Then we get to Tech 2 and 3 Command ships where things get interesting.

I like the general thrust that Tech 2 command ships can boost better than Tech 3 but can't fight as well as Tech 3 strategic cruisers can while boosting. That's smart game design.

I love the idea of getting rid of the "field" versus "fleet" command ship distinction. Especially if this means that the Vulture become combat capable.

But the most interesting part of the section was what they talked about in column four of this chart:

Each command ship will have bonus to two warfare linking types and each strategic cruiser gets access to three. This will be a humongous boost to Gallente as Information warfare has been long considered to be the least desirable, and is exciting overall for the possibilities it could open up in fleet design.

And one more thing:
As a side note, as we announced a while ago, we are not pleased by having Warfare Links work outside the battlefield zone, and will be investigating options to move them on grid. Command and Tech3 ships providing that much of an advantage should commit to an engagement instead of being safely parked inside a POS bubble.
Oh yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

2 comments:

  1. I was a little disappointed to see that there are still no plans to turn any other T1 battleships into EWAR platforms other than the Scorpion. If you want a battleship that gets neut bonuses you have to drop all your isk on a faction ship.

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  2. I posted this bit a few days ago (elsewhere):

    My current hate for the command ships balancing, is that t3 ships are given command ship abilities at all.

    T3 cruisers are cruisers. Not battle cruisers. They are a ship class below battlecruisers. In my most humble opinion t3 cruisers should be very flexible, very reconfigurable, very generalized, cruisers. They should not be able to rep better than t2 logistics, for example. They should not be better at any task, than the dedicated t2 cruiser for that role, but they should be able to do more than any single t2 cruiser.

    But they should not play a role better than battlecruisers. No frigate is better at being a destroyer than a destroyer is. No cruiser, however flexible, should be better than a battlecruiser at the roles assigned to a battlecruiser. And there is certainly no way any generalized, flexible cruiser should be better at a specific battlecruiser role than a t2 battlecruiser assigned to that role.

    T3 cruisers are either way overpowered (my opinion) or command ships need a serious boost to do their roles.

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