Over at Poetic Discourse blog Poetic Stanziel has issued a call to reduce the power of the new T1 Logistics:
The composition of fleet fights in faction warfare lowsec have changed radically since Retribution was released. I'm not so sure for the better.
Before December 4th, flying with logistics was a rarity. Something done occasionally to mix things up, to try something new. Fweddit experimented with a Circlejerk doctrine involving Drakes. We had some success with it, but it was a specialty doctrine, useful only in particular situations.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've been in logistic fleets since I joined faction warfare until the release of Retribution. Nearly every fleet I've flown in since Retribution has had a contingent of logistic ships.
I'm not asking that T1 logi be removed. I'm simply suggesting that they may be a tad overpowered, and that maybe their "healing" skills could be blunted somewhat.I don't think its fair, merely one month after Retribution, to look at "fleet doctrines" in faction warfare and throw up your hands and beg for mercy. The situation requires more time to develop and allow corps and FC to adapt to the new realities. As some commenters on the post pointed out, remote sensor dampeners and ECM are great at disrupting these fragile tech 1 ships.
He also bemoans:
Ad hoc fleets, spontaneous roams. A thing of the past. And that makes me sad. Faction warfare has always been improvisational to some degree, and that's been lost with the advent of powerful T1 logistic cruisers. Now, if you don't have the logi, you don't fly. You can't compete in fights without it. As a result, doctrines have all started to look the same. The fights have started to look the same. Stalemates are becoming more commonplace.Null sec alliances have been contending with this issue for years, and have adapted around it. Perhaps its time for the faction warfare fleets to mature a little and learn how real fleet comps work. Is this not the whole point of making the T1 logistics ships viable? To give a real stepping stone for players leaning the role?
Logi on one side needs more logi on the other side as a counter. Thus there's little in the way of ingenuity in fleet composition. It's logistics escalation. That doesn't strike me as great design.Which is, as I mentioned above, utter bullshit. Fleets right now have not found a way to deal with this new threat but its not new: T2 logistics have been a factor in fleet fights for years, just not as prevalent in faction warfare. The players will adapt and learn the methods for neutralizing enemy logistics without having to escalate.
Give it more time.
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Logi isn't difficult to deal with, all it needs is organisation and planning. There are many counters to logi.
ReplyDeleteHe's not really complaining about logi as such, his complaint is that the new logi has necessitated organisation and planning; which has meant the end of spontaneous ad hoc kitchen sink fleets, which used to be a hallmark of FW combat. Organisation and planning, the hallmark of any decent 0.0 fleet is now the order of the day.
I think he is over-reacting on the loss of ad hoc fleets. Perhaps the larger battles are more logi-dominated now, but I've seen plenty of kitcvhen sink fleets in Gallente/Cardari warzone since Dec 4.
ReplyDeleteIn time once all the tech 1 and tech 2 ships are rebalanced it will be fine, just going to have cheep logistics for a while :)
ReplyDeleteA properly organized and well-run fleet should always have the advantage over a kitchen sink / ad-hoc fleet, all other things being equal.
ReplyDeleteAt its core, the issue some people have with T1 logi is that it makes it easier to run a well-organized fleet. It opens up an important role to more people because of lower cost and lower skill requirements. So complaining that more organization of friendly fleets is required in order to counter an enemy fleet that is organized is just...silly. Of course that's going to be the case!
I think though that coming from Poetic's position, he (and many others) joined faction war for less-than-serious PvP. The whole everyone-hop-in-a-ship-and-brawl-the-enemy-fleet thing is what they seek. The introduction of the current T1 logi has made that type of PvP less prevalent in faction war. It's found elsewhere (I found it fairly common in my 12 days in RvB).
Anytime someone's ecosystem is disrupted, they either adapt, leave, or die. And until one of those things happens, there's always going to be a lot of whining.