Zeylon Rho
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
3521
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Posted - 2014.02.24 15:57:00 -
[1] - Quote
I made a suggestion in my thread about moving suit skill passive bonuses from the skill tree directly onto the suits to fix part of this.
The way suit passive skills work now, once you get to PRO level in the skill, you get the full benefits of the role even on STD suits. This isn't bad necessarily, but for a pilot this is problematic since if the "vehicle" is his shield, post-rank 5 there'd never be any reason to field anything but a STD suit.
With bonuses on the suits themselves, you can have the bonus modifier for pilots only be at "max" when they're fielding the PRO version of the pilot suit (e.g. - the STD suit grants 1% bonuses per rank in the Pilot skill, the ADV 3% per, the PRO the full 5% per, or some such).
I wasn't personally envisioning any modules the suit would have that would impact vehicles. CCP suggested previously that the pilot would provide some bonus to vehicle function, but be a "meat puppet" or something like outside of one where they were exceedingly easy to kill. This would suggest the pilot would have a little reason to "bail" from their vehicle if they were very very easy to kill out of it.
Bonus-wise, I'd imagine we'd see some give-and-take, but it would probably vacillate between problematic balance issues and your issue #3 (marginal benefits), as many suit skills, etc., already provide relatively marginal or highly situational benefits. Situational is probably the ideal, as opposed to the completely worthless or overpowered.
Part of the vehicle design approach post 1.7 was this idea that the vehicles are basically more like empty shells that you'll define with modules. The "potential" bonuses that were present when the pilot suits were briefly on the server around the launch of uprising were purportedly inflated for testing purposes, but they ones shown gave bonuses to module cooldown/duration. In light of how powerful those are currently, and the relative module-focus they seem to have; it seems like it might make more sense to have the bonuses largely based around module-specific passive bonuses. Amarr Pilot bonuses to heat management and armor plate hp. Gallente bonuses to armor repair and *whatever*, etc. It seems possible to balance to me.
Dren and Templar equipment stats, wrong since release.
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