So with the upcoming buff to assaults, and no mention whatsoever of touching the basic medium frames, is there any practical use for the basics? They are already the pure essence of mediocrity as it stands right now, but after Charlie assault suits will straight up annihilate them.

It takes too much SP to get to assault suits to expect new players to not use these basic frames, and they will simply be outclassed in every way without some kind of buff. I'd urge CCP to take a look at ALL basic frames in Delta to see if they could do some improving to them, and by consequence, also improve NPE.

Anybody have any suggestions?

LP medium frames? Increasing LP payout makes it cheaper and easier to use the dedicated role frames

But that doesn't solve the problem of basic frames. If we are just going to do everything we can to avoid using them, then why do we even have them in the first place? Why not just remove the SP sink and save everyone some time grinding?

Yeah, I never use basic frames, never see the point. Not sure what role they are intended to fill, unless it's just to try out a suit class without significant SP investment... but then, that's what I thought militia suits were for.

I honestly don't understand why base frames exist.

Why not just have direct specialisations into assault, logistics, sentinel, scout, and commando?

Exactly. But we are all forced to put SP into basic frames before we can move on to suits that are actually useful, so we should either make basic frames useful, or just remove them and the SP sink that they create.

They should reduce the basic frame SP modifier to x3 or x2, and then... imo, a great way to make basic frames useful would be to remove most of their slots and increase their base stats toa semi-equivalent way to what you could feasibly fit if you have brick tanked an equivalent specialist suit (i.e. basic light would be equivalent to a brick tanked scout, medium would be a bricked assault, and heavy would be a bricked sentinel). They would never, in reality, be as desirable as a specialist suit but they would also be naturally cheaper in both SP and ISK (due to lack of modules)

In this way, they are a cheap and non-customizable way to play any of the frames and they emphasize ehp... which is good for new players who may not understand the mechanics quite yet. Decent for NPE as well as it allows you to play basic suits before you have the SP to level up core skills.

Just a thought at least...

Basic Frames are the poor mans Assault Suit...