On the idea of taking officer weapons away from warbarges:

That cuts down on a huge amount of meta gameplay, and definitly hurts player trade. You still need to invest some time and resources to produce officer gear. I like the idea that everyone who has saved thier own resources can produce something valuable. The only reason to trade officer weapons is that you dont have to worry about them becoming so rare that you are better off skilling into that weapon rather than trading them.

Personally, that would wreck my own meta, since i trade officer weapons for suits and skins. Strongbox drops just dont cut it.


Rattati's premise that officer gear should be for top PC corps:

Just, no. Instead of officer weapons being spread out according to the free market, what that entails is creating a marketplace bottleneck where only a relative few well have acess to large amounts OP gear.

That would drag PC's back into its elitist state, where up and commers will have alot of trouble going against a vet PC corp with bons's running about. And those same corps will turn around and stop the crap out of pubs. They have acess and nobody else does. Recipe for disaster that.

On the idea of taking officer weapons away from warbarges:

That cuts down on a huge amount of meta gameplay, and definitly hurts player trade. You still need to invest some time and resources to produce officer gear. I like the idea that everyone who has saved thier own resources can produce something valuable. The only reason to trade officer weapons is that you dont have to worry about them becoming so rare that you are better off skilling into that weapon rather than trading them.

Personally, that would wreck my own meta, since i trade officer weapons for suits and skins. Strongbox drops just dont cut it.


Rattati's premise that officer gear should be for top PC corps:

Just, no. Instead of officer weapons being spread out according to the free market, what that entails is creating a marketplace bottleneck where only a relative few well have acess to large amounts OP gear.

That would drag PC's back into its elitist state, where up and commers will have alot of trouble going against a vet PC corp with bons's running about. And those same corps will turn around and stop the crap out of pubs. They have acess and nobody else does. Recipe for disaster that.

The shield module ideas are pretty good. Please look into the lower tier rechargers, energisers and regulators. The progression from militia to complex is pretty poor.

*edited out the rest. I think I see the CPM's perspective on regulators now. Fitting costs have been balanced here without consideration of regulators. I thought this was a problem, but when I think of the regen delay changes, I see that regulators are being relegated to a minor module to help shield tanking, rather than a main tanking module.

Due to the regulator's ability to discourage dual tanking, I think it's a bit of a shame to reduce it's importance. However I can see how it is easier to balance things in a world where regulators are less significant.
I guess the idea then would be that kincats are the shield tanker's equivalent of damage mods, as an assault module that can be fitted without sacrificing tank, to discourage dual tanking.

With this in mind, I like the numbers presented here for modules, having looked at both the regen penalties on reinforced extenders and the new CPU and PG stats for basic extenders. I think the increased fitting cost of reinforced extenders should follow a similar markup as armour plates, so needs to be a bit more costly. A plate costs 50% more than ferro, and gives about 75% more hp. The reinforced shield would give 50% more hp, so should cost about 30% more than normal extenders.

I do wonder though whether the regen penalty on the reinforced extender is enough. Have you considered adding a profile penalty? As well as increasing the sacrifice on all suits for getting the extra hp, it would particularly discourage scouts from using them, who otherwise may get a disproportionately high benefit from them. Don't shields increase profile in EVE?

I think the CPU/PG of flux extenders should be similar to normal extenders, in the same way that reactive plates are similar to ferroscale. For example, a reinforced extender and a fiux extender together give more hp, better regen and a shorter delay than fitting two regular extenders, and costs less PG.

I think you should have a look at some slightly lower hp configurations. Such as 2 rep 3 ferro, or 3 extender 2 energiser. All the examples are pretty high up in the hp scale. It would also be interesting to see the figures using the hotfix regen numbers. Perhaps I'll have a look myself.

Please do not interpret "spitballing" theorycrafting as a statement of intent tesfa.

There is not, thus far, any talk of removing or reducing battle salvage or lockbox weapons. The only reason it's being considered for the barge is the rapidity and comparative effortlessness of harvesting officer weapons from the barge.

My read is that Rattati wants the officer gear most prevalent and easily obtained via PC.

There is no talk about there being "only" PC methods of acquisition. None of us have issue with players being able to acquire as far as I know. But the incredible ease and rapidity of generation in the barge feels a bit much.

It would help player trade by forcing prices for officer gear upward.

But in my opinion officer gear shouldn't be so easily attained that people spam it in pubs without a second thought.

Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing.

May I just caution against adding more suit bonuses. The per level bonuses are very bad for new players as they significantly increase the gap between high SP and low SP. I thought it was generally accepted that this gap was too large in Dust already and could do with being reduced not increased.

For example, if you wanted to increase TTK (which I don't think I agree with btw), it would be better to put the hp and regen buffs straight onto the suit base stats rather than make them skill bonuses.

^

Also an option, but we'll see what comes of it.

Believe it or not the frame bonus proposal has a lot to do with the inability to really differentiate fitting meta and doctrine.

Gallente can't rep significantly more than an identically fit Amarr, and the Amarr are generally supposed to have more raw toughness on their side.

Caldari are supposed to be the shield buffer race while the minmatar go heavy speed and fast recovery a lot.

It was one way to do it, and as importantly, to remove an "sp tax" of skills that do nothing.

Past that, I'm not really interested in dinking around with TTK much. Screw with it TOO much and you get the same problems in the reverse.

But that's also why the bonuses would go to base stats on the suits.

There's a few more "SP Tax" skills that provide no actual benefit, but the frams skills are one of the ones that really hose newer players IMHO, getting dropsuits with no bonuses whatsoever in order to graduate to suits that benefit from actually skilling into them.

Of course, vehicles have similar issues with no-benefit skills where the skills were stripped of bonusing between chrome and uprising.

The upshot is the bonuses we picked cant be modified by overstacking similar modules. They are based entirely on the base suit stats..

The other thing to consider is that modifying based off modules doesn't provide even returns.

10% bonus to an armor rep gives about 1 rep per second. Four of them gives roughly 4. That hardly answers the age old question of why racial suits aren't flat better at racial fitting doctrine. 10% to 4 extenders on a calassault would give what, 26-ish HP? Again, that's pretty much a not-bonus.

Finally there are technical reasons why we had to pick skills modifying the base suit stats rather than modules. I dunno if I can go into specifics, so I won't.

I know you disagree Breakin, I'm glad you are listening though, and that we've been able to have this discussion. Perhaps some of the other CPM, or CCP will see things a bit my way. If any of these issues are addressed at any point. I don't really see it as a priority to be honest (other than medium frame base stat buffs).