It seems CCP finally has seen the light and will patch up our ships with a little more of everyone’s favorite adhesive.
First, they announced a few updates to the updates for faction ships: the Firetail will see its “scan resolution increased to 660mm, signature radius decreased to 35m”. I love the scan resolution increase (from the current 550mm), and while the sig radius decrease won’t make a huge difference, any decrease beats zero.
Then they updated those updates further, tweaking the tier 1 and 2 Minmatar battleships:
Typhoon:
Slot layout: received an additional launcher slot and turret slot (for a total of 5/5 turrets/launchers, 8/4/7)
Tempest:
Hitpoints: armor and shield values swapped (now has 6954 armor and 6211 shields)
Typhoon Fleet Issue:
Slot layout: received an additional launcher slot and turret slot (for a total of 5/5 turrets/launchers, 8/4/8)
Tempest Fleet Issue:
Slot layout: 7th turret slot removed for a 7th low-slot (for a total of 6/4 turrets/launchers, 8/5/7)
Hitpoints: armor and shield values swapped (now has 10431 armor and 9316 shields)
I feel like I need to digest this a little further, but that Typhoon Fleet issue looks mean.
However, they haven’t stopped there. The hits just keep on coming, so to speak, with a new thread on balancing projectile weapons. Pretty graphs included, pointing out some of the issues.
So they tell us:
The original balance of projectile ammo seems to be skewed towards long range variations. Adjusting the projectile ammo to match its counterparts gives Phased Plasma ammo a 10% damage increase and EMP ammo a ~9.1% damage increase, while reducing the damage of the long range variations. The change will give auto-cannons a good performance boost, and make long range munitions easier to balance through the damage modifier.
Mid-range crystals and hybrid charges give a bonus to capacitor consumption, projectile ammo is reduced in size. We don’t like this, so we’re looking at changing it to a tracking bonus.
After ship hitpoint adjustments, the alpha strike of artilleries isn’t nearly as impressive as it was a while back. In our first iteration of these changes we’ve increased the damage modifier by 50%, along with the rate of fire. The DPS stays in place, but the volley damage is increased significantly. With the increased volley damage, and increased rate of fire, the clip size doesn’t matter as much. We still feel that it can use a boost. We’re looking at doubling it across the board, now with uniform ammo size.
Other things we might be looking at:
- Auto-cannon tracking adjustments
- Auto-cannon tier balancing
Then later:
Oh, and also Tracking Computers. We’re looking at some falloff love.
(Emphasis mine.) If you have detailed opinions on this, please go comment. Personally, as long as they’ve started to give my preferred weapon type a boost, I’ll trust CCP with the details.
And finally, for us lore geeks, CCP Abraxas put up a new chronicle this week, “A Man of Values and Faith“. This really emphasizes the darker side of the Minmatar, particularly with respect to the Ammatar/Nefantar relationship with the Republic. I love this and it plays particularly well with some stuff I have brewing in my duct tape kegs.
As we find out more, I’ll keep posting here.
Image credit northofdenali.
Once in a while, the EVE blogosphere extrudes a tendril of such awesomeness that its sheer concentrated “win factor” (apologies for the technical term there) overpowers any observers, reaching in through their aural (or, more likely, optic) orifices to rearrange the relevant neurons into a configuration that not only aligns more closely with reality but actually folds information back upon itself, displaying the fractal nature of comprehension.
