#odyssey 1.1

[anoikislost]

Favorite ship

Absolution, hands down.

[anoikislost]

New Odyssey 1.1 Update

For those who aren't yet aware HAC Rebalance Commandship Rebalance Medium Turret Rebalance Local Rep Boost 15%+ Warfare Link Boost Rebalance So in other news my Absolution will be getting higher resists, better local rep as well as going from a 5% to 10% damage increase. Losing a gun, but still more firepower. Also with medium beams getting upgraded, I might just be able to use them :D

[jasonbouchardeve]

EVE - An Industrial-Sized Solution

After the incredible backlash by the EVE community regarding CCP's initial plans to revamp the Tech I Industrial line, CCP Rise posted a completely new thread on the forums with "Round 2" as he calls it of the balance pass. Fortunately for him, this time the reply posts have been much more positive. Say hello to your new line of Space Trucks!

General Roles

There are still 2 basic roles if you look carefully enough: an agile, fast-warping line with less cargo and more tank, and a fast sub-light line with more cargo and less tank. The big difference now is that there seems to be a lot more in the "racial flavoring" department.

Racial Advantages

Amarr — Most base tank (Sigil) and most potential cargo (Bestower)

Caldari — Most Base Cargo and Mid-Slots for most potential tank (also Badger Mark II for Heavy Assault Missile comedy PvP)

Minmatar — Fastest

Gallente — Average all-around, Drones (Iteron Mark I)

Special Bays

Yep; you heard it! Specialized Bays! The ships that were previously left to dry now have special roles!

Iteron Mark II — Minerals

Iteron Mark III — Planetary Commodities (essentially a more widely-available version of the Primae that CCP gave to players who've been around since the 2010 Tyrannis expansion which introduced Planetary Interaction)

Iteron Mark IV — Ore ("Four for ore" is how I'll remember this one)

Hoarder — Ammo/Charges. Expect to see at least one of these in big, drawn-out fleet fights jetting cans of ammo for pilots who run out.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, I thought that this was a good second effort by CCP and I sort of wonder why they appeared, based on our good friend FunkyBacon's article, to be hesitant to roll this out the first time around.

While FunkyBacon (and CCP from the sounds of it) have a somewhat-legitimate concern over players yelling about the Amarr and Caldari not getting anything special like the Gallente and Minmatar lines did with the Iterons and the Hoarder, CCP seems to have balanced things out in my opinion. With the sturdiest, largest general haulers, the Amarr and Caldari offer great alternatives to the specialized ships, the "okay" Gallente generalized ships or the fast and furious Minmatar ships. And even between the Amarr and the Caldari you have a choice: I can pick the Sigil and get the most HP I can get without fitting anything, or I can get more cargo with the Badger and try to make up the 830 base HP gap by fitting Shield Extenders in the 6 Mid Slots.

All I can say now is that like FunkyBacon, I'm looking forward to seeing those "Drone Swarm Iterons." :D

[jasonbouchardeve]

EVE - Some Nice NOS News

In CCP Rise's forum thread from last Wednesday, we learned that the long-broken Nosferatu modules will be working in an actually viable manner come Odyssey 1.1. So today we're going to explore the history of the Nosferatu, aka, the NOS.

Nosferatu 1.0 - The Age of the NOS-Dominix In the beginning, all the Nosferatu did was take capacitor energy from your target and put it into your capacitor. That was it. Whether you had more cap than your target or the other way around didn't matter. The result was the famous Nosferatu-Dominix. To keep up their tank, battleship pilots would outfit their Dominixes with Nosferatus and Armor Repairors and suck the cap out of already-dry targets to run the Repairors and keep the Dominixes permanently capacitor-stable and virtually invincible.

Nosferatu 2.0 - It's All Relative

So with Revelations 2.2, CCP nerfed Nosferatus and declared that no ship with a higher percentage of filled capacitor could use a NOS on a target with a lower percentage. In other words, to use a NOS you needed less % cap than your target. And with that, the players decided that why would you try to win a cap-warfare fight by intentionally reducing your capacitor to use a module that can't even make your target worse off than you? From then on, the Nosferatu was relegated to the dustbins of people's station hangars.

Nosferatu 3.0 - We Like Real Numbers Now So now with Odyssey 1.1, CCP is trying to find the middle ground. You'll still need less capacitor than your target, but now it's measured in actual GigaJoules, not percentages. What this means is that now the Nosferatu has a special job as a weapon for all the Davids out there in EVE taking on Goliaths. Since smaller ships have less total capacitor space than larger ones, this change means that you won't need to intentionally sacrifice any cap to take on a larger ship with a NOS, unless the poor sucker has been nearly drained already.

Expect to see some large frigate and cruiser fleets armed to the teeth with Nosferatus taking on battlecruisers and battleships after Odyssey 1.1 hits the main game server, Tranquility, as well as a huge uptick in market prices and demand. Might want to buy now, looking at the current graph for the Medium Nosferatu II it seems the market rush has already begun!

[jasonbouchardeve]

EVE - The Industrial-Sized Debate

Last Wednesday, CCP Rise opened up a thread in the Features and Ideas Discussion forum detailing CCP's plans for revamping the Tech I Industrial line in Odyssey 1.1 . Unfortunately, he also opened up the biggest can of worms since the disastrous Incarna expansion back in 2011.

The initial goal was to give defined roles to all of the Industrial hulls, of which there are 12 (5 Gallente, 2 Caldari, 2 Amarr, and 3 Minmatar). Stopping the story there, everything seems fine. The whole point of the Rebalancing Initiative, nicknamed "Tiericide" by the fans when it began in the Inferno expansion of Summer 2012, is to eliminate "tiers" of ships. Previously in EVE you had the problem of Ship A being inherently inferior to Ship B because they fit the exact same role, but Ship B's stats give it the advantage in said role. So all the Ship As were never used except by players in the process of skilling up to fly Ship B, at which point they were sold or scrapped and became hand-me-downs.

Starting in 2012 CCP decided this was a bad idea and to give every Tech I combat ship its own unique role with racial flavoring (so now each race now has a Tech I Electronic Warfare frigate, but for Gallente it's bonused for Sensor Dampening, for Amarr Tracking Disruption, and so on.) Now there is an incentive to using each type of Tech I ship in combat, and a more clearly defined progression for players from starting off in their racial rookie frigate to whatever specialized role they want to go into.

So why did this become a problem when CCP decided to apply the Tiericide formula to the industrial line, which sort of had the same problem? (The Iterons below Mark V are rarely used because the next ships in that line simply add cargo room without any major drawbacks. In fact, for that reason, the Iteron Mark V the most popular industrial ship out of all the racial hulls.)

The problem was that they only found two roles (less cargo/more tank/more agility and more cargo/more speed/less tank) when only 2 races (Amarr and Caldari) have just 2 industrial ships. The Iterons II, III, and IV and the Hoarder were all put into role-limbo with CCP Rise's initial post, which has since been deleted as CCP figures out how best to adjust their plans to satisfy the immense community reaction. In addition, there was very little to address the issue of the Industrials not really having much in the "racial flavor" category aside from the Amarr ships having the most tank (as always) and the Minmatar ships being the fastest (again, as always).

Many people had similar ideas to themittani.com's FunkyBacon, who suggested giving each race one racially-specialized ship (like an exclusively ore-hauler or a Tech I blockade-runner) and one ship that fits either the speed or high-capacity role that CCP initially tried. The Iterons II through IV could then be used as lesser versions of the other racial specialties, which makes sense with the Gallente backstory/lore of them as opportunistic generalists.

According to CCP Rise's update post, the rebalancing team will be looking into something along these lines. Hopefully this time around the results will be satisfying to those who actually care about industrials. Either way, though, at least his post on the new Nosferatu mechanics is getting positive feedback! More on that in another post!