It seems CCP might be well on the way to making the new roles for the upcoming mining barge/exhumer iteration mostly pointless.
Two of the exhumers currently have specialized bonuses. The Skiff has a mercoxit mining bonus. The Mackinaw has an ice harvesting bonus.
How will this affect the new upcoming iteration? Where mercoxit and ice mining are concerned, it kind of makes the upcoming changes pretty pointless. If you're ice harvesting, why would you fly anything other than a Mackinaw? Whether it's Hulkageddon or not, no matter what space you're in, you're never going to choose the more sturdy Skiff over the ice harvesting bonus that the Mack gives. This defeats the purpose of the player having to make choices, having to gear their activity towards other outside forces and factors.
I'd simply assumed yesterday, when I cheered on the upcoming iteration towards roles, that the specific mining type bonuses would be removed from the exhumers. If the intention is to create a bit of a paradigm shift in the exhumer class vessels, different ships for different situations, then keeping the current specialization bonuses undermines the paradigm.
Apparently the exhumer bonuses are staying. CCP Ytterbium clarifies in some Q&A on the ship rebalancing thread:
Q: WILL EXHUMER SHIP SPECIALIZATIONS BE AFFECTED BY SUCH CHANGES?It's times like this when I wish CCP would actually go into some detail on their decision-making. What's their thinking on the issue? Why do they feel that removing the current specializations is the wrong course of action? Hopefully the reasons are deeper than just being lazy and wanting to push some changes out the door as quickly as possible.
A: Most likely not.
But ...
If CCP did remove the mining type specializations from the exhumers, what would happen to them? Would they just disappear, or is there a way to let players get the bonus/penalty of those specializations through some other means? There are two equally valid ways for CCP to go about doing this.
- Turn the Mining Laser Upgrade and Ice Harvester Upgrade modules into items that can load scripts. The scripts define any bonuses and penalties. Perhaps the Mercoxit Script gives a 60% bonus to mercoxit yield, while delivering an ore bay capacity penalty, along with a penalty to gas cloud formation. This concept could be expanded down the road, with scripts for every rock type. A veldspar script, for instance, giving some veldspar yield bonus and an associated penalty.
- Mining Type rigs. Want to mine mercoxit? Install a rig on your ship. Want to increase your ice harvesting yield? Install a rig on your mining vessel. The bonus of rigs is that to replace them, you have to destroy them, which would please manufacturers.
Why CCP is not going down this road, I have no idea. Smacks as a quick fix to some miner screaming, versus an iteration with some real longterm potential in mind.
So where's your post on the eve-o forums asking for clarification?
ReplyDeleteI'm strongly in favour of tiericide for t1 barges, and I'm also aware that T2 ships are meant to be more specialized than their T1 counterparts.
I'd like to see the tech 1 barge designs reflected in the tech 2 ships;
* Skiff is a really tanky version of the already-tanky Procurer
* Mackinaw is a really-large-cargohold miner, even compared to the new Retriever
* Hulk retains its role as most bonused miner.
The problem is that binding specific ship bonuses to a module is something which makes T3 ships special. In generaly, upgrade modules only impact other modules (damage mods impact weapons, etc), or a specific attribute of the ship (plates improve raw armor hit points).
ReplyDeleteI struggle to think of a single module which augments a ship to the point where it provides a *ship level* bonus outside of T3 subsystems.
Essentially, for T1 barges, the alignment of hit points vs yield makes sense. These ships have no specific role, its basically a choice between 1, 2 or 3 strip miners. By making it so that if you chose 1 strip miner you get uber tank, 2 strip miners you get balance, 3 strip miners you fly around in a fragile piece of fine china you have a sensible level of choice.
Coming up to the T2 ships, you end up with an odd situation where if you wish to mine rocks you have no choice but to fly the most fragile ship. The end result will be essentially no change.
One solution may be to bind the ship bonuses to the T2 lasers. T2 ice miners get the 200% bonus, T2 strips get you the yield bonus, T2 deep cores get you the skiff bonus...the problem there is that you would end up with everybody flying the hulk because it can fit 3 things, and you end up with no 'real' solution (the same is true if you make it a scripted module, why mine ice in a mack when you can mine more in a hulk?)
Tough one, maybe an indicator that tiericide of T2 doesn't really work due to specialisation?
CCP said they were bringing up all the mining ships much closer to the hulk's yield/hour in the rebalance. I interpreted this to mean that all mining barges/exhumers will have 3 strip miners post-rebalance. If the procurer still has only 1 strip miner, then the rebalance will have been a joke, tbh.
DeleteI'd imagine that their logic is related to the way they do most other T2 ships in the game, that is, it's not a pure progression from T1 to T2. Most T2 ships aren't simply better versions of their T1 counterpart. For example a Destroyer and Interdictor have completely different rolls even though they are based on the same hull. Same with Logi, Heavy Interdictors, Covert Ops, Recons. Just because a Basilisk is much more expensive than an Osprey doesn't mean its better (ok it probably is right now, but you get my point).
ReplyDeleteI figure they mean for the T1 barges to be your normal mining ships, while the T2 exhumers are there for the special mining roles.
I was wondering about the exhumer bonuses - but on thinking about it some, the proposed buffs to the Skiff and Mackinaw complement their bonused roles quite well.
ReplyDelete- The Skiff is best at mercoxit mining, which means null-sec, high threat environments, plus the potential for damaging blowback from the rocks. Buffing the tank is a natural improvement.
- Ice mining's major problem (aside from gankers) has pretty much always been the fact that the ice blocks are so flippin' large that a Mackinaw is almost always rigged for maximum cargo and damn the tank; an outsized ore bay is perfect for ice miners.
To bring the yields a bit closer, you could build in a 50 or 60 percent bonus to all mining lasers on the Procurer/Skiff, and a 20 or 25 percent bonus to all mining lasers on the Retriever/Mackinaw, or something like that, to make the smaller barges viable alternatives. During high-threat times, it wouldn't surprise me to find people using the less efficient ships in roles that didn't match their bonuses; it happens all the time with other classes (the shield-tanked Myrmidon, for one)...
but it wont happen. Find me a tanked mining ship that's been killed during hulkageddon.
Deleteminers go after maximum yield. Its what they do. That is their end game. Changing the base EHP of the ships wont change that
I remember them mentionning that this change was to depart from the "each ship is just a better version of the previous one" situation.
ReplyDeleteIf they do expand the Tierization to Exhumers and let specialization go, they'll have be essentially better than the corresponding Mining Barge with respect to their Tier. Which seem to be exactly what they said they did not want.
If their guideline is to keep the ship decision as open as possible they will have to keep some some of specialization into T2, either by not applying the tier change to them, or by trying a weird mix that is IMHO bound to fail.
Now even with specialization it's not good solution, you fall into weird effect (e.g. you need Exhumers V for the skiff to be better at what it does than the Hulk) which force you to chose your numbers very carefully and make the situation very vulnerable to small changes.
I think they're stuck between a bad solution and one that is against their newly publicized guideline.
I just checked, and the skiff still lists a +2 warp strength. with the improved tank and ore hold I would mine in low sec with even one strip miner
ReplyDeleteI find it absurd that a Hulk will have less EHP than smaller ships in the same class.
ReplyDeleteThat's like saying that a BS will have less EHP than a Cruiser.
Also, in the original ship description it talks about the Hulk being the big bad boy, pinochle of exhumers, capable of defending itself in harsh environments better than any other dedicated mining platform, yadda-yadda.
Adding content and updating game mechanics for smoother play = good.
Altering principles = bad.