Waka Waka!

This post is uncategorized so far as I didn't intend to be reading a lot of tea-leaves in this blog. However, with the amount of dust that CCP Fozzie's been stirring up it seemed I would be amiss not to write something. If he keeps this up he might get a blog category all to himself! Anyway, this one's about the winter expansion and what it means to some beloved ninja ships.

CCP Fozzie and tiericide

So who is "CCP Fozzie" anyway? Let's start by saying that EVE is a huge game which works well overall, yet is broken in many, many places. Some glaring imbalances have been around for so long that people have generally stopped crying about them. Tech 1 subcapitals was one such issue. We were all used to having only a few truly battleworthy hulls to play with, while some of the other hulls found niche roles owing to some peculiar ship bonuses. Nobody really cared about it anymore.

Then this guy Fozzie came out of nowhere and started fixing it.

Actually, it turns out one does.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Let's start with the winter rebalance announcement. While we were expecting the full line of T1 frigates to get overhauled, Fozzie apparently doesn't need sleep so he decided to go over the T1 cruisers as well. Most of these ships are getting buffed. This is good news for ninjas who fly cruisers as kill ships and we may well expect to see "Ackbar" tactics (baiting in a PVP cruiser) picking up more steam. What I'm most excited about though is the "Support Ships" role where, according to these plans, we'll be seeing T1 logistics cruisers that are actually well-suited to their task. I expect this will allow younger ninjas to get into the RR game quickly and effectively, without having to slog through the long skill queue for T2 Logistics.

But the big one that hit yesterday was, of course, the announcement that the Hurricane is about to lose 16% of its powergrid. The reasoning behind it has something to do with the Hurricane apparently being given the role of an artillery platform instead of an autocannon platform. I've played around in Pyfa a bit and fitting a Hurricane with a full rack of T2 220mm autocannons and two medium neuts is going to be next to impossible without some serious sacrifice in either tank or firepower. The ninja 'cane as we know it will, effectively, be no more.

...

The sky is falling!

Not quite. I'm not going to go with the "it's not final yet" thing because though the details may change, Fozzie's made it pretty clear that the Hurricane nerf is not really up for discussion. I do have my reasons for not being too worried about this whole business though:

• The Hurricane was already hilariously overpowered for our pruposes. We don't fight bleeding-edge PVP, we fight mission runners who are half asleep in unbelievable shitfits.
• We already have a good alternative in the Harbinger, which can be fit to pretty well match the Hurricane's specifications. Kinda sucks if you haven't trained for energy weapons, but you should still have a month or two until the winter expansion.
• The Hurricane can easily do with less tank if you fly with friends who have RR on standby. The announced T1 Support Ships should help here. Teamwork is a good thing.
• There's more changes coming. Hulls which are currently considered underpowered, like the Prophecy, the Cyclone, or pretty much anything Gallente may well become viable gank ships once the Battlecruiser class as a whole gets overhauled.

The bottom line is, we're ninjas. We're not a group that CCP really pays attention to. We operate on the fuzzy edges of "working as intended" and that means we'll always have to adapt to changes made for the benefit of larger demographics. We'll find new and hilarious ways of squeezing the most out of the toys we're given to play with. And on the whole, CCP Fozzy appears to be giving us more toys rather than less.