Do we know if there are any new ships being added?

 

I haven't seen a new one in a while, and haven't heard any talk about new ones coming soon.

Unfortunately, the fifth ship type was postponed indefinitely a while back.

 

That said, my hope is that once all this GSH stuff and 3.0 are live we'll start getting more GSF stuff; new ships (cartel and the fifth ship role) , new maps, and new game modes. It would be awesome if they would release something with 3.0 but at this point I think that's a pipe dream of a hope.

Unfortunately, the fifth ship type was postponed indefinitely a while back.

 

That said, my hope is that once all this GSH stuff and 3.0 are live we'll start getting more GSF stuff; new ships (cartel and the fifth ship role) , new maps, and new game modes. It would be awesome if they would release something with 3.0 but at this point I think that's a pipe dream of a hope.

 

Agreed, that's my hope as well. I'm accumulating absurd amounts of fleet req on multiple alts, need something to spend it on.

personally i hope the fith ship class is never released.

 

Stealth ships have no place in gsf. Once u introduce stealth into any form of pvp it normally breaks it. look at majority of qq on ground pvp it was either smash or stealth classes most threads. imagine a premade of stealth ships, think that would be fun when your on your own? lol think of worse case siturations what people cud do with a class and it normally happens, in idea they could be fun but the downsides would kill any balence there is right now.

 

But i do hope to see more ships of existing classes, more maps, and more game modes. oh and more detailed and variety cosmetic options for ships.

personally i hope the fith ship class is never released.

 

Stealth ships have no place in gsf. Once u introduce stealth into any form of pvp it normally breaks it. look at majority of qq on ground pvp it was either smash or stealth classes most threads. imagine a premade of stealth ships, think that would be fun when your on your own? lol think of worse case siturations what people cud do with a class and it normally happens, in idea they could be fun but the downsides would kill any balence there is right now.

 

But i do hope to see more ships of existing classes, more maps, and more game modes. oh and more detailed and variety cosmetic options for ships.

 

I'm not trying to start an argument as you offer a very valid viewpoint, but I do want to offer an alternative point of view.

 

In regards to a "stealth" ship I do think there are ways that they could limit the ships effectiveness. First, as the ship would have a "cloaking device" this would effectively take their systems component or the ability to change weapons. In addition making the ship lightly armed and armored by limiting its weapon and defense choices would also make it weaker when battling other ships. Furthermore, cloaking itself doesn't have to make the ship physically invisible. Before GSF went live, you could ramp sensor dampening to a point where an enemy couldn't see you until you we're 7k away (if I remember correctly). If a cloak was implemented this way, pilots would still be able to physically see the enemy when it got close, they simply wouldn't be able to target it, and since a stealth ship wouldn't have access to rail guns, it wouldn't be able to snipe invisible like PTS gunships could. Other cloaks could include actual invisibility, projecting multiple "false-copies," and more. All of these cloaks could be further tweaked to limit their power; either by having a time limit followed by long cool down, or in a way that while the cloak is active a stealth ship physically can't use it's weapons. Additional components could be added to the existing ship classes to further counter stealth and cloaks. Targeting Telemetry used to have fly text that said it would remove a cloak (I don't remember if it still does), and EMP and EMP missile bothe prevent the use of system components which would neutralize a "cloak" style systems component that a stealthier would use. Heck, you could even make an EMP mine for the minelayers which would make them even stronger in DOM fights.

 

My point is this, I agree that a stealth ship would be difficult to balance but I do think it is viable possibility.

 

That said bioware has made one thing clear and that whatever info has been datamine cannot be relied on as accurate. Bioware could release a fifth ship type that has no weapons, or is a class ship that our friends can take the control of the turrets with. I'm sure whatever they do, it will be surprising in some form or fashion. My only hope is that they continue to release new stuff for GSF; game modes, maps, components, and ships.

 

I apologize if I have come across as aggressive or insulting or condescending or arrogant or negative in any way; that was not my intent. Again, I simply wished to express a counter point to the argument that a stealth ship would be over powered. This was all my opinion and should not be taken as my attempt to state facts.

 

Finally i typed this all on my phone so I apologize for any errors in spelling or grammar.

The stealth ships are there, but I think they know it would require some tweaking to make them work. Infiltrators don't seem like they were envisioned as permanently invisible guys, but I'm not totally sure.

 

I'm pretty sure you could make a stealth variant in this game work, and I'm definitely looking forward to it. But as everyone said, it's probably not going to happen right away. The game didn't even get the few things they had mentioned this patch, so we'll probably see a patch with some GSF stuff after 2.10. I mean, at least we need TDM Denon, and at SOME point they need to give us other modes.

I am very glad the Infiltrators were postponed / scrapped.

 

While I'd love a fifth ship, I don't see how a stealth ship could do anything but exacerbate GSF's current issues.

 

What are GSF's current issues? In my opinion...

 

1) Burst damage (mainly from Gunships and Scouts) greatly amplifies skill differential between the experienced and inexperienced. The experienced pilots kill the inexperienced ones nearly instantly, such that new pilots have little chance to actually learn how to react, get frustrated, and don't come back.

 

2) Battles are dominated by specialty builds that can deal out tons of damage to targets they catch unawares (again, Scouts and Gunships). Even when flown by mediocre pilots, a Gunship or Scout can almost always use its capacity for surprise and burst to get 1+ kills before it is killed or forced to go evasive. Matches are won mainly by shooting as many people as possible, who are unaware of you, before the other side can muster a counter-retaliation. Rarely do true duels or furballs result in anything but turning-war stalemates. Instead, it's the guy outside the fight, who shoots from 15km or lances in with offensive cooldowns, who rack up the kills. Sure, that Gunship or Scout will likely get mobbed and killed, but one's one death in trade for 5 kills?

 

3) A node with 2+ Bombers (even piloted by idiots) on it is nearly impossible for new pilots to successfully assault. They simply don't have the required components.

 

So how would a stealth ship inevitably have to work? It would go invisible, get close to a foe, unleash some crazy burst damage, and then flee.

 

At the very least, this would exacerbate #1 (too much burst). Once again, we'd have experienced pilots insta-gibbing new pilots--except with even less warning than Scouts and Gunships currently provide.

 

As for #2 ("kill all the things before they come get me") ... the stealth ship might not be able to do that as well as a Gunship or Scout. Perhaps it would only be able to score a single quick kill coming out of stealth, and then it'd have to flee or dogfight as normal.

 

As for #3 (Bombers on nodes) ... if the stealth ships did not trigger mines while cloaked, then perhaps they would be interesting for dislodging entrenched Bomber defenses on a node. Though I'm not sure. Even if they could get close to the Bomber--the moment they attack and uncloak, all the mines/drones will roast them, and I doubt they'd be able to one-shot the Bomber.

 

As for what other classes the stealth ship would counter--they would be perfect against Gunships, of course. I can't argue with that. And that would offer a clear path for all the new (and some veteran) players who hate Gunships.

 

The big problem is they are also going to be relatively effective against poor hapless Strikes, and not effective at all against the already-powerful Scouts. In fact, we know the only anti-stealth component in the game comes on all three Scouts!

 

Like I said, I would love to have a 5th ship ... but yet another class that relies exclusively on surprise burst damage is not what GSF needs right now.

 

We need burst damage to be nerfed all-up, and we need Strikes to be overbuffed, to the point where they can dogfight better than Scouts. Scouts should be a utility / mobility ship. They shouldn't have offensive cooldowns of any kind, and they really shouldn't have BLC's or Clusters either. Unfortunately that genie is out of the bottle.

Done right, stealth ships could be interesting.

 

Unfortunately, the way the components are laid out on today's ships, they're going to be incredibly weak: telemetry is a scout ability which is already quite common, and strikers with no sensor component are already vulnerable to classes with range and stealth spec (gunships).

 

Something tells me these new stealth ships are going to have BLC on them.

 

There are invisible gunships:

Get slugged.

Press 'r'. No target.

Get slugged again.

Tab through and find no gunships pointing at you.

Repeat until you move or die.

I'm reserving judgment on stealth ships, but only because I hope Bioware has figured out something I haven't.

 

Right now I just don't understand what role they could fill that doesn't basically duplicate a scout (especially a battlescout). The only way I can really imagine "stealth" working in GSF is as a souped-up DCD that gives a ship a small window of opportunity to do enough burst to score a kill. That's... what scouts already do. If it has some extra power like "ignores mines" then OK, you have "this ship is a scout except it ignores mines".

 

I don't see stealth as giving any extra ability to sneak up on gunships (scouts are already really good at this). Stealth is just mobility, and scouts already have that in spades.

 

Stealth could provide some advantage in satellite-circling, though I'm not sure we want to make it even harder to kill enemies orbiting a node.

 

I don't see any way for infiltrators to do anything but "scout harder".

 

It's the above that gives me a small sliver of hope; because the duplicative nature of infiltrators seems so apparent, maybe the only reason devs talked about them was because the devs have some idea I haven't thought of.

The planned loadout of the stealth ships was.. "found", a while back... I remember they all had BLCs and a secondary short range massive burst weapon on top of that...

 

Well, would probably have permanently solved the gunship problem, but it hardly seems worth it... You dont fix broken by bringing more broken.

I agree with pretty much everything Nemarus said there, but his comments led me to wonder this...

 

What if the stealth ship was a purely 'utility' craft, and it's purpose was to stealth into an area and EMP the daylights out of it (without being as vulnerable as the Blackbolt / Novadive)? So if you had that 2-bomber-on-a-node wall of mines and drones, the stealth ship could zip in unseen, EMP all the junk away, and give people a chance to attack the node?

 

It could additionally be effective against gunship nests that way, maybe heavily stripping their systems / abilities and leaving them vulnerable to counterattack.

 

The stealth ship itself would not need much if any offensive punch to be a very effective and desirable role player in that configuration. Light lasers... maybe give it interdiction missiles. No torpedoes, nothing long range, nothing bursty. Just a very strong utilitarian roleplayer that could undo some of the really debilitating tactical formations that are troublesome in the current meta.

 

You wouldn't want more than one or maybe two on a team, since they would have little offensive use, but they would be very strong in certain situations.

 

- Despon

Edited August 19, 2014 by caederon

I agree with pretty much everything Nemarus said there, but his comments led me to wonder this...

 

What if the stealth ship was a purely 'utility' craft, and it's purpose was to stealth into an area and EMP the daylights out of it (without being as vulnerable as the Blackbolt / Novadive)? So if you had that 2-bomber-on-a-node wall of mines and drones, the stealth ship could zip in unseen, EMP all the junk away, and give people a chance to attack the node?

 

It could additionally be effective against gunship nests that way, maybe heavily stripping their systems / abilities and leaving them vulnerable to counterattack.

 

The stealth ship itself would not need much if any offensive punch to be a very effective and desirable role player in that configuration. Light lasers... maybe give it interdiction missiles. No torpedoes, nothing long range, nothing bursty. Just a very strong utilitarian roleplayer that could undo some of the really debilitating tactical formations that are troublesome in the current meta.

 

You wouldn't want more than one or maybe two on a team, since they would have little offensive use, but they would be very strong in certain situations.

 

- Despon

 

Actually, of the three datamined Infiltrator variants, one did sound like that. Some excerpts:

 

"eschews high-damage secondary weapons in favor of weapons that disable"

 

"equipped with a wide array of technologies designed to baffle foes' sensors"

 

"cloaking field, which can extend to encompass allies"

 

"built to cause chaos"

 

"prototype technologies to wreak havoc on enemy sensors"

 

"secondary weapons are oriented toward disabling, not destroying"

 

I know there was some kind of "false sensor image" projector component. That sounds pretty neat. You could use it to shake pursuers and then get behind them.

 

I do think that "Utility Infiltrator" could definitely spice things up a bit. And all that unique utility sets it apart enough from Scouts to justify its existence.

 

The other two though ... I'm not so sure about.

 

The dedicated backstabby Infiltrator is essentially just another way to Scout, like Kuciwalker said. Except it would probably be a sitting duck once its cloak was dismissed. If it wasn't, it'd be OP.

 

And the other variant appears to be an Infiltrator/Strike hybrid. Much like the T3 Gunship and T3 Bomber, this would be yet another example of a hybrid Strike being better than a pure Strike. I mean, who wouldn't sacrifice an extra laser or missile to have a cloaking device?

"eschews high-damage secondary weapons in favor of weapons that disable"

 

sabo probe, ion missile, emp missile

 

"equipped with a wide array of technologies designed to baffle foes' sensors"

 

mobility by any other name

 

"cloaking field, which can extend to encompass allies"

 

tensor field

 

"secondary weapons are oriented toward disabling, not destroying"

 

sabo probe, ion missile, emp missile

 

 

 

Unless you really think that mobility achieved via stealth is sooooooo different from mobility achieved via cheap boost (I don't), there just isn't a lot of new design space here.

Hmmm, very interesting points that everyone is making.

 

In regards to game balance and theory crafting I will defer to the number gurus and ace pilots; I am after all an average pilot with no head for numbers. In my opinion though, I don't think introducing a fifth ship type at this moment would be too much of a problem or wreck the balance and here's why.

 

1.) Introducing another ship type will attract more players. We don't know what the fifth ship type is (again, all datamining is suspect until bioware says otherwise). However, someone will take a look at that fifth ship type, whatever it is, and say something like "Oh cool, that's my kind of ship" and want to fly it.

 

2.) Introducing a fifth ship type give pilots who have completely mastered craft something else to work towards. I know there are plenty of pilots who are sitting on millions of requisition because they are amazing and dedicated pilots, but they have completely mastered everything and having nothing else to spend it on. A new ship type gives brand new ships to spend that requisition on, or at least draining some of the req they have accrued (side note, we seriously need something to spend requisition on other than just the ships).

 

3.) The meta will be shaken up. Don't get me wrong, I think that there are some things that could definitely use a few tweaks in order for GSF to be more friendly and inviting to new players as well as balance things out but if they're fixed and bioware decides to introduce a fifth ship type then they're just going to have to rebalance the whole thing anyways. Better to start now, rather than to fix something and just break it with another patch.

 

4.) This one is most important in my opinion, but our community needs something to look forward too. Even if bioware were to fix the current balance issues, what then? Do we just continue flying our ships for requisition, conquest points, and a handful of credits? Activity on our forums has slowed as people have just gotten tired of discussing the same old arguments with nothing new to debate or generate interest. I mean we'll probably get a TDM denon at some point but whoopee, we'd then have six maps divided between three game modes, great. We need something new to get us excited and it can just be a new map of an existing game mode or new color schemes or even new models of existing ship types (though arguably the latter would be great if I could put a "cartel" imperium on my launch bar). We need something new that will mix things up and cause people to readjust and fly differently as they try and account for new things; be that a new game mode or a new ship type, or even a new component. We just need something new to look forward too.

 

That's why I think a fifth ship type wouldn't hurt right now. Please keep in mind this is all my opinion, and that's the opinion of an average pilot with no head for numbers or theory crafting.

mild digression:

 

Debuffing weapons face an uphill battle in GSF (indeed in every game) because the best debuff to inflict is always "dead". This means it must be easier to land a debuff than to just straight-up kill an opponent, or the debuff has to be so crippling as to be equivalent to death, or the debuff must accompany significant normal damage.

 

Some debuffs in GSF fit this:

 

1. Ion railgun is easy to land, conditionally does decent damage, and applies a reasonably powerful debuff. It's usually worth hitting someone with ion before you hit them with slug rather than just firing two slugs.
   
2. Interdiction missile has a very fast lock-on and does cluster-level damage, so again it can be worth taking over regular clusters (although this choice is pretty even).
   
3. Thermite debuff is pretty scary and thermites already do great damage, so they are pretty balanced vs protons.
   

 

Some debuffs in GSF are kind of marginal:

 

1. Sabo probe is basically equivalent to a kill, but the long lock-on time (and the fact that you have to actually finish the job) means it's usually better to just use clusters or rockets.
   

 

And some just can't justify themselves over "moar damage":

 

1. EMP field is an OK debuff... but you give up TT. TT will just get stuff deader, faster. Somewhat excusable from the anti-mine role, but...
   
2. Ion and EMP missile: for the same or less investment, both clusters and concs get the enemy much closer to "dead" than these
   

 

The purpose of the above isn't to suggest widespread rebalancing of GSF. I know it's not always valid to compare e.g. ion missiles to clusters since you don't get them on the same ship.

 

Rather, the point I'm trying to make is that the power of existing "moar damage" components really constrains the design space available to utility or debuff components. In order to introduce a new utility system or missile without underwhelming, you have to make it really powerful and easy to use.

 

It's not really clear where we are supposed to find this design space. Slows? Already got 'em all over the place. Energy drain? Like five or six different components already have that, and it was only really notable on one (where it was repeatedly nerfed). Disabling your 1-2-3 buttons? Been there, done that. Sensor debuffs? lololololol.

 

Maybe there's some room for some additional armor, shield bleedthrough, or accuracy debuffs. Maybe.

Rather, the point I'm trying to make is that the power of existing "moar damage" components really constrains the design space available to utility or debuff components. In order to introduce a new utility system or missile without underwhelming, you have to make it really powerful and easy to use.

 

I think, speaking from a purely theoretical standpoint, that the fault lies primarily with the ease of using damaging weapons. If I want to shoot a guy dead, it's not honestly that hard (especially against newer pilots). Most lasers, along with clusters, give you a lot of reward for simply being on target for a short time. As we all know, a full two seconds on someone's tail is generally a death sentence.

 

Torpedoes break the mold. Hitting with a torp is hard, and theoretically that's rewarded with big numbers (guaranteed 830 hull damage, and that's before upgrades!). In practice, however, other weapons can be used more reliably for the same results.

 

Imagine a world where all lasers do half the damage they deal now, or less. Suddenly, things like torpedoes are more valuable for their ability to punch through shields that you can't just tear off; sabotage probes are more valuable because they give you some much-needed time on target; ion missiles will take out that wall between your lasers and their hull much more efficiently than previously. We see the same sort of thing in other games, where comparatively large amounts of utility are required to deal significant damage and/or land kills (and in such games, the two are very different concepts that skilled players need to master). Such a blanket nerf would not be a fix -- and this late in the game's lifetime, it wouldn't be acceptable even if it did fix the issues -- but I think that if the game had been designed this way from the ground up, utility weapons would be much more notable.

 

This is exactly what you said when you compared utility weapons to "more deader" weapons. Utility and damage tend to sit on a seesaw; the more powerful the one is, the less useful the other is. You don't need utility when the other guys die instantly, and you don't need much more than plink damage when the other guys are sheep for the whole match. And I think that in order to make utility weapons more attractive, we need to put a rock on the damage side of the seesaw, not push up the utility side. Simply buffing utility weapons does solve their problems, in a way; addressing damaging weapons, on the other hand, also handles the concern while also addressing the problems with burst damage -- all without introducing newbie-unfriendly power creep.

I agree, but it's hard for me to see a plausible evolutionary path from today's GSF to the game you're describing, and the problem becomes harder to solve the more ships and components BW adds.

 

That said, it may be that nerfing battlescout damage* would be enough, and the resulting game would have enough room for utility.

 

*with simultaneous nerfs to T1 scout lasers/pods and probably railguns

Edited August 19, 2014 by Kuciwalker

By battle scout damage, you mean BLCs, TT, and BO (of which only BO is exclusive to battle scouts)? Those nerfs are necessary in and of themselves, but like you say, they wouldn't be sufficient for the goal in mind. And, if done improperly, I don't think they would make much progress at all on the utility front.

I'm with Nemarus on this one. Not putting in the stealth ships was a good move. It's hard enough to balance the current roles, and stealth ships would only exacerbate the problem.

 

This is doubly true since stealth ships don't really serve as a hard counter to another role, at least not one that's already countered (Gunships is the closest, of course, but scouts can already do that).

 

Besides, if they're going to spent any significant effort on GSF, I think what we need most are new game modes (or at least 1). That would help GSF more than another balance-breaking role.

 

Thank you.