The Megagay Drive

Call me a luddite curmudgeon, but the Micro Jump Drive seems to be a shit module thrown in to hotfix battleships which, aside from POS bashes and a few rare events, are now more or less totally obsoleted by just about everything. The MJD won't fix anything, and will break more things than it fixes.

The problem, as we should frame the problem in order to investigate the solution, is manifold but in my opinion it comes more down to the signal resolution of battleship weapons than any other facet. I say this because when you are unjammed by ECM, and you get assfucked by a single Legion, without even getting through his shield, you know something is wrong. This is repeatable with every type of strategic cruiser which is not covops fit, and many which are.

Note that in this instance, you aren't even addressing the whole "he's got faction resists!" line of thinking where you get brick Legions or brick Proteii with 150K EHP. You are talking here about the wake limiter sub with and AB fit, resulting in a sig radius that is frankly ridiculously low. Far too low for a battleship to apply its DPS to. Consider an Armageddon with Dual heavy Pulse II's (the smallest BS guns, sig resolution 400m) vs a wake-limited Proteus (168m). The nominal DPS of a gank Geddon (900) is halved even before transversal, tracking, etc. The Proteus suffers no such limitations. Orbit at 500m with webs on the BS, and your DPS doesn't improve. Web down a ow-sig T3 and your BS merely gets close to half of its paper DPS. Add tracking computers out the wazoo, still half.


This is without implants or off-grid boosters affecting the sig radius of the Proteus; you can get your sig down close to 50m with both.

What does this mean? Well, as everything in EVE is getting gankier and tankier (c.f. what's happened to frigates and cruisers) the advantage of a BS tank (100K) over a Frigate tank (used to be 3K, now 7) has halved. The gank discrepancy has halved, too, with Neutron catalysts pushing 700 overheated, 400 with a "tank". This has diluted the BS's preeminence as a tanky battlewagon that can command a small gang situation and take down enemies rapidly. Add to this increasing speeds - usually from off-grid boosting alts but nowadays from speed buffs to cruisers and frigates, and even if your enemy is MWDing about with sig bloat (yay 100% paper DPS!) the transversal/tracking problem comes to the fore, which allows kitey ships to avoid the DPS. Midslot proliferation has seen the Tracking Disruptor become ubiquitous when not replaced by the ASB - a terribly broken module.

So, it comes back to the solution. Do you want brawling battleships, or just sniping battleships (or, lets be honest, tier 3 BCs)? If you want brawling battleships to be able to hold their own versus faster, smaller-sig, TDing kitey enemies what do you do?

You add the Micro Jump Drive. After a 12s spool up, you teleport 100km forward in the direction of travel. You have +1 warp strength and are immune to bubbles. This of course, is fucking awesome, as you can't be help in place by one kitey ceptor.

The tactics are going to be interesting. Already people are waming up blaster Hyperion fleets 110km off gates, jumping to zero from a 100km pounce, and vaping their foes. People are sitting t 100km off gate sniping aligned to a celestial, MJD'ing to 200km just before being pointed, then warping to safety. People are warming up their massively warp-stabbed smartbomb BS, bombing, then clearig gate instantly.

The thing is, this isn't going to actually make battleships better. It will just make a few of them die on gate when they get scrammed (hooray for tackle), and the rest will become uber gay blink kiting punching bags. Get the drop on one, and it's fucked, absolutely fucked, even if it has an MJD. Get into a fight against something smaller than a MWDing battlecruiser, and you are going to suffer the same fate as before.

I wonder what other failure of a module CCP tried to make battleships better? Oh, right. The Target Spectrum Breaker AKA the SSuicide Disco Lottery ECM THat Never Breaks Every Lock.

Good game, CCP. Good game.