Rhea-lly Cool

The announcement at EVE Vegas, including concept art, for T3 Destroyers (aka Tactical Destroyers) in Rhea (the December update) piques the interest.

The idea is the T3 Destroyers have three modes; a tanking, manouvre and sniping mode.

It makes a lot more sense than T3 Frigates, because right now there's basically only a handful of the T1, T2 and pirate frigates which see any widespread use solo, or in wormholes. In J-space you cannot go very far past the Astero, with an AAR, or maybe a bomber, covops for probing (but not combat). You rarely see much else, in the frigate sphere. This is because (with the proviso you wish to cloak) you realistically cannot get more tank and DPS out of a frigate than the Astero; bombers are good on DPS but terrible with tanking, and covops are just outmatched in the DPS department, and can't really fit the lowslot tanks to make AAR's work.

A tech-3 frigate with 5 subsystems would be too costly, and if it had the tank to protect the ISK sunk into the subs, it would be far too powerful in comparison to even T1 cruisers. This is probably one reason that we have T3 Destroyers and not T3 frigates. 

Given there's no cloaky destroyer, and destroyers have a stupidly large signature and barely more EHP than frigates, there's little use to put them to in wormholes. This is even given the addition of frigate holes, which are properly destroyer holes. There are a few souls who run RR Algos in C1's, and I've seen the odd gank Cat in W-R holes, but beyond that nothing.

The whole idea of frigate wormholes is to provide more options to wormhole dwellers than the typical T3 and Guardian blobs. The problem as above is that there's not really a lot you can do with frigs and dessies that satisfy the need for tank and gank in brawling. Even our punchy Enyo doctrine struggles because they aren't that tanky, and T1 logi frigs are anything but tanky. So we have struggled to make a coherent doctrine to take through frig holes to attack people.

Thus, I am interested to see exactly how ganky the T3 Destroyers are; how tanky they are in tank mode; what their manouvre mode allows them to do, and whether they have any hope of fitting or getting bonused EWAR. This bodes well for frig hole assault doctrines, giving such mass-constrained gangs the ability - perhaps - to take on larger ships like Rattlesnakes, marauders, etcetera.

The Tug? What a ridiculous punching bag suicide gank target. it'll be fantastic watching a whole Tug full of pimped Nightmares getting suicided on the Niarja gate. Because fuck me, if CCP think pandering to the mealy-mouthed mewling cockbag incursion bears via putting this in the game is smart? Bring on the Talos ganks!