Tiercide your tiercide with more tiercide

Well, my plans to play EVE this week fell in a well and drowned. So it's 2 more weeks out in the desert earning money. 

Trawling the F&I thread or whatever it is called now, there's a huge amount of tiercide inbound in March. My TL;DR of this is, basically, you'll have to wait till your Pyfa or EFT updates to figure out if anything works anymore. 

Whilst tiercide is overall a good thing, with the philosophy being to streamline the modules from arcane legacy names and an obtuse and uselessly designed metalevel system into the Attribute-Bonused system (Scoped, Compact, etc), the pace of change has gone from glacial to a rush of climate change glacial meltwater. 

This has some risks. Mostly the risks are to game feel (like mouthfeel for your mental model of how ships behave) and fittings and fits. 

Hit in the Feels

The biggest hit to the feel of the game is going to be the DCU / Hull Resist change. Technically it's a nerf to DCU's but only insofar as their hull resist bonus isn't as great as it used to be, but it comes with innate 33% resists for everything. Aside from Freighters and freighter gankers suffering from this (most autopiloting freighters don't have DCU's active; now 33% resists and wrecks that can't be popped), the effect for this will be that the ubiquitous use of DCU's is probably on the way out.

Nearly all of my fits, shield or otherwise, include a DCU because, a) 12.5% shield resists, b) armour resists, c) 60% hull resists are vital for buffer fits. Some nano ships, some frigates, you will avoid the DCU because it's kinda not worth it, but certainly prior to this a DCU was required for active armour and all frontline armour ships with logi because hull HP lets you gap down into hull in between rep cycles without insta-popping.

A native 33% resist, if you have low numbers of lowslots, may be enough to let you escalate your fit with AAR's (eg, AAR Crucifiers, Slicers, Incursus) and free up that DCU slot for more DPS modules. 30 CPU is basically swap a DCU for a Magstab. 

Likewise, shield ships may find that they can do without that DCU if you have, say T2 Minnie resist profile on a Vagabond, etc. Extra nanofiber or Gyro might be worth it, big time, and you still get a moderate hull buffer. 

Point and Pointability

The warp scrambler and disruptor changes are interesting, for two reasons. 

Firstly, the streamlining of the faction modules from being a grab-bag of randomly assigned bullshit, into a coherent and logical progression. This now means that some expensive pro fits with RF dissies will suffer the extra CPU requirement. This isn't bad, per se, because it was ridiculous in a way that the lowest CPU cost for a disruptor also came with the longest range. 

Secondly, the scram power is going up, which negates warp core stabs to some degree. Yay for honorable murdering of defenceless industrials! Certainly the Epithals with 5 stabs won't do so well anymore, and neither will the relic Herons with 2 or 3 stabs. Faction Warfare farmers are going to have some issues as well. 

However, scram ranges are lower overall, which is going to change the feels on frigate combat significantly. 

The ECCM Confab

Honestly, the merging of Sebo's and ECCM's is a great idea. This will do much to provide a neutralising factor for Falcons and ECM drones, will tidy up 120 database items and modules which were basically redundant (backup arrays, wut?) and provide a bit of an interesting dynamic in gate camp combat. 

Meanwhile, in ECM land, did you check the power of the ECM Burst AKA Burst Jammer? That's a bit more potent. T2 will be much more expensive to run (58 vs 48 or 38 for the Enduring - a significant difference), harder to fit and much more potent. Thus tiercide in the ECM's has really thrown the doors wide open, creating a real choice for the Falcon pilot - stronger but less cap stable, or more cap stability but less potency. 

T2 Invictus!

So, yeah, T2 is in almost all cases now going to be best. As it should be. 

Cap Battery Meh

Another go at the cap batteries seems a little unimpressive. For a fraction of the fitting costs you can fit a capacitor booster, and gain shitloads of capacitor to inject whenever you need. Sure, you might miss the capacitor resistance to neuting, but it's not really of much use off a Bhaalgorn or maybe a carrier anyway. 

IMO, the battery should give a substantial boost to the base capacitor, and the neut resist function should be moved into the Capacitor Flux Coil, which is a generally useless module no one ever uses because it shits on your capacitor and recharge rates. It would be nice to bulk up your neut resists via dropping a low slot item (usually DPS), and that would be a nice fillip to the meta. 

Heavy Stasis Grapplers

I am interested in the application of these, because this is clearly an attempt to make Battleships somewhat immune to the "get at 500m and orbit" malarkey frigates pull all the time. The synergy of nominal 90% webs and light drones vs frigates is also worth noting. 

The falloff mechanic is interesting, too, allowing a battleship to at least tangentially slow down a kiting cruiser or frigate at >10km. Even a moderate webbing factor applied to a cruiser may help some battleships land more telling blows. Others, with poor optimals or terrible tracking guns (I'm looking at you, blaster Rokhs, Apocalypses, Hyperions) won't really notice much. 

But I am yet to see them in action and get a feel for it. Overall, it's a good module to go with brawlers, and a good defensive module to go with MJD's. Even the threat of a BS having the grappler aboard will cause cruisers and battlecruisers to have a bit of a think as they come in to scram range.