Another month, another expansion bump from CCP.
I actually had to think for a moment about the title of this post as, not being an EVE Online blog, the name Vanguard might bring up the late and ever troubled (while it was around) Brad McQuaid project.
I am not sure I succeeded with that title, so let me just say now that there is no Brad McQuaid connection to New Eden… at least none that I have ever heard of.
Yes, CCP announced that full sized expansions would be returning, but they will also continue on with the scheduled smaller code drops to deliver smaller feature updates and fixes at regular intervals.
Today’s drop is Vanguard and I am going to say that the biggest item… there being no dev blogs or such on Vanguard features to indicate importance or scale… on the list of features it brings is the change for new characters. Fresh characters in New Eden will show up with more skills and skill points. You will essentially start 400,000 skill points into your lifetime of training, up from 50,000 previously. That is maybe 10 days of training (and a bunch of ISK), but those first days in the game are important and can shape your destiny.
Neville Smit has posted before/after pictures of the skills being added while over at Th Nosy Gamer there is a far more detailed look at what skills are being added and what they mean to players.
The next up and probably most talked about change, at least in null sec, is the combat and Navy issue battlecruiser rebalance.
FC, can I bring my Drake now?
This has vets happy, since we remember a golden era of battlecruiser dominance where we flew Drake and Hurricane doctrines every day. I miss my 2012 pera-MWD Drake of doom.
So these old hulls… old being defined as anything that was around when I started playing in 2006… are getting a buff.
The problem is that it just isn’t 2006… or 2012… anymore. These ships can’t stand toe-to-toe with the strategic cruisers still, which can fit a battleship level tank if needs be, nor are they as versatile, not having a subsystem swap option to make them interdiction nullified or able to use black ops bridges or whatever. And in the post-Phoebe world of jump fatigue battlecruisers are slow travelers when you have more than a few gates between you and your destination.
So they are a cheap… and now a little bit better… option on the home defense front or for nearby deployments, but if you’re going to go far my gut says that alliances will bring harder, more survivable, more expensive ships to fight.
But we’ll see. Maybe Reavers will be drop Tengus and pick up Hurricanes.
(A run down of the changes over at Crossing Zebras.)
And then, also a big deal in null sec, the ability to fit Entosis Link modules has been removed from interceptors. The trollceptor is dead, but I am sure something will rise to take its place.
After that, we have:
- Physics based rendering (PBR) being applied to stations and Amarr and Minmatar strategic cruisers. Make more shinier.
- Jump invulnerability timer: You will now have a visual indicator as to how long your cloak will hold after you jump through a gate or wormhole.
- Wormhole polarization timer: You can now see when you will be able to jump back through a wormhole.
- A multi-buy option for the market, the flip side of the multi-sell option introduced previously. (Dev Blog up now.)
- New Guristas burner missions.
- Blue Tiger skins for a range of Minmatar ships.
- Festival launchers no longer require a launcher hardpoint, just a free high slot. Launchers for all your carriers!
Then there is the typical range of small fixes along for the ride on this particular release vehicle. And new issues for new features…
There is a release page for Vanguard and a set of patch notes which tell most of the story of the release between them. (But never the whole story.)
That is what Vanguard brings us… well, all that a theme song.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 