CCP Launches a Surgical Strike on New Eden

Today is the day we get the Surgical Strike update for EVE Online.  The real question in my mind is how appropriate that name actually is.

Normally tax day in the US, but this year it is July 15th

A surgeon uses special tools, like a razor sharp scalpel, to make deliberate and precise cuts in order to repair, reshape, or remove aspects of the human body.  I am not sure how that compares, by the analogy the name suggests, with nerfing every damage resistance module in the game by 20% in the hopes.  And doubly so when CCP comes out a day later with a mea culpa that they totally didn’t consider what this would do to PvE or suicide ganking.

The latter makes you wonder if they didn’t run this past the CSM or if 9 out of the 10 CSM members being PvP focused gave them the same blind spot that CCP obviously had.  Or maybe CCP discounted their feedback.  Who knows.  But today the big patch landed and it does at least seem like they got some of the feedback related fixes in with the main patch, so I will give them credit for that at least.

The big hit this time was damage resistance modules.

  • Reduced effectiveness of all resistance modules by 20%
    • Includes all active and passive armor and shield resistance modules.
    • Does not include resistance rigs or damage controls.

This hits PvP, of course, and will cause ships to explode more often as their effective hit points, EHP, drops.  But it also hits every mission runner and miner and high sec hauler.  And the change is noticeable in your fits.  My Apostle, even with a somewhat outdated fit, has about 84% of the EHP it had yesterday.

The Day After

In response there is a lot of refitting theory crafting going on and the Imperium told their pilots to stand down supers and titans for the next week while the fit team comes up with new approved configurations for the big ships.  That is because the big toys also got an additional nerf:

  • Super Carrier and Titan Plate bonus reduced
    • Super carrier bonus to plates and extenders reduced from 400% to 200%
    • Titan bonus to plates and extenders reduced from 500% to 300%

So a lot of EHP was shed today.

And, just to keep things interesting today’s update also included a tiericide run for the active shield defense modules, so a bunch of shield modules have new names and new stats.  Confusion reigns!  The list is long and I’m not going to paste all of that here.  Go read the patch notes.

Super carriers also got a nerf to heavy fighter explosion radius, which makes them less effective against sub caps as well as a balance pass so that all the base super carriers now have the same number of fighter tubes.

There were also a lot of other ship changes, listed out below:

  • T1, Faction and Pirate Battleship base hp increased by 10%
  • T1, Faction and Pirate Battleship base scan resolution increased 30%
  • Muninn
    • Damage bonus reduced from 7.5% to 5% per level
    • Optimal range bonus reduced from 7.5% to 5% per level
  • Eagle
    • Max velocity reduced from 202 to 190
    • Powergrid -40
  • Loki
    • Powergrid reduced from 670 to 550
    • Bonus to projectile range and falloff reduced from 10% to 5% per level
    • Loki bonus to projectile tracking reduced from 7.5% to 5% per level
  • Legion
    • Powergrid reduced from 700 to 625
  • Deimos
    • Hybrid damage increased from 5% to 7.5% per level
    • +50 PG
    • +20 CPU
  • Increased Scan Resolution by 30% for Marauders and Black Ops
    • Redeemer increased from 170mm to 220mm
    • Paladin increased from 120mm to 160mm
    • Golem increased from 105mm to 140mm
    • Widow increased from 115mm to 150mm
    • Kronos increased from 120mm to 160mm
    • Sin increased from 140mm to 185mm
    • Vargur increased from 145mm to 180mm
    • Panther increased from 155mm to 200mm
    • Marshall increased from 180mm to 235mm
  • Increasing Freighter Hit Points by 20%:
    • Providence Hull increased from 100K to 120K
    • Providence Armor increased from 46K to 55.2K
    • Providence Shield increased from 10K to 12K
    • Charon Hull increased from 77.5K to 93K
    • Charon Armor increased from 15K to 18K
    • Charon Shield increased from 50K to 60K
    • Obelisk Hull increased from 110K to 132K
    • Obelisk Armor increased from 40K to 48K
    • Obelisk Shield increased from 14K to 16.8K
    • Fenrir Hull increased from 65K to 78K
    • Fenrir Armor increased from 22K to 26.4K
    • Fenrir Shield increased from 48K to 57.6K
    • Bowhead Hull increased from 50K to 60K
    • Bowhead Armor increased from 15K to 18K
    • Bowhead Shield increased from 22K to 26K
  • Force Auxiliaries are now limited to on-lining 1 (one) Capacitor Booster

The nerfs to Eagles and Munnins are attempts to reign in null sec’s current fleet darlings.  Likewise, Lokis have been the T3 of choice for a long stretch.  And that last item… well, faxes won’t be repping so hard now that they’ll run out of cap sooner.  Death to supers.

And then there is the attempt to make brawling great again.

  • Increased damage of Void, Conflagration, Hail, and Rage ammunition (Small, Medium, Large and X-Large) by 15%

We’ll see how that plays out, though I suspect if you can’t get those who favor kiting in range that damage boost won’t help much.

And the new Avatar model, which I tried out on the test server, is now live in game.

The new Avatar model in the hangar

And then there are a whole bunch of the usual tweaks and fixes.  This is a pretty substantial update and will lead to a bunch of fitting and doctrine changes.  As usual, I tend to be a fatalist on this sort of thing.  I just go out on fleets to blow things up, so more things blowing up might be great… but then I might blow up more as well.  We shall see.

Anyway, the patch has been reported up and live.  The patch notes are here.  There are also feedback and known issues threads live in the forums.

Time will tell as to whether this update becomes one of legend or one we forget and whether these are changes we curse or bless as we move forward.

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4 thoughts on “CCP Launches a Surgical Strike on New Eden”

  1. anypo8

    “Welcome to the game, new COVID players! By the way, a week or two into your run we decided to make all your ships extra-explodey, because this game wasn’t hard enough.”

    CCP seems to fail to understand an important factor in MMO design. Every time you substantially nerf a thing, most of the people who have heavily invested in that thing get pretty put out. Playing an MMO is mostly planning — this is especially true in EVE where the consequences of your decisions often play out over weeks, months or years. A quick nerf in this context is aggravating as hell.

    Honestly, every time I think “well I’m stuck at home now, maybe its time to get back to EVE” my next thought is how much of the lifestyle I built up to a couple of years ago is just gone. EM is not really a thing anymore. Explo has been pretty well nerfed by changes to stealth. A lot of the ships I trained into have been nerfed. Pretty much every lifestyle that isn’t “join a big corp” or “small-scale PVP” appears to be suffering. Those two happen to be playstyles I’m not interested in. More importantly, the loss of a whole bunch of investment of effort, ISK and skillpoints to nerfs makes me sad and angry.

    This is on top of the sadness and anger I already feel at the end of the “skillpoints are time” era. Pay-to-skill is gross, and I hate it.

    CCP needs to figure out how to make positive changes to the game, not negative ones. Give me a reason to be excited to come back. It would take a lot at this point, but it’s not inconceivable. Watching the universe spiral into the dumpster just makes me feel smug about getting out when I did.

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  2. Wilhelm Arcturus Post author

    @anypo8 – I just never ceased to be amazed that CCP can announce changes time and again without apparent consideration of what often seems like less than subtle secondary effects. Still, I suppose that is better than when they argue with people’s predictions and get proven wrong immediately.

    Liked by 1 person

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  4. Klyith

    Damage resistance has needed to be lowered across the board for a long time now — it’s a compounding multiplier that makes logi reps much better at the same time as damage weaker. These effects are what make PVP fights into lopsided 100-0 routs, rather than fights where even the losers get to puff up about iskwar or killing a bunch of ships. The early history of goonfleet is 2 years of losing battles but still having something to make propaganda about. Under the durrent meta, BoB would not have lost a ship to the guys in rifters.

    Resists are also disproportionately more effective for cap ships because they have so many more slots to use on resist mods. If you can onmi-tank by fitting 4 type-damage mods, an extra EM or Explosive for your hole, and 2 eanms or invulns you get ludicrously high resists.

    Being CCP they do a needed thing in a dumb and minimum-effort way with no advance warning.

    A better resist nerf would have been to change the stacking penalty for resist mods to something much harsher. PVP is where people stack a lot of resist mods, in PVE people use the 2 hardeners for their NPC damage types.

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