Amarr Rookie ships: Intended consequences?
With the Rookie ship changes came an unannounced and radical change, but only for Amarr players. Before the patch, one of the most common uses for Rookie ships was as a cyno boat. People traded tank and versatility for the ability to light a cyno as cheaply as possible. In order to do this you required Cyno IV as the cargo hold of the Rookie ships could only hold a maximum of 300 liquid ozone. With the patch, that has changed and the change appears to be intentional.
[QUOTE FROM CCP Fozzie ]
When it comes down to it, cyno lighting on rookie frigates is an activity that we don’t explicitly design for. We have no problem with people doing it but we will not guarantee that all the design decisions we make will support it.In this case we built the rookie frigates to highlight the differences in the races’ ship design philosophies, by making the rookie frigates a scaled down version of the kind of stat progressions you’ll run into at higher tiers. Amarr ships tend to have slightly smaller cargoholds than other races since they don’t need the space for ammo.
In the end we gave all the rookie ships (including the Impairor) a significant buff to cyno lighting since they no longer need MAPCs.
The buff to that specific use was not intentional but it was something we knew would be happening and we were fine with it. The Impairor got slightly less of a buff for cyno lighting than the others, but once again I consider that fine since lighting cynos isn’t a core use for the ship.
In the end my advice is to stock some expanded cargoholds with your cyno gens and celebrate that you no longer need the more expensive MAPCs.
The only place that this change was mentioned was response #241 on page 13 on the EVE-O forums. It was not in the Dev blog and the response from Fozzie seems to indicate that not only was CCP aware of the problem, that it was intentional. It seems like a minor change but it puts amarr players at a significant disadvantage which they will be unable to overcome without bio-massing their current pilots and re-rolling from scratch.
Losing cyno ships is just part of the game and it happens quite often. You log back in your cyno account and you are in a pod. Most capital pilots have stockpiled generators and ozone at their jump locations as well as the Micro Auxillary Power Cores that were required before the patch. If you are an Amarr pilot, you will now have to slow boat through hostile gates in order to get an expanded cargo hold so that you can fit the required 300 ozone. If you are not Amarr, you will just have to dock up to receive a shiny new cyno ship which is ready to go.
The rest of the rookie ships all received a massive buff to cynoing. The increased power grid means that you no longer require a micro aux power core in order to fit the cyno and it still holds the fuel required to light the cyno at cyno IV. In order to light a cyno with the Impairor, a pilot would now require cyno V. That has a whole bunch of implications for cyno alts. It increases the SP of the pilot beyond 900k which means that you will need to upgrade its clone on every pod jump and you will only be able to safely jump to stations with medical facilities unlike the other races.
So if you are thinking of starting an alt account and you intend to use it for a cyno, do not choose Amarr. I would love to know why CCP felt this change wasn’t worth mentioning considering how wide the implications are.
- Matt