Hello Capsuleers,
Yesterday saw the release of the newest patch for Eve Online. The big focuses for this patch were the next round of Tiericide and continuing preparations for the release of Citadels. We also see the addition of the Heavy Stasis Grappler, changes to the Drifter’s behaviors and the introduction of new 8% combat boosters. Project Discovery was also released along with new LP store items to purchase.
Universe:
Big changes have come to the Drifter activities with reports coming in that the Drifter forces have ended their assault on the Amarr empire and are returning to their home systems. Some forces have still been hostile during this reduction in force so, as always, extreme caution is recommended when interacting with Drifters. Within Drifter wormholes, increased activity as been observed as well as changes Drifter behaviours within anomalies.
Drifters and Circadian Seekers have had additional loot added to their drop profiles and Drifter Hive wormhole systems now have the potential to produce 5 new combat boosters. These boosters have been marked as “legal” and provide an 8% boost over 30 minutes to the capacitor, tracking speed, armor repair, shield boost and missile flight times. The missile flight time booster occupies booster slot 3, giving an option other than Crash for missile boosters.
Tiericide:
The next round of Tiericide changes and includes updates to module names, fittings and mechanics. The focus in this patch was on EWAR, tackle modules, weapon upgrades, tracking computers, sensor upgrades, capacitor batteries and damage controls. Many of the changes continue the effort to consolidate the module list; however, fall-off mechanics have been changed along with a re-balance of module stats, more on this later.
Tackle modules (warp disruptors, warp scramblers, and stasis webifiers) have been re-balanced to provide clear reason to fit one over the other. The old meta 4 modules which outpaced the T2 versions have been removed. Faction and officer versions of these have been been added and lower meta versions updated to provide greater fitting choices and variety. The trade-off between capacitor use, effectiveness and fitting costs should allow for greater variety in ship fits.
EWAR modules have been most affected by this Tiericide pass with a new implementation of their fall-off calculations. Previously, fall-off for EWAR modules affected the chance to apply (even for dampeners and target painters.) In this release, EWAR modules have been updated to work similarly to turret fall-off; EWAR modules will have reduced effect at range but their chance to apply will remain the same.
Weapon upgrades are seeing the addition of new, lower-CPU modules which should give tight fits some option for increasing damage output. Named versions of tracking computers have been added to give additional high-tier options, and the remote variants have had their range increased significantly.
Damage controls are now passive modules and provide reduced hull resistances. Ship hulls will now include a default 33% omni-resist that when added to the new damage control stats should produce similar results as previous fits. Faction and officer damage controls were released to provide more expensive, higher resist options.
Sensor boosters and ECCM functionality have been merged into the sensor booster module and ECCM modules removed. Sensor strength increases are now provided by a scripted sensor boosters and provides an appropriate sensor strength bonus to the ship they are fitted to. Similar changes have affected sensor back-up arrays and signal amplifiers.
Capacitor batteries have been modified to reduce the effect of energy neutralization, rather than to reflect back the capacitor pressure. They also received a significant bump to make fitting capacitor batteries more useful.
New ships/modules:
The Heavy Stasis Grappler, a more powerful, short-ranged web for battleship and capital use, was added in this release. This module is pushed as an aide to the solo/small gang battleship pilots and at ranges of 1km (4km overheated) the Grappler can reduce the speed of a ship by up to 87% in the case of officer modules. This allows any battleship to act as a very short ranged Vindicator and provides defence against small ships getting under large guns.
Citadels:
Changes continueto set the stage for the release of Citadels later this year. Fuel block blue prints have been updated to include 40 units of Strontium for production. As Citadels will not require Strontium for reinforce timers, use of this will be built into service operations consuming fuel blocks. Citadels will be able to run on any fuel block type, and therefore names have also been changed from racial to isotope based.
Three new structure blue prints have been seeded to allow for production of base Citadel components:
Four new structure skills have been seeded to allow for training prior to Citadel releases:
Mineral and PI composition of various structural components have been updated, likely to prepare the market for later removal of some structure components.
All remaining Sovereignty Blockade Unit blueprints are being converted to Territorial Claim Unit blueprints.
Starbases have been given the ability to repackage ships and items in the same manner as NPC stations.
Project Discovery:
Project Discovery is now live and ready for capsuleers to participate. Aimed at using Eve to crowd-source protein research, Project Discovery introduces a mini game to review images and select key components in protiens – for rewards. These rewards include Analysis Kredits to be used at the Sisters of EVE loyalty point stores as well as a rankings for your “scientist level.” New items have been added to the Sisters of EVE loyalty point stores to spend Analysis Kredits on.
The data fueling Project Discovery was recovered by the Sisters of EVE from the Drifters. Research into their data aims at bringing Drifter technology to capsuleers.
Miscellaneous:
The watchlist has been renamed to “Buddy list” to more accurately describe it’s use. The new buddy list has also been changed so that only mutual friends can view online status. This means using the buddy list for intelligence on enemy pilot activity will be much more difficult than with the previous watchlist functionality.
Orbit mechanics have been updated so that velocity changes do not change the plane of orbit; orbit distances should remain unaffected by this change and will still be subject to speed changes. While this doesn’t directly impact maneuvers like slingshotting, it will affect the ability of guns to track targets.
Importing of shopping lists has been added to the multibuy window and skill queue important has been moved to the the training queue window.
Undocumented:
Some additional, undocumented changes have been found and posted to Reddit, a full discussion of those can be found in the original posting.
Camera/UI:
Incursions:
Community reported bugs:
The full set of patch notes, as well as associated dev forum threads can be found here.
