Following on from the previous discussion:

Tsubutai wrote: Interesting ideas. When you rebalance CS and leadership mechanics/offgrid boosting, will you be adjusting the way mindlinks interact with leadership skills? As it stands, mindlinks more or less double the strength of the corresponding ganglinks, making it much more important to have the mindlink plugged in than it is to max out the Command Ships skill or the appropriate T3 subsystem. Are there any plans to shift the emphasis such that mindlinks become less of a must-have for pilots with leadership skills? Also, will T1 BCs retain the ability to fit gang links, or will fleet boosting become a CS/T3-only affair? Shifting parts of the bonuses from the ganglinks to the other skills and bonuses is an option we have been considering but we have not made a decision there yet. It’s likely that the gang link stuff will not all show up in one patch. And we have no plans to remove the gang link cpu reduction bonus from the Combat Battlecruisers (formerly known as tier 1 and 2).

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So about mindlinks.. The fact that they are such a huge portion of the effectiveness of a booster isn’t something we like

The fact that people are forced to use multiple jump clones or pop a new expensive implant every time they want to switch link types isn’t something we like

The fact that they make the use of multiple gang link types at once so much worse isn’t something we like

The exact way to deal with these problems isn’t something we have hammered out yet, but we’ll keep you updated And since questions keep coming up I’ll clarify some skill stuff again: Assuming you have the (insert race here) Cruiser skill to 3, the level of (insert race here) Battlecruiser you get after the change will be the same as your Battlecruiser level before the change, not your Cruiser level. And we don’t have a date to give you on the skill changes but here’s what I can say: It won’t happen in Retribution

It won’t happen until we release the BC and BS changes

We can’t commit to exactly when those changes will release yet

But I have an internal estimate about when we’ll get it done, and that estimate makes me smug out

So if you’re choosing between training those skills either sooner or later, choose sooner Sinzor Aumer wrote:

Why? Normal implants give a small enough bonus that you may be incentivized to use the right clone with the right ship but you’re not crippled if you don’t. We don’t want committing to a jumpclone to lock you out of 3/4 of your role options for the duration. So mindlinks providing a modest bonus would be fine, but the bonus is too big a part of the overall picture at the moment, we’d like to move some of that bonus elsewhere.

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For reference, the link boost breakdown looks like this at the moment:



The graph is a bit misleading due to multiplicative bonuses, but I sorted the effects from the most common to the least common, but it’s clear that the ship bonuses don’t matter nearly as much as the mindlink…