Half an hour of waffle to introduce five facts

I don’t want to take the piss out of the O7 show because its good to see the effort that goes into it and they clearly have a good laugh, plus live TV is not easy, but it does drag on a bit before you get to the useful info.

Basically last nights show boiled down to:

Railgun nerf – ambivalent about this.

Skynet (fighter assist) to go – delighted.

Thinking about removing fighter warping – again ambivalent.

T3 tank nerf – they probably needed this to be fair.

Ishtar sentry damage bonus dropped from 10% per level to 5% – very much needed.

I have used Ishtars both solo and in 10 – 15 man fleets fighting nearly ten times our number. The problem is not just that they are overpowered but that they are so easy to use, I just dump drones and concentrate on manual flying, if they get blapped I drop more, if tackle gets close you abandon sentries and drop warriors before scooping them back and reconnecting to the sentries which project almost perfectly around the grid without any drone travel time and without the drones having to go into web range and therefore being killable.

They are therefore perfect for low skilled blobs, they have projection, dps, alpha, low cycle time, no reloads or ammo – the lot. As much as I used the overpowered tools myself I am happy the sentries are being nerfed but the ship will still be powerful – a gecko group on an Ishtar does easily over 700dps and still will after the patch but importantly those drones will have travel time and need to go close enough to the target for your expensive gecko to get webbed and destroyed which is a fair balance I think.

As a balancing change I think CCP got it about right, the big nullsec blobs however are just planning to use more ishtars to make up for the lower damage..