A Good Idea

Over at The Nosy Gamer blog NoizyGamer (wait a minute, is he nosy or noisy? Or both?) wrote about his day at fanfest (*massive jealous rage*) and something caught my eye that made me giddy with joy (emphasis mine):

Ship Balancing: I was a little amazed that some people who are so clearly interested in ship balancing and so into the game they travel to Iceland appeared to not follow the ship balancing threads on the forums. I won't rehash the past but will focus on what the ship balancing team will do after battleships are finished. In the order of presentation, those ship classes are: 

Command ships - All the command ships will have bonuses for gank links as well as weapon bonuses. Some ship specific comments were that the Eos would resemble the Navy Myrmidon and the Claymore would become a missile boat. 

Electronic Attack Ships - Given that the ship balancing make the tech 1 version of these ships so good these ships are scheduled for an upgrade. 

Heavy Assault Cruisers - One interesting tidbit is that HACs will receive the same MWD bonuses as assault frigates. 

Black Ops - These ships will receive an upgrade to allow them to fight as well as serve as a jumping point for black ops gangs.

Why, what a great idea! In fact, it was so great I said they should do that last December in my post "Hacking HACs":

The solution that CCP hit upon this past year was simple and effective. Assault frigates got a role bonus of 50% decrease to signature bloom from MWD. This made them superior to Tech 1 frigates in the role of heavy tackle and damage from a frigate based platform. We also know that CCP has reinforced in their efforts the concept that Tech 1 is general purpose ships, Tech 3 are super flexible, and Tech 2 is highly specialized. This is aptly demonstrated in the dev blog that discussed ideas for Battlecruisers, Tech 2 Command Ships, and Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers with the Warfare Link Processing subsystem. 

Back to HACs. We know that being Tech 2 they should be more specialized than their Tech 1 counterparts when performing their specialized role. What is the specialized role? Well, the name gives it away now doesn't it? Heavy Assault Ships: like Assault Ships, but heavier. 

Therefore I'm going to propose that along with making the Tech 2 cruisers slightly beefier and harder hitting versions of the current Tech 1 cruisers, they should receive a role bonus to reduce their MWD bloom by 50% just like the Assault frigates. This will help to make them very specialized at hitting harder and faster while surviving longer.

This change is very exciting for Tech II combat cruisers. This will allow them to be effective against similar sized targets with cruiser weaponry as well as very effective against battleship weapons, perhaps a counter to Attack Battlecruisers.