Refitness - Comments

Last week I posted about the upcoming proposed limitation on refitting (i.e. can't do it with a weapons timer) and there were some comments I wanted to address directly.

Talvorian Dex said:

Easy solution to logi... implement a stacking penalty to incoming logi reps, similar to what happens with webs or target painting. Done and done.
Leave small-gang or WH combat refitting where it is.

Interesting, but does he mean in addition to the weapons timer limitation for refitting? If not you're still left with the problem of capitals and super capitals refitting at will to tank as needed or do pure damage when desired. If not, and he's proposing wormholes get special rules, I think that is an awkward compromise.

As for the stacking penalty, there is currently no mechanic that acts upon another ship that stacks with the sort of exception of webbing which naturally stacks based on order of applied webs. If you do the stacking wrong for logistics you could completely make logi useless in almost any scenario.

FriendlyManagement comments:

There is an extremely easy way to let WH and small gang pvp to remain potent and fun and at the same time remove the slowcat doctrine. The answer is to only allow refitting while in TRIAGE, SIEGE or BASTION mode. This literally fixes all the problems. With the introduction of FAXes we'll not longer have massive blobs of massive dps dealing and remote repping carriers and this change would mean only ships who cannot receive remote reps would be able to refit.
Lots of people in the community are writing stuff like this blog which kinda goes "Oh yea it's not the best change but it'll remove slowcats so good enough". No. We have a simple and elegant solution to this issue and anything left is imo frankly unacceptable.

Since a single ship can service many and taking turns in triage mode is pretty standard already for carriers, I don't see how this is going to impact anything in the problem space of multi-defense-offence mode capitals. And I never said it was good enough, I said CCP will probably go ahead with it.

Rob Kaichin responds:

[...] The combination of Reps, Refitting and DPS will die with FAXes, which aren't even mentioned in your post. CCP must know this, since that's exactly what the FAXes were intended to achieve. Even so, there were more thoughtful changes which could've been implemented to nerf Slowcats: let Capital Repair modules impact Drone control abilities. -1 drone per capital RR would strip 2 drones (40% of the firepower) from an Archon.
Instead, CCP is flailing around in confusion. They're going to remove Slowcats with FAXes, but to make doubly sure they're aiming to remove the idea of refitting.

I agree Force Aux and triage changes will severely hurt the slowcat doctrine. But the problem of capitals refitting to tank the damage the best at all levels of defense (and then switching back to combat damage when no longer in danger) still exists. Its not just slowcats; its all capitals.