EVE: Viridian Patch Notes - Marauders and Battleships

EVE Online's Viridian expansion, set to launch on 13 June 2023, is the game's second full expansion since the return of the content format in November 2022. The patch notes are fairly extensive. Instead of just composing a surface-level single post giving my thoughts, I thought I'd do a little experiment. Are people interested in perhaps a little deeper coverage? I'm about to find out, as this post covers balance passes for marauders and battleships.

I don't really know much about the changes as I never flew marauders and perhaps these changes will ensure I never will. And while the Maelstrom is my favorite battleship, I abandoned flying the big ships once I moved to low sec so many years ago. 

Marauders - The developers feel that since the changes back in February 2021, the tech 2 battleships have become too powerful. As part of the introduction to the changes, the patch notes state:

In general Marauders have a very potent combination of:

• High damage.
• High tank, including allowing it to catch reps even in large scale fleet fights.
• High mobility, even though the bastion locks them in place, it has a short duration.
• High range.
• High application.
• EWAR resistance which prevents most counterplay options.

This results in them being rather good at everything and lacking in possible counterplay. Faster fleets can’t avoid their damage, smaller fleets struggle to break them, clever FCs can’t bring EWAR counters. The best counter to these ships is a capital escalation, which is not available to many groups, particularly smaller ones or all areas of the game such as wormholes or inside an ESS.

Bastion Module - The ability to go into bastion gives the ship class its identity. Pre-Viridian, the bastion module was a high slot module with a 30-second cycle time providing the following effects:

• 50% reduction to turret and missile launcher cycle duration, i.e. doubling the rate of fire and thus DPS. This bonus is not stacking penalized.
• +25% Missile Velocity, Turret Optimal Range, and Turret Falloff Range. This bonus is stacking penalized.
• +100% Shield Booster and Armor Repairer amount.
• 30% Shield, Armor, and Structure Resistance to all damage(stacking penalties with Damage Control and Reactive Armor Hardener). This results in more than 40% increase in effective tank.
• 50% resistance to Tracking/Guidance Disruptors, Remote Sensor Dampeners and Target Painters
• +100% Sensor Strength which can be interpreted as 50% ECM resistance. No stacking penalty.
• -100% maximum velocity.
• Cannot dock, tether, or enter warp.
• Applies a 60 second weapons timer. This timer is refreshed constantly during the bastion cycle so it will last 60 seconds after the cycle ends.
• Cannot receive remote repairs or capacitor transmission.
• 95% reduction to friendly Remote Sensor Booster and Remote Tracking Computer effects.

The developers made two changes to the module:

• Duration Increased from 30 seconds to 60 seconds.
  
  
• Removed the electronic warfare resistance bonus to Sensor Dampener, Tracking Disruptor, and Target Painter resistance. 

The devs noted their goals with the change:

Our goal is to create new weaknesses and therefore opportunities for counterplay in PvP for Marauders where they currently do not have many. These changes would lean into the class identity as being strong but immobile and offer smaller ships the chance to play around a Marauder with EWAR tools that are currently often useless in the face of its EWAR resistance bonus. 

The ship continues to retain its incredible firepower, tank, range and application but will now have a few weaknesses.

Three of the four marauders received specific changes.

Kronos

• +1 Midslot, -1 Highslot
• Increased Amor HP from 7,900 to 8,500
• Decreased Structure HP from 9,500 to 8,900

The Kronos is currently the weakest performing of the Marauders. We are giving it an additional midslot in exchange for a highslot to give it more utility for close range brawling. We are also making a small tweak to its survivability by shifting some of the structure HP into armor HP.

Vargur

• +1 Lowslot, -1 Highslot 
• Decreased Shield HP from 8,300 to 7,800 
• Increased Armor HP from 7,300 to 7,800 
• 7.5% bonus to Shield Booster amount changed to 5% bonus to Shield Booster and Armor Repair amount 

The Vargur is performing the best out of all the Marauders right now for solo and small gang use. We are making adjustments to decrease the power of triple X-Large Ancillary Shield Booster fits by lowering the shield boost bonus slightly, and moving some shield HP into armor HP. At the same time we are improving the flexibility of the Vargur by adding an Armor Repair bonus and an extra lowslot in exchange for a highslot to match the paradigm set by the Kronos. 

Paladin

• Reduced Optimal Range per level bonus from 7.5% to 5%

Currently the paladin is extremely dominant compared to other Marauders in very large scale fleet fights. We are lowering the optimal range per level bonus slightly to reduce its dominance.

Mass Changes to Marauders - As briefly mentioned before, the devs feel that the tech 2 battleships are a problem in wormholes as well as in regular space. The mass of the ships is changing as follows:

• Kronos : 148,000,000 kg (+54,520,000 kg)  
• Vargur : 150,000,000 kg (+53,480,000 kg) 
• Paladin : 160,000,000 kg (+67,755,000 kg) 
• Golem : 157,000,000 kg (+ 62,665,000 kg) 
• Agility for all Marauders has been improved to keep align times at similar values. 

Marauders are particularly dominant in wormholes due to their high power to mass efficiency. We are increasing the mass to be closer to Black Ops battleships. This will mean that players will need to be slightly more cautious about the number of Marauders they can bring to a fight in J-space.

Battleships - The class wasn't as in as bad of shape as its tech 2 sisters. Two ships, the Rokh and Maelstrom, were singled out for special attention.

Rokh

• +1 Midslot, -1 Lowslot 
• Increased Drone Bandwidth from 50m3 to 75m3 
• Increased Drone Bay 50m3 to 125m3 
• Increased CPU from 780tf to 810tf 

The Rokh Currently shares the 8/6/5 slot layout with the Maelstrom, which outperforms it as a shield brawler. By increasing it to 7 Mid slots, the goal is to give it more flexibility when Blaster brawling over the Maelstrom. At the same time, we are also giving it a bit more fitting space, and a much bigger Drone Bay, with a smaller increase to Drone Bandwidth, which will add to its utility, especially when up close.

Longer range fits will benefit from the extra utility or tank the 7th Mid slot provides, especially when combined with the Large Railgun buffs.

Maelstrom

• Increased Shield Boost bonus from 7,5% to 10% per level 
• Increased Max Velocity from 94m/s to 115m/s 
• Increased Scan Resolution from 117mm to 125mm 

We are generally happy with the Maelstrom’s identity as a Shield Boosting brawling projectile platform, it just needs a bit more power. We are improving the Maelstrom's speed, Shield Boost bonus, and Scan Resolution. Both the velocity and scan resolution were a little on the slower side for a Minmatar ship, especially when compared to the Hyperion.

Large Railguns - To go along with the idea the Rokh needed help, large railguns also received a buff in Viridian.

• +15% bonus to Tracking Speed 
• +15% bonus to Rate of fire. 

Large Railguns are severely underperforming compared to other battleship sized weapons. We are Improving them relative to other weapon classes to make them a more viable option and to help improve the viability of several underperforming ships - such as the Rokh and the Kronos.

The tracking increase will place Large Railguns between Large Beams and Large Artillery for tracking scores, the rate of fire increase will improve their DPS making them more attractive while not increasing their alpha strike capability for large fleet fights. 

Hopefully this post has helped explained some very important changes to ship balance in EVE Online. The changes various traits and attributes, while perhaps just changing some values in a database, will impact the gameplay of some popular and not-so-popular ships. The changes to the marauders may even impact the economy as they may alter the rate of ISK flowing into the game world's money supply. With any luck, the changes to the meta will provide a nice change of pace to players.