Revenant Major Update Patch Notes: Warp Speed Changes

I woke up this morning to find when CCP Games labels something as major, they are not joking around. Today's Revenant Major Update for EVE Online features quite a few topics that deserve their own posts. The third in the series will feature changes to warp speed affecting nearly all ships in the game.

The news article about the update gave a brief description of the change. 

Warp speeds across ship classes are being standardized for more consistent travel mechanics and better fleet balance. Heavy assault cruisers (HACs) will see a slight warp speed reduction to align with their Tech I counterparts, while specialized ships will retain their warp bonuses where appropriate for their roles.

The patch notes went further into why the developers made the change.

Overtime, we’ve adjusted and rebalanced different ship class warp speeds, most recently in 2019 and they are now fairly inconsistent with some ships like Heavy Assault Cruisers having the same warp speed as Stealth Bomber Frigates and Tech 1 Destroyers, while industrial ships such as haulers and mining barges which are also the same size (M) are slower than some battleships.

This can make it difficult for new players to understand the relationship of warp speeds between different size classes of ships and Tech II ships currently have faster warp speeds than Tech I ships, even when it doesn’t always make sense for their specialized role, like the above-mentioned heavy assault cruisers warping faster than regular cruisers. Tech II ships from the size above are also competing with the tech I and navy size below for warp speeds, which makes it is harder to justify bringing smaller classes of ships. This also contributes to unhealthy ‘force projection’ since stronger, more powerful ships, are also able to cross the universe faster.

I also suspect that the reduction of 13 ship categories down to 7 might help the game code run more efficiently, but that's just a guess.

Warp speeds - new vs old

• Grouped up all ships based on their size, such as Small, Medium, Large and Capital. Removing the 10% or +0.5AU/s bonus from Tech II ships.
  
  
• Ships that are slightly bigger than this size category, such as Destroyers for small, Battlecruisers and Haulers for Medium etc. are placed in a plus sized group.
• This leaves us with just 7 base warp speed tiers rather than the current 13!
  
  
• Tech II ships which need the increased warp speed for performing their specialization, such as Interceptors and Interdictors, have been given role bonuses to warp speed to keep their current warp speeds about the same while making these ships easier to identify for new players.
  
  
• The Net result from these changes are that Titans, Freighters, Mining Barges, Exhumers, Haulers will now warp 10-15% faster, The Porpoise and the Orca get improvements of 25-30% and most Tech II ships which are not specialized will warp slightly slower.
  
  
• Additionally, Capsules will now warp at 4.0 AU/s to match cruisers, which is what they did before the 2019 warp speed increase for Cruisers.
• We are not buffing the warp speed of corvettes at this time, which still warp at 3.0 AU/s, to make sure we do not obsolete shuttles and tech I frigates as travel options.