My first thought about this was WTF... what happened to Freighter combat but the more I look at it the more I like this personally. Gunner here I come.

Im afraid admins might do a big nerf of gunner after they put it in. It looks pretty powerful. With that extra elec and 2 guns some setups with some nice dps can be made... With compressed dampener +'s and space... And the -20% resist tweak.

Sounds good to me, personally. High end battleships needed a boost anyway for general PvE and uber runs.

Well the thing is that a gunner with kikale muzungi trading warfares would have almsot same minign dps as a mf with excoms...

Mfs bonus would be sheilds of course, partially negated by gunners compressed dampeners, but gunner also gives that -20% tweak.

The one thing i hope the admins realize they need to do is take all combat bonuses off the "trade" skills.

MfM as it curently is with gunner would just be broken. Uber sheilds, good range good tracking.. space... Dmg... Yeah. Or for that matter MF... Double the sheild bonus, extra space range and tracking

MfM will need a huge rethink.

but nuro i guess your right in the end. MF will still trump gunner in terms of raw dps, and sheilds, just gunner will have the support tweak, the extra elec, and space.

But what about a MF Gunner? All those extra wep slots and that tweak...Or a sniper gunner? As it is it would be *way* too easy to make insanely broken char's/ships with these skills really...

Bluejayez...i dont think you have it right with that graphic. Jeff said those skills were mutually exclusive so you cant get more than one(CA, EE, ...).

we need the admins to specify how the new skills will interact.

No, you can. The WHOLE idea of this change is so that combat classes can have a skill which makes them viable for making money. You have your normal combat skill plus ONE of these new ones. And yes, that tree isnt right, you should just blank out CA, EE, StM and MFM, then make a new tree in which those four are exlusive with each other.

Woah! Finally some good news. I like this idea Gunner wtfp00nage.

Bluejayz got it right. Nice chart.

Yes, Gunners will do a nice amount of damage. But they get no shield bonuses because they don't have berserker and no speed bonuses. The idea is that they dish a lot of damage and help the other classes dish damage, but are fragile themselves. If the compressed dampeners make them too resiliant, then we might need to adjust it a little, like maybe give Gunner some vulnerabilities.

I'm confused....is the idea of this to give Combat Classes the ability to make decent bases, or is it to give base building classes combat potential?

i have a question. what will hapin to the 2% bones to drones that is on the sm skill? cas that will case dms lose like half of thar power

No offense, but, I've done some calculations.
A RadX/Slave M/MFM NCC with RadX16 Slave 16 MFM 20 and 3 basic caps will have...
5k hull, 70 speed.

I mean, WOW, for a tech 5 ship that's surely overpowered imo. Not that I mind, pump teh colonies, but still. Won't that need a lil tweaking?

Edit:
Also I'd like to say, Stationmaster should get more bonus then CA. These days the effects of Station Master and CA stacked. Now you can't use both simultaniously, bases will be (yes again) significantly weaker. I think Station Mastery should give +4% to all base stats. CA +3% (and +5% to trans damage/efficiency and the colony bonus) and Extraction Expert +3% (and the extract/hull bonusses it has at the moment).

Greetz Val

All the new skills and everything sounds cool.

What Im interested in knowing is what changes has been done to the core combat classes? Mainly SD and sniper. Are these skills better balanced now?

Actually the one question I do have, what are the new skills spec and exp augs going to look like? What happens to currently existing spec and exp augs? I have an MFM spec on a BT which will now be quite defunct, so will the MFM exp I bought for several billion.