As previously announced in this dev blog, Strategic Cruisers (also known as Tech 3 Cruisers) will be undergoing a significant transition over downtime on July 11th with the July release.
The Strategic Cruiser class is being rebalanced to emphasize their unique role as a flexible and customizable ship class while leaving room for other ship classes to thrive as well. All the details of the planned changes can be seen in this forum thread for those who are interested.
Since we are now one week away from the Tech 3 Cruiser revamp, we want to issue a public service announcement to highlight the transition that will occur on the July 11th patch deployment.
- As part of this rebalance, Electronic Subsystems are being phased out and Strategic Cruisers will now only contain four subsystems at a time.
- All characters that have the Electronic Subsystem Technology, Amarr Electronic Systems, Gallente Electronic Systems, Caldari Electronic Systems, and/or Minmatar Electronic Systems skills trained will receive the skillpoints from these skills as unallocated skillpoints as well as isk reimbursement for the NPC cost of the skillbooks.
- Existing subsystems that are not fit to a Strategic Cruiser will be directly transformed into their closest functional equivalent under the new system.
- Strategic Cruisers with subsystems fit to them will have their subsystems converted into new ones directly, and will receive one extra subsystem placed in their cargo hold (to ensure that players have the same number of subsystems before and after the patch).
- This means that although all fitted Strategic Cruisers will continue to have a valid set of subsystems after the patch, some of their modules may go offline as fitting and even slot layouts may change.
- We highly encourage all players who will be flying T3 Cruisers at the time of downtime on July 11th get themselves into a safe location such as a friendly starbase or docked within a station/structure before the downtime begins. This will ensure that they do not get caught in a dangerous situation with some of their modules offline when they next log in.
We welcome all feedback and comments on this plan in the official forum thread.