Manasi's trees

In Manasi's post recently he goes into explaining why he's being bitten by the bitter vet flu that seems to be going around.  You know what?  I'm going to agree with him about his point of view while still not being disappointed that Incarna is finally coming out.

I will argue that the specific analysis of only 4 new pvp ships introduced since 2007 is a little flawed.  There are easily 6-7 functional ship configurations per hull for the 4 strategic cruisers.  Minimum.  I currently have 3 configured (1 PvE, 1 Recon, 1 PvP) and the utility vs cost is astounding.  They are not substantially more expensive than T2 HACs (if you're not faction/officer fitting them they are what? only around twice as expensive).  And you can truly fine tune their functionality to what you envision.  Manasi mentions that he does not yet have SC unlocked and usable and this may be why he only considers them to be 1 hull, those of us who use them consider them to be an entire ship class like say "T2 Cruisers" in and of themselves.

But on the whole he's correct that the release of new ship types is slow.  On the other hand, what functionality ship wise that are not in the current ships would he like to see?  I can think of some functionality that is not currently in the mix but what does he want?

Will the T3 frigates introduce new functionality or will it simply new flavors of existing functionality?  The current T3 ships only introduced a single new functionality to the eve mix that wasn't there before.  The ability to warp out of bubbles.  Any other functionality you'd be able to accomplish using other ships in EVE.  Prober? cheetah or Recon.  Ewar?  Specific ships already.  Combat? duh, command? got command cruisers for that.  So as you can see the only new thing was the ability to warp out of bubbles.  Oh and weird combination of other functionality (scout ship with the DPS of a HAC? T3 can deliver, Firepower of a Hurricane with the long range webs of a Huggin? love that ship).

At the end of the day we need some new functionality to hang a new design on otherwise we end up with new ships that are simply different variations on existing ships.  So Manasi, what functionality would you like to see that we could hang a new ship design on?

But otherwise yea, I would like to see more ship classes in game if only to give even more things for the indy side to make.