Gonna Need a Bigger Gun

Gonna Need a Bigger Gun

Ok, so it came up again in a comment on a Mittani article:

"Aside from that I've got mixed feelings on the state of w-space, dreads serve as an excellent field-leveller for smaller corps

Instead of a 50 man fleet they can deploy several caps and a few T3's and blap the living hell out of the other team's T3 blob."

I see this argument used for not changing how dreads work against subcaps or in WHs all the time and since it is complete and utter garbage, I thought I would dispel a few myths for the smaller corps out there before they decide to 'level the field' with their dreads.

I have been on both the dealing and receiving end of dread blapping and if you ask me it is the single worst thing ever to happen to WH PVP.

Let's start with how dreads actually function against other ships in w-space:

Other Dreads - This is obviously a massive slug fest which tends to come down to fittings, drugs, who has their skills to 5 and who made the mistake of fitting CCCs rather than trimarks.  Pilot experience also plays a large part if it's 1-3 dreads per side, in the 20 vs. 20 dread blobs that have been more common in the past year or so, experience is more or less irrelevant.

Carriers - Do you remember Clarion Call 2?  Used to be a single triage Archon could tank 8 dreads and live to tell the tale about it with a BS fleet supporting in none the less.  These days a single Moros does more DPS than an Archon can handle for very long and the Dread vs. Carrier fight is so horribly unbalanced now that using a triage carrier against any more than a single dread is a joke.

Battleships - There is nothing in EVE that is going to save your battleships against multiple dreads.  There is a reason the initial part of any large WH fight is called the 'Bhaal-Grinder' part of the fight.  If you ever want to see isk evaporate, go warp 10 Bhaalgorns into 5 Dreads.  Battleships were never really heavily used in WHs due to mass reasons but dreads have made them 100% not viable to fly in large fights for pretty much any reason.

Command Ships - These don't die quite as fast as battleships but a dread will still hit them without any major assistance and they die in 2-3 volleys.

Cruisers - Even T3s are not safe from the blap.  Your 200k EHP Proteus is cute and all but throw a couple webs on it, maybe a TP and you can open up your skill queue to retrain that subsystem to 5.
Yes, dreads do need assistance to hit T3s but if you're fielding dreads, you probably have access to 3-4 webs in your fleet and if you know what you're doing, target painters too.
Add the fact that 90% webs exist to the mix and even orbiting at 500m won't help you:
http://dontshootx.com/killboard/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=16491

Logistics - So, got sick of your Archons getting vaporized by dreads? Switched to low sig Guardians? Well, don't get too attached.
Yeah, even the tiny sig of a skirmish link boosted Guardian isn't safe against the blap dread.
It's harder to hit that anything else, sure, but web it down and you can hit it fine.  Add to that the relatively low EHP of Guardians and it doesn’t take many volleys to pop them.
All of that is really beside the point any since your Guardians will not be able to keep anything else alive under multiple dread fire anyway so they can just ignore you.


So with dreads being so strong against all subcaps, why are they not a balancing factor for small corps?

Well, there are a couple of reasons.

The first is that you need more than one dread.  Sure, a dread can blap on its own fine but in a situation where you're fighting a larger force and want to bring dreads, you need to warp them in at varying ranges, ideally ~30km apart, so that you have overlapping optimal ranges to negate their T3s just orbiting at 500m, which means you need 2 minimum.

Maybe that's fine, maybe you're a small corp that does have access to 2+ dreads.  This brings us to the next and biggest reason it's a bad idea:
If you as a small corp have access to 2+ dreads, what are the chances that your enemy, a large corp, doesn't have access to 2+ dreads?  Zero.
If you escalate a fight against a large WH corp with capitals, they WILL respond in kind and to a larger degree.
If you have never been in a large WH corp you may not understand just how prevalent dreads are in C5-6 space now but people there often own more dreads than T3s there and large groups always have dreads (plural) sitting at a POS, or at the very least on the login screen, when they are fighting in or near their home system.
As a personal example, when I moved out of AHARM I moved 6 personal dreads out of the system.  When AHARM were moving out of Nova they moved over 100 capitals out, most of which were dreads.
WH corps will also not hesitate a second to collapse themselves into your WH to bring dreads to kill you with so they won't bring 1, they'll bring 3.

Ok, maybe that's still fine, maybe you’re a small corp who doesn’t live in a C5-6, maybe you live in a C2 and have built dreads there, the enemy can't bring dreads in there to counter escalate right? 
Well, sure, they can't.  What they CAN and WILL do (assuming they can't handle you on their own) is jump into any of a dozen public channels and bring a fleet in through your highsec entry that will be able to deal with your capitals.
The day and age where WH corps did things on their own is LONG gone and WH people love nothing more than killing caps in low class WHs.  They will come.
Even we in lowly SUSU got in on this action recently:
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=19870013

Lastly, w-space knows all about dread blapping now.  It's been a good long time since dreads were buffed and w-space has adapted.  People are not going to bring battleships to fight a dread and they are going to bring Minmatar ECM to jam your Loki's.
People know what dreads can do now and they know how to engage them, or to stay away from them if they need to.

All of this will lead to your no so glorious death if you escalate with dreads against a larger force.


This was my first experience with dread blapping:
http://dontshootx.com/killboard/?a=kill_related&kll_id=9960
AHARM rolled into our static and wanted to play so we warped a bunch of dreads 50km above their HIC bubble and went to town.
Even after they bounced a planet and came back at zero they continued to die.
AHARM have not brought a BS to a capital fight since that day.


So what would I like see done with dreads in WHs?

Well, Sandslinger would like to see them removed entirely from w-space but I think that is too extreme since they do play a very important role in POS bashing since no one wants to POS bash without dreads, ever.
They are also extensively used for C5-6 PVE which I also think is fine since it speeds up the tedious red cross blapping and makes people bring them out as potential PVP targets.

That said, the level of rape they bestow upon sub battleship target needs to be toned down.  A lot.
I've suggested this on the forums before (a while ago now when a discussion about it came up), I think the way to go is to impose the same type of dps reduction on dread guns as was introduced to titan guns based on the sig radius of their target.
Titan guns start doing less DPS on targets below 2000m sig which is way too high for dreads as it would let carriers sig tank them and would make them unable to hit anything sub cap at all.
I would make them do less DPS versus targets 500m sig and below.
This doesn’t affect their DPS vs. structures and caps at all, it reduces their DPS what I feel is a reasonable amount (not much) versus battleships but still lets them kill them and drops their DPS against cruisers significantly which would allow logistics to keep up and keep Guardians and T3s alive under dread fire.
The dreads would still hit the cruisers the same but they would do a lot less damage to them.

I think this would go a long way towards repairing the state of C5-6 PVP as it would mean smaller groups could viably engage capitals and you wouldn't need the 40+ man blobs of today to deal with them.

Anyway, enough rambling for today.
Remember, people everywhere love killing caps.  If you bring it out to play, make sure you know what you are getting into.

JM