tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51955847601400452592024-02-19T04:23:58.263-08:00Stuck In Here With MeJMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-17877925140294871352015-05-10T19:16:00.001-07:002015-05-10T19:16:23.751-07:00The Long Awaited Update<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Greetings Wormholers!<br />
<br />
I have received many requests to update my blog in the past few months (it IS horribly out of date after all) so here it is; the update you've been asking for, but probably not the one you want.<br />
<br />
As of this week, I have left Isogen 5 with all my characters.<br />
This is not due to any falling out with Iso but rather I have grown weary with wspace and EVE in general and have made the decision to close up shop. To that end, I used the transitional period of Iso moving to their new C5>C5 home wormhole as an opportune moment to do so.<br />
<br />
My accounts have all been unsubbed, though due to running yearly subscriptions, I'll be around in a minor capacity until the last one runs out in late October.<br />
(Currently 2 accounts are dead already, 5 remain active.)<br />
<br />
Wspace no longer holds my interest as it once did.<br />
What the larger groups have done to C5/6 space is a truly sad state of affairs and I'm no longer interested in arguing about it or having anything to do with it.<br />
<br />
I have no doubt I'll be back at some point and I truly hope the landscape of high end wspace changes drastically before then.<br />
<br />
I wish you all luck in your wspace endeavors and hope you're still finding what you came here to look for. Sadly, I am not.<br />
<br />
As always my friends, fly fun.<br />
JM<br />
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In closing, I'll leave you with some words to live by:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mh6pZQX22CQ/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mh6pZQX22CQ?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe><br />
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PS: The keen observers out there may notice that one of my toons is in fact still in Isogen 5, this is due to that account running dry before I got around to moving it out.JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-26510370188895300352014-09-18T20:37:00.001-07:002014-09-18T20:47:21.864-07:00Never Not Primary the SkiffThe weekend started out fairly typically for Isogen 5.<br />
I logged in on Saturday afternoon to find 2-3 people online with Foedus out scanning in the chain. It wasn't too long before Foedus calls out that he's spotted some NOHO (a well known and sizeable WH corp) pilots moving around in a LS at the end of our chain and asking if I was up for losing some ships if he finds their home.<br />
I have no illusions regarding our corp's ability to go toe to toe with NOHO but I'm always up for a fight and it was an off peak time for them.<br />
Given that they live in a C6 magnetar, the likelihood of us getting a kill before we all died was also reasonably high if we got into a brawl due to the high DPS buff so I logged in my Gnosis and said 'sure, why not?'.<br />
Wasn't long before Foedus scanned through 4 WHs from the LS into Polaris (NOHO's home system) and 3 of us started to make our way up the chain while he scouted.<br />
We also invited Glyndi from Honeybadgers to come along since he was near a LS that was connected to NOHO's static so he'd meet us there.<br />
The residents on NOHO's static were Quantum Origins and they also had 2-3 pilots online so we held the fleet 2 holes out of Polaris and I moved my own scout into the Quantum Origins hole to keep an eye on them.<br />
It quickly became apparent that Quantum Origins were having some sort of scrap with NOHO as there was a frig wreck on the Polaris entry hole and Foedus shortly announced that there was a QO Wolf asking for a 1v1 in Polaris local.<br />
<br />
This complicated the situation a little.<br />
<br />
Around this point, NOHO made the situation even more complicated by warping a Hulk and a Skiff to their ore site and starting up a mining op in the middle of all this. Only NOHO...<br />
Given the rarity of the chance to kill NOHO miners in their home system and that the ships fighting on their hole were of minimal value, Foedus made the call to wait until their fight was over and then going after the miners. <br />
And so we waited.... and waited some more...<br />
The Wolf pilot ended up having a Deimos buddy and the 1v1 turned into a drawn out 2v2, then another 1v1...<br />
To make things even more annoying, the Hulk pilot had left the ore site at some point and was now idle in a POS. The Skiff was still mining away happily though and Foedus was still hungry for some miner blood so we continued to wait for the hole to clear.<br />
<br />
About 45min later Glyndi, who has been sitting patiently in the connected LS, calls out that a QO Leopard just jumped past him into their hole. Spotted.<br />
Almost immediately I see the Deimos and Wolf warp to the LS so I tell Glyndi to bail, which he does, obviously forgetting to bookmark the hole.<br />
The Leopard pilot hits the POS and swaps immediately to a Vigilant, warping it to join his mates on the LS.<br />
This tasty target is enough and we go for it.<br />
We had another corp mate log in and join us by this point and our fleet is now 2 Ishtars, a Zealot, a Caracal and my Gnosis.<br />
We jump the fleet in and warp it to the LS, obviously landing just as the QO ships are warping off. Fast tackle is overrated.<br />
<br />
'Hulk is back at site, warp to NOHO hole!'<br />
<br />
In the meantime, the Hulk had re-joined his Skiff friend and was again at the ore site.<br />
At this point there is still a NOHO Vexor sitting on their hole, along with who knows how many cloakies, but whatever, we came here for a fight and we were gonna get one started by killing their miners!<br />
<br />
Our whole fleet warps to their hole, jumps through and warps right past the Vexor sitting there to our premade bookmarks for the miners.<br />
We kill the Hulk without incident but the Skiff is 50km off. As the Hulk goes down, 2 NOHO response Ishtars warp in at range and drop curators. My Gnosis is hardly fast and there's nothing I can do against the Ishtars so I make the warp back to their static hole, hoping to find something close range like the Vexor to shoot there, leaving the rest of our fleet to catch and kill the Skiff which they manage to do.<br />
<br />
At this point I also see a new ship on dscan in the QO hole with my scout: <br />
<br />
'Kronos on D.'<br />
<br />
It looked like the Vigilant pilot had swapped into it but I don't give it much thought as it could be someone new, or just the ship he likes to log off in, and I move my scout back to watch the LS.<br />
<br />
My Gnosis lands on the Polaris static by now and finds it clear. Disappointed, I jump out to see if the QO guys are around and find to NOHO Vexor orbiting at 20km on the static side. Game on!!<br />
I point it, overload and do my best to get into web/scram range in time but he notices and moves away from me, easily out speeding my slow ship.<br />
<br />
'Er, Kronos on the lowsec...'<br />
'Kronos jumped out...and back...'<br />
'Guys, get to this lowsec!'<br />
<br />
My scout is still watching the LS hole and to my very high amazement, the QO Kronos had warped to it, double jumped himself and was now just sitting there while I'm shooting a stupid NOHO Vexor on the Polaris hole and the rest of our fleet is finishing off the Skiff's Pod and scrapping with NOHO Ishtars.<br />
I haven't decided yet if its bait or stupid but either way, I kinda want to shoot it!<br />
<br />
I decide I don't REALLY care all that much about the Vexor and given that it is not pointing me, I hit warp to the LS and call for the fleet to get there at best speed.<br />
Sometime around this point it occurs to me that the Astarte command ship that had been on dscan the whole time was probably boosting...<br />
I land on the LS hole and tackle the Kronos.<br />
It shortly tackles me back, followed closely by the rest of our fleet landing, along with a QO Wolf and Deimos; bait it is. The battle is joined!<br />
It's extremely obvious that the fleet we have can definitely not kill a bastioned Kronos so Foedus grabs his diplo hat and calls NOHO in to help us kill it and they form up some Ishtars and other kitey ships, along with a Scythe for reps, to assist.<br />
We quickly force the Wolf off the field and force the Deimos to jump out but by the time NOHO get there our Caracal is down and the Zealot and my Gnosis were pushed into structure and forced to jump, leaving the 2 Ishtars holding down the fort while we go 1 jump over in LS to rep in a station before re-joining the fray.<br />
<br />
By the time I get back, NOHO have pushed the Kronos through to lowsec and I land as it jumps back into the WH so I follow and engage on that side.<br />
NOHO spend some time trying to kill the Deimos in LS but he also jumps back and when NOHO re-join us we have enough DPS to finish off the Kronos and kill off the Deimos who had also been repping like a champ.<br />
<br />
Fun fight indeed!<br />
<br />
10/10 would tackle Kronos on LS again.<br />
<br />
Miners:<br />
<a href="http://isogen5.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=24937617">http://isogen5.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=24937617</a><br />
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Kronos:<br />
<a href="http://isogen5.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=24928323">http://isogen5.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=24928323</a><br />
(Cruor is unrelated, was from QO's scrap with NOHO earlier)JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-47654971367457236822014-08-19T23:12:00.001-07:002014-08-19T23:13:06.250-07:00Marauding Through SpaceMarauders were my very first 'end game' target ship. <br />When I first joined EVE's ranks back in 2009, a buddy of mine who got me into EVE was running a Golem for level 4 missions and I was in awe of its power while I was still skilling the T2 shield mods on my purger rigged Drake.<br />One day I was going to fly one of those sweet ships and blow up all the things with them!<br /><br />Well, my initial newbro naiveté wore off pretty quickly as I learned how things in EVE work and found out that the Golem was pretty sweet for missions but it wasn’t really THAT great. It also cost a whole lot, couldn't be used in PVP and was actually worse at the C2 wormhole sites I was getting into at the time than my Drake.<br />And so, my training focus shifted heavily into cruiser hulls and it would be years before I looked at battleships again.<br />When I did finally start training battleships, it was all about the Vindicators and Bhaalgorns that were popular at the time and my early fixation with Marauders were long forgotten as they were not on par with their pirate faction brothers.<br /><br />However, Marauders were buffed pretty heavily by CCP in their balance pass, some time ago now, and their use has grown again, even in WHs.<br />Running C4s, and even C5s, solo with their new bastion mode has become reasonably common and Marauders have returned to their spot on top of the PVE food chain.<br />When people started running C5 sites in their new bastioned Marauders, I was reasonably skeptical as there had never really been a ship that could handle the neuts and DPS of class 5 wormhole sites before but the reports of it being possible were not isolated and 'how to' videos and guides started cropping up so clearly it was possible.<br />I ran the numbers (on paper) myself some time ago and it actually seemed to be pretty simple to fit out any of the 4 Marauders to be able to tank the sites with minimal fit pimp and no fleet boosts while still putting out 1000-1100 DPS a piece. Sweet!<br />I decided to train Marauders V on my main, bought and fit out a Paladin and... never undocked it.<br />At the time I basically couldn't be bothered running PVE in a ship that was far, far slower and lover ISK/hour than my tried and true capital escalation fleet and so left the Paladin in Jita.<br /><br />However, I finally decided to go ahead and try it out last week and so undocked in my shiny Marauder for the first time.<br />I pulled the basic fit for it from one of the guys I know who runs sites in Marauders, pimped all the mods by 1-2 meta levels (T2 damage mods? come on!!) and went to run the two Core Garrisons in our home hole.<br />I threw my fleet booster into fleet for good measure since I have one so may as well and went to town.<br /><br />Not gonna lie, warping a 2+ bil battleship into a C5 site by yourself with no backup was a little butt puckering the first time around but hey, seems to work for other people!<br /><br />Turns out my concerns were completely baseless and the Paladin had no issues at all handling the sleepers.<br />The hardest wave tops out at around 1900 incoming DPS which it turns out my Paladin could tank, fairly easily, on a single b-type repper.<br />However, I was more worried about the neuts but they were also fine with my cap level never dropping below 50%.<br />I did manage to cock up my mid site rewarp on the first site to get on top of the last wave which meant I had to kill it from 80km away but since scorch is a fair and well balanced ammo type, this wasn't really a problem.<br />Honestly, the whole process with links was much easier than I expected. I feel that even if I'd fucked up a trigger I would have been fine on tank.<br /><br />All in all, running the site by myself in a single ship was a pretty refreshing change from the standard escalations fleet.<br />However, when it comes round to it, that's the issue I was feeling the entire time: why am I running WH PVE in a C5 and not in an escalation fleet?<br />I understand that not everyone has access to a corp that runs capital escalations but if they do then there's zero reason to ever find yourself running a C5 site in a Marauder.<br />Still, it was actually reasonably fun for PVE and I do think I'll be optimizing my fit a bit now that I know how it handles and trying out a few more sites out of interest.<br /><br />I also feel that the Marauders might actually be in a reasonable place for certain PVP scenarios and I'll be looking into some PVP fits too.<br />It's possible there's still nothing there but I'll report in if I make any progress.JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-2451061848632398832014-08-12T23:39:00.001-07:002014-08-13T05:18:14.045-07:00Wormhole Farming and YouThe main argument supporters of the proposed range spawning changes have been making is that it's currently too easy for carebear farmers to just roll their holes and be 'completely' (realistically the correct word there is 'mostly') safe while they run sites all day, every day.<br />
Well ok, it is pretty easy to roll C5/6 holes at the moment and while a competent enemy can prevent you from doing so, realistically most groups can and do close holes into their system that they do not want pretty regularly.<br />
<br />
That said, is this a bad thing? Let's discuss.<br />
<br />
The crux of the conflict here I believe to be a fundamental clash of mindsets.<br />
The people who hate farmers and automatically support any and all changes that hinder them, regardless of who else they also hinder, hate the fact that these people won't fight them and that they're hard to catch. They consider them a waste of space in WHs and believe they have no right to be there.<br />
On the other hand the have the farmers who just want to be left alone and their ideal desired level of interaction with other WH groups is as close to zero as possible.<br />
This kind of difference in world view is pretty global and can be found in all areas of EVE, be it AFK cloaky gankers vs. botters in null, incursion runners vs. war deccers/gankers in HS or in WHs where it's the PVPer vs. the PVEers. It's nothing new or unusual.<br />
<br />
Are farmers actually a problem in wspace?<br />
I'll go over this from a few angles.<br />
<br />
Do they take up too much room?<br />
Well, farmers generally live in C5 space as it is a bit more secure than C6 space (due to the nature of rage rolling and how many C5s and C6s there are. There are also historical reasons that we won't get into...) while providing the same income when running escalations.<br />
Ask anyone in WHs how populated C5s are. Their answers might vary a little but none of them are going to claim that it is full, as it certainly is not.<br />
I'm not sure exactly what the real number of empty C5s is but if I was to hazard a guess I'd say that somewhere between 25% and 50% of C5 systems are completely empty, ie: have no active POSs, so C5 space is certainly not full.<br />
Likewise C6s are also nowhere near maximum occupancy, C4s are probably closer to 75% empty and classes lower that this may be used for PVE but the corps there are not the 'farmers' we're looking at here.<br />
This means that it not like the farmers are taking up room that would otherwise be used by PVP groups. Anyone who wants to move into C5 space can do so, even with more or less free selection of what static they would like.<br />
The rarest C5 systems are C5s with C2 static which is what my corp currently lives in and we were still able to find a perfectly good one with no occupants when we moved in a few months ago after maybe a week of searching.<br />
<br />
Do farmers actively reduce content levels in WHs?<br />
To me this is an easy no and I can't understand why anyone would claim otherwise.<br />
They're not pushing people out of wspace, as discussed above, so the only comparison to look at here is do farmers bring more or less content to wspace than another empty C5?<br />
Well I've killed farmers before, haven't you? <br />
I've killed them running sites, I've killed them rolling holes, I've killed their scanners, I've blown up their POSs, I've killed their haulers, I've even stolen their ships out of their POSs.<br />
That all sounds like content to me.<br />
What was the last bit of content an empty C5 brought you? Well PVE, sure. A bit ironic perhaps...<br />
Bottom line is PVE farmer corps do actively bring content to wspace. Sure it's not as much content as active PVP groups but it's a hell of a lot more than an empty system.<br />
<br />
Do farmers hurt other groups in wspace?<br />
Well they're certainly not going to shoot you if that's what you're worried about!<br />
I had a think about this and I came up with two ways in which it could be said that farmers actively hurt other WH groups.<br />
The first is that if there is a farming group in your chain while you're out scanning, it's very possible that their WH will no longer be there when you head back with your scout, leaving you stranded.<br />
This has happened to me personally maybe a half dozen times in my entire WH career and while yes, it's can be annoying, it didn't really inconvenience me all that much and rolling their WH is well within a corp's rights. Hell, I've actively collapsed scanners in and out of many a WH.<br />
The second way is that if all the farmers suddenly left the game then it would probably drive sleeper salvage prices up a bit as there would be less people running sites. It would basically only affect melted nanoribbon prices since blue loot is locked to NPC prices and farmers do not generally run mag/rad sites.<br />
That said, PVP groups run site pretty often too and I doubt the prices would be terribly affected. Still, it's a consideration.<br />
<br />
Where does this leave us?<br />
Well, so far we have discovered that farmers are not preventing PVP groups from coming to wspace, they provide real content and they have minimal negative impact on other WH groups.<br />
So far, I'm not seeing the problem.<br />
<br />
Let's look at it for the opposite direction and take a look at what impact the proposed changes will, or will not, have on farming groups.<br />
As a brief summary, the proposed change is that heavier ships will spawn further from a WH the heavier they are. The important ranges to note are caps spawn at base 20km, battleships at base 10km and orcas in the middle.<br />
Basically what this means is that it's much harder and far riskier to roll holes with heavy ships and they spawn outside jump range and you need to get them back onto the hole to jump back.<br />
Does this actually affect farmers though?<br />
Well, I guess it does mean they can't roll holes as safely but do they need to?<br />
I've run my share of sites in the past and I've even been on two PVE 'expos' before where all we did was run sites.<br />
Our process did involve closing all incoming WHs and critting our static so yeah this would have been affected.<br />
However, I've run many more sites in whatever home hole I was living in at the time and the process there was far simpler; warp to site, run it.<br />
Sure, I'd put mass on WHs if I was on alone or I knew there were hostile groups in the chain but I never really bothered with much security.<br />
The reason for this is that by FAR the most common way of getting jumped while running sites is to have someone roll directly into you and the is something you can't avoid no matter how much preparation you do and how many precautions you take.<br />
I'd say at least 90%, probably more, of site ganks happen because someone with enough guns rolls into a system where someone happens to be running sites and this is something the proposed change will have zero effect on.<br />
In fact, the changes will make this even easier as there will be less warning for new incoming WHs due to the K162 spawning mechanic changes.<br />
That said, this change will result in far fewer PVP groups actively rage rolling which means farmers will actually be safer than they are now.<br />
<br />
So ok, in summary the changes would have up to 10% impact on PVE farmer corps. This is very minor and can be further negate by using systems with low class statics that are easily massed with BSs ect.<br />
To the farmer haters out there, is this enough to make up for the far greater hassles and limitations this will put on active PVP groups?<br />
I say it isn't even remotely close.<br />
<br />
Personally I have never understood the hatred of farmers by so many in wspace.<br />
I mean sure, I get that they don't give you fights but there's not much any mechanics change can do about that.<br />
People also seem to be of the opinion that is things become so difficult for farmers that they can't continue to function that they will somehow turn into PVPers or be replaced by PVP groups.<br />
This just is NOT the case.<br />
If CCP went today and deleted all farmers from WHs with a magic button and banned them from wspace their systems would not magically attract bloodthirsty pirates. They wouldn't suddenly see the light and join an existing PVP group. They'd just leave and go run incursions or rat in nullsec.<br />
<br />
The alternative to farmers is not a PVP group, the alternative is an empty system.<br />
If you need further proof of this, go look at what happened in C6 space around late 2011 and 2012 when several C6 PVP groups decided to evict everyone who didn't fight. C6 space still has not recovered from the barren wasteland it got turned into.JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-16758748878567763312014-08-10T18:11:00.001-07:002014-08-10T18:13:05.777-07:00WH Changes: The Good, The Bad and the UglyWell, we've been asking for it and so here it is; the first major changes to wormholes since 2009.<br />
However, now that they're here, are they actually good? Well, that depends on who you ask so let’s discuss the WH changes coming in the Hyperion expansion.<br />
<br />
For those who have been living under a rock, the dev blog can be found here:<br />
<a href="http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/into-the-known-unknowns/">http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/into-the-known-unknowns/</a><br />
<br />
This dev blog outlines 6 major changes that CCP are looking to implement in the next expansion.<br />
Some of these are excellent changes that we've wanted for a long time while others? Well, not so much.<br />
<br />
<br />
So let's start with the good.<br />
<br />
1. Bookmark copying changes.<br />
This is the smallest change of the bunch with CCP upping the limit on how many BMs can be copied at once and speeding up the whole process. The final numbers are not yet confirmed but Fozzie advised it's looking to be in the 20-30 BMs at a time range.<br />
This change has little impact on single corps due to the corp BM system but I'm sure the alliances out there, WH or otherwise, will appreciate it.<br />
<br />
2. Dual static C4s.<br />
C4 space has been the butt end of many WH jokes in the past due to its horrendous kspace access, poor resources and generally empty chains and dual statics have been asked for by basically everyone who isn’t a giant carebear living in C4s purely to run solo sites with marauders for more or less as long as I can remember.<br />
This change will open up much bigger chains in general and make C4s and C4 statics premium real estate for PVP centric corps who like having large chains to hunt in.<br />
I expect the C4s with C4 and C2 statics will very quickly attract many corps.<br />
This one is my pick by far for the best change coming.<br />
<br />
3. More and new roaming WHs.<br />
CCP are also increasing the spawn rate of all WH originating roaming WHs to further increase available connectivity and interaction.<br />
Again this is a great change people have been wanting for a long time.<br />
There are also brand new roaming holes being introduced that can spawn in any class WH and lead to any class WH or nullsec. These new holes will have high total mass but will have extremely low jumpable mass, restricting them to frigate and destroyer hulls.<br />
I'm a bit on the fence with these new holes to be honest. I don't really think the add anything meaningful to wspace and while yes, they make it real hard to lock your system down as they are effectively unclosable, frigate fleets are not a thing in WHs and I highly doubt these holes will have much of an effect on that.<br />
I would much rather CCP just add normal mass roaming WHs to C4-6 space as they are currently only in C1-3 space.<br />
Still, more connections are great so overall the change is good.<br />
<br />
4. WH anomaly rebalance.<br />
I guess this was inevitable at some point, even if I think it is largely not needed.<br />
The anomaly rebalance is pretty good overall with no major holes in it.<br />
I'm not going to go through every system type completely as you can just read the changes in the dev blog but here are the highlights.<br />
<br />
- Black holes getting a large revamp. Turret penalties completely removed, agility penalty halved, missile bonuses added for velocity and explosion velocity. <br />
This is good news for black holes as they have been utter garbage since forever. Should lead to interesting missile kite comps from its residents that visitors will need to be prepared for.<br />
<br />
- Magnetar is getting a target painter effect reduction to offset how popular they are for PVE.<br />
<br />
- Red Giant is getting a damage bonus to bombs.<br />
<br />
- Pulsar is getting a bonus to neuts to make Chimeras more killable there.<br />
<br />
- Wolf Rayet is getting its armour resist bonus changed to armour buffer bonus as well as having its small weapon damage bonus doubled. <br />
This is one I don't like at all really. The resist bonus was not an issue here at all. The only thing I can think of to warrant this change is if they are also planning to buff capital reps in the near future which may have needed this change. The small gun bonus has always been irrelevant since it's only useful IN the system and if you can't follow your enemy through holes with your fleet comp, you're not going to fly that fleet comp very often. Additionally, with the new roaming frig only holes, Wolf Rayet residents are going to be hit super hard if frig gangs become a thing.<br />
<br />
- Cataclysmic Variable if having a remote cap transfer amount penalty introduced to nerf spider tanking. Very good change which should make the unkillable pantheon Archon fleets that people who live in these holes a thing of the past.<br />
<br />
Overall these changes are well handled and, in particular the Black Hole changes, should level out a few of the bumps in the current WH weather.<br />
<br />
<br />
So there we see the 4 good changes in this expansion, not let’s look at the bad.<br />
<br />
5. Mass-Based Spawn Distance after Wormhole Jumps.<br />
This is the black sheep of these changes.<br />
Basically, CCP want to make every ship spawn out of immediate jump range of a wormhole with the heavier the ship, the further away it will spawn.<br />
There have already been two 40 page threadnaughts on this change on the WH forums and both have had very minor support from a few players who basically just want to watch wspace burn and huge levels of opposition from all sorts of WH groups who hate this change because it will effectively destroy our way of life.<br />
<br />
This change makes it impossible to roll wormholes quickly and leaves your rolling ships stranded up to 25km away from the WH with no way to jump back.<br />
It means smaller groups cannot roll holes with any level of security as they cannot protect their ships from larger attackers. It means that if a small group rolls into a large group they cannot fight, they can't just role the hole and continue looking for content but they are instead stuck with a hostile static that they can do nothing with or about until the larger group rolls it or it times out.<br />
It also means people can no longer chain roll for content, people cannot use mass to effect fights on WHs to their favour, combat rolling becomes a thing of the past, committing caps to kspace fights becomes a non-event and committing caps even to fights in your static gains an unacceptable level of risk.<br />
<br />
As for those saying this is a good change as it will make rolling fleets easier to catch, you're looking at it completely wrong.<br />
Yes, if the change goes in and people make zero changes to their rolling process then it will make them super easy to catch.<br />
But do you really expect that to be the case?<br />
People are inherently risk averse any this change will just make them NOT role the hole if there's any chance of being caught which will give you even less chance to kill them than now since they won't even leave the POS.<br />
Yes, there will be stupid people who are careless but those people are super easy to kill even now so this change still has no benefit for you there.<br />
Catching collapsing ships is really not that hard right now, you should learn how to do it rather than complain about it.<br />
<br />
I don't understand why CCP feel this change is needed or wanted. Fozzie advised that the change allegedly came from a player and that it was later brought up by Chitsa in his CSM term but I have never heard anything even remotely this absurd raised on the forums.<br />
<br />
This is by far the worst change proposed for WHs. <br />
If it goes through it will dramatically change WH living and will force people to from larger groups for security as small groups in WH space will have no way to maintain their system's security against larger forces.<br />
While it hits small groups super hard, it also impacts large groups negatively as they will not be able to look for PVP in the manner that they do with chain rolling and will not be able to coming cap groups to fights through WHs.<br />
Not to mention the giant pain of just routinely rolling your chain to get a fresh one.<br />
<br />
I continue to urge CCP to fully scrap this change and if you have not posted in the feedback thread yet, I would suggest you do so.<br />
<br />
<br />
Luckily there is only the one really bad change but it does leave us with one ugly change.<br />
<br />
6. K162 Signature Appearance<br />
People have been rightly complaining about how easy it is to spot new WHs every since the sensor overlay rubbish was introduced.<br />
In order to address it, CCP are looking to change the WH spawn mechanics to only spawn when someone jumps through a new WH, rather than when they initiate warp to it.<br />
<br />
Really? Is this issue really that hard?<br />
I mean, sure, this changes the problem but it doesn’t really address it.<br />
Bottom line is that the issue is the sensor overlay and it picking up new sigs immediately.<br />
This level of free and instant information is just NOT what WHs are about and the entire system should never have been introduced in wspace.<br />
Unfortunately, CCP are not willing to even consider changing it now that it exists so here we are with this half way measure.<br />
<br />
The correct solution here is to leave WH spawning as is but put a delay on the overlay picking up new sigs, something in the 5-10 minute range is all that is needed.<br />
Note that the delay should be only on the overlay, NOT on probes.<br />
This would leave the current system as it is for the most part but would reward people who take the extra step of actively scanning to check for new sigs.<br />
It really shouldn't be that hard but CCP seem insistent on over complicating the matter and so here we are with their ugly change for it.<br />
<br />
<br />
Overall, these changes are all overshadowed by the horrible change that is mass based range spawning for WHs.<br />
I would rather have none of these changes than for that change to go through.<br />
I really do think it will have a hugely negative impact on all forms of WH life.<br />
I know CCP are still discussing it in light of the hugely negative feedback so here's hoping they come to their senses.JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-66760363839968199152014-08-06T21:10:00.002-07:002014-08-06T21:10:47.222-07:00Sticky SituationSo looks like CCP are dedicating the next expansion almost entirely to wormholes.<br />This is very welcome news if for no other reason than the fact that it shows CCP are actually looking at WHs in some manner.<br />
<br />There are 6 changes being made which vary from largely irrelevant to WH life changing in scope and they are similarly varied is quality.<br />
<br />The changes are:<br /><br />1. Dual static C4s<br />2. Spawn range changes based on mass<br />3. New frig only WHs<br />4. K162 spawn changes<br />5. WH anomaly re balancing<br />6. BM system changes<br /><br />Corresponding feedback threads can be found at the top on the WH forums.<br /><br />I'll be doing a full review soon but for now I'll just say that 4 out of 6 isn't too bad.<br />(It is in fact well above average given CCP's track record.)JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-72879144619600219302014-08-03T18:32:00.002-07:002014-08-03T18:32:55.447-07:00They're Touching Them Again...So it looks like the PR department of CCP has scrubbed out once again.<br /><br />Apparently there are changes being made to WHs that change how far away from a WH a ship spawns based on its mass, with the upper limit currently being up to 40km (which is hilariously outrageous!).<br />The first I heard of this was in this forum thread:<br /><a href="https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=362811">https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=362811</a><br /><br />Based on the post, the change has already been deployed to SISI where it was found by several people.<br />There was no forum post, no dev blog, no nothing. Just a straight release to the public test server.<br /><br />Not even looking at the change itself, this immediately raises so many red flags in regards to CCPs development, testing and release cycle, not to mention PR, that it's no longer even funny.<br /><br />As near as I can tell CCP didn't ask anyone if people wanted this change, didn't ask anyone for feedback and didn't tell anyone it was coming until it was publicly released on the test server.<br />Once again a change is being put in place in WHs that has MAJOR impact on day to day w-space life without so much as an afterthought given to asking us what we think about it.<br /><br />To make matters even worse, this change is absolutely atrocious and the VAST majority of the feedback has been hugely negative.<br />Further to that, perhaps the most ironic thing is that this come right after several months of heavy feedback being given to CCP by players and CSM regarding changes we DO want in WHs, none of which have been looked at yet.<br /><br />For those who don't know, I work in IT testing for a company that has a wide user base that we work very closely with to cater to their needs while we constantly update our product so I am acutely aware of how annoyed customers are when we change something in a way they don't like or do not communicate any upcoming changes well in advance.<br /><br />In typical fashion, CCP has noticed the looming threadnaught of hate on this issue and Fozzie, seeming losing the dice roll, piped up a half dozen pages into it that the changes are preliminary and not yet set and that it's a ways off yet. The usual back pedal nonsense to try cover a PR cock up.<br /><br />Here's some free advice CCP:<br />Do not release changes to SISI without any warning. Typically, changes get put on SISI not that long before release and as players, we generally assume that anything on SISI is in final testing stages and that it WILL go onto the live server with minimal further change.<br />Any major changes should be posted either on the forums or in a dev blog WELL before they are released onto SISI.<br /><br />I urge the CSM to tell CCP to show it with this change.<br />It isn't needed, it isn't wanted, and it is very bad for WH life.<br />JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-85335995984897376992014-07-01T18:15:00.001-07:002014-07-01T18:15:48.821-07:00Once More into the BreachOnce More into the Breach<br /><br />So looks like the Jack Miton clan is homeless again :(<br />Unfortunately, Rolled Out is in the final stages of shutting down for good and I find myself once more with assets scattered across EVE and apps pending approval on all my toons to my alt corp.<br /><br />Without getting long winded, the basic story with Rolled Out is that the US time zone guys were largely ex nullsec players and most of them decided to head back to nullsec a few weeks ago.<br />This lead to a sharp decline in our US time zone activities and we basically became an AU time zone only corp.<br />Honestly, the reduction in numbers was perfectly fine by me since I prefer flying in small gangs and doing things with low numbers. However, many of the remaining members were not interested in being a small WH corp and the bleed to other larger corps continued until the call was made to fully disband and move on.<br /><br />I considered briefly leaving my assets in the Rolled Out hole and using it as my own personal base of operations but given it is a C5>C5 Magnetar, it is premium real estate and it would be highly likely someone would come and claim it so I moved out my cap fleet and dumped my assets wherever our chain opened in highsec.<br /><br />The decision of where to go next is now needing to be answered and I basically have three options; stay solo for now, join a large corp, join a small corp.<br /><br />Working solo is something I am fine doing but empty comms get lonely and having a few friends around to help out doesn't hurt so I'm setting that option aside for now.<br /><br />So what about joining a large corp?<br />I'm well known, have good pilots, I'm sure I could find large corps that would have me which leaves the question, do I want to be in a large wormhole corp?<br />SKY/ROLO were my return to large corp life and while I did enjoy the company, had some great people in both corps, I must admit that the 'high end' WH life style no longer appeals to me like it once used to.<br />I don't like flying in blobby fleets at all and any 'Joint' op, which seems to be most of them in C5/6 space now, is an automatic pass for me these days.<br />So I fine that the answer here is no, I do not want to be in any large WH corp. Unfortunately C5/6 space has become the exact political playground that people used to flock to WHs from NS to avoid and I want no part in it. At least for now.<br /><br />So that leaves me with a return to small corp life and when Bronya announced he was reforming SUSU, I couldn't be happier.<br />SUSU was one of the most fun groups I have ever flown with in my first stay there and if the second iteration is anything close to similar, I have high hopes for the times ahead.<br />I'll be re-joining SUSU once I finish sorting out my assets after the move out of ROLO and look forward to it.<br /><br />I wish all the best to the ROLO guys and girls, they were a great bunch to fly with and I'm sure we'll meet again.<br />For now, I am rolling out.<br /><br />Fly Fun,<br />JM<br />JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-42603922728908248342014-06-01T23:48:00.001-07:002014-06-01T23:49:16.558-07:00When Rolled Out Roll OutThis weekend was a busy one for Rolled Out, if not as exciting as it could have been.<br />
I logged in on Saturday morning reasonably early to find that we had been invited by Disavowed to join them and a few other groups in an effort to evict one of the Blood Union/Quantum Explosion home system C6s that they had used to launch some recent attacks on other C6 PVP groups.<br />
<br />
I am not entirely sure what sparked the recent shift in Blood Union's activities but rather than their usual site ganking of PVE farmers, they had turned their attention to performing full scale evictions of PVP entities in high end wspace and have been doing so with the help of Lazerhawks.<br />
Doing this is their prerogative but given the close knit nature of the upper end WH entities, people do notice when one group starts bullying the others and it's gotten to the point where the Bat Phones of the past no longer actually need to be rung, they just tend to happen.<br />
<br />
Their first target was RCC who they successfully evicted, primarily because RCC happened to be in the process of moving systems anyway and no real defence, other than the usual elite forum PVP, was mounted.<br />
This weekend their next target became Whale Girth who did not fold as quietly.<br />
There were all sorts of rumours and threats made after the RCC eviction which included BU/QEX threatening anyone and everyone who assisted RCC with an eviction of their own. Now, threats like this are made reasonably often by those with power and BU are certainly a group capable of acting on such a threat.<br />
However, making this threat rang the Bat Phone all on its own and when Whale Girth got invaded, half on the non-Russian WH groups came to defend the WG system while the other half was called on to attack the BU home system C6. We were part of that second half.<br />
<br />
The BU system only had 2 moons in it with heavily armed POSs on each and when Lazerhawks rolled into their allies and reinforced them with 3 caps and a dozen or so subcaps we called for a log off until numbers were brought in later in the day.<br />
In the end NOHO, who were in the WG system defending them, talked to BU leadership and a 24h cease fire was called with all evictions cancelled and we went home.<br />
Evictions are bad for WH space in general and this was the best possible outcome for all involved in my opinion but it did leave many upset about what they saw as a diplomatic blue balling.<br />
In any case, Rolled Out moved back home and as it was hitting 2am for the AU TZ, most of us went to bed.<br />
<br />
<br />
On Sunday I logged in around lunch time to find my corp reinforcing some random C3 POS as they were determined to find a fight this weekend.<br />
The POS only had 10 hours of stront in it but waiting around for the timer is boring and we had no real interest in it so we moved on.<br />
<br />
The day was spent looking for trouble in our chain and while some random kills were found, it did not yet satisfy our hunger for kills this weekend.<br />
<br />
A few hours before downtime, someone found a twitch stream of a guy running C3 sites with some alts who was openly revealing his HS entry point when he made trips there to refit.<br />
Now, this is quite possibly the stupidest thing you can do in wspace. There were only a few of us online and we decided to teach this guy that lesson.<br />
There was no route from our home system but Sith was in HS and he started heading over in his cloaky Proteus while I logged on my Tengu alt and also headed over.<br />
Unfortunately for us, another group had the same plans as us and got there about 5min before us.<br />
Sith managed to tag the streamer's Typhoon with his Prot and bail as the 3rd party landed 4-5 ships so he ended up on the kill mail.<br />
I had been slightly behind and had arrived in system with my Tengu by now and wanted to play so I jumped into the C3 and had Sith fleet warp me at range to the site the Streamer had been running.<br />
I landed 60km or so off the 3rd party Megathron, Ishtar and Sleipnir and picked up some transversal.<br />
<br />
The Ishtar and Sleip were shield tanked so I knew my main threats were neuts from the Sleip and Mega. I tested if the Mega had a neut by getting within heavy neut range of it and it did not so I felt reasonably safe.<br />
The Ishtar was faster than my 100mn but it had no webs or any real non drone DPS so it wasn't really a threat so I went to town on it.<br />
I set a closer orbit than normal on it as I needed to be able to web it to stop it from getting away.<br />
As the Ishtar hit armour, I realized my mistake. I knew the Ishtar and Sleip didn't have webs but I had completely neglected the Mega and it DID have a web, which I had just managed to get in range of...<br />
At this point I switched all my attention to getting away from the soon to be lethal web and the Ishtar got out in deep armour.<br />
I had hit web range at around 60% shield and it began dropping fast as the web let the Sleip catch right up to my ass. Luckily it only had a NOS, no Neuts.<br />
I was also very aware of the heat damage on my mids being around the 80% mark but I had to risk 2 cycles of heat on the AB to pull range and I managed to do so as I hit 5% shield.<br />
Close one, but safe.<br />
<br />
After that I regenerated some shield and crashed the HS hole through their HIC bubble, podding the streamer on the way who had just landed in his pod since he had no other way out.<br />
We considered doing round 2 but we only had 2 combat ships plus an Onyx that has made its way over versus their 6-7 ships so we didn't go back and Sith headed home.<br />
<br />
<br />
After DT I decided to run a home site as I had fit out a Vindicator earlier and needed to recoup some isk reserves.<br />
As I was on the last wave with 8-9 sleeper BSs left, the few others that had logged on rolled the static and the scout immediately called that escalations were being run next door in the new static. This was the blood we were after all weekend and a ping was made and the fleet scrambled.<br />
(I got very distracted at this point and nearly lost my Moros in the PVE site as I wasn't paying attention to it! Pretty sure it has structure damage.)<br />
My main was not in the site but I had Archon, Moros, Loki stuck there for at least 5min.<br />
I scrambled my main into his PVP Legion (Ew, I know...) to join the attack, I wasn't missing this, while trying the finish off the site as quickly as possible.<br />
I managed to get my PVE ships off grid as the call to warp to the static was made and hastily reshipped my booster into a covops for an additional scout to take with us while logging off my other 3 toons while they were still in warp to my POS.<br />
<br />
The call was made for our Flycatcher to jump in and warp to the hostiles as our caps (Moros, Naglfar, Nidhoggur) were in warp to the static which he did, bubbled them and warped off to safety before they knew what was happening. <br />
Our fleet jumped, closing the WH behind us, warped to the site and made short work of the 2 Moroses and 2 Thannys that were trapped there after their Loki bailed.<br />
<br />
Final tally was a tad over 12bil.<br />
<a href="http://rolledout.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=23712736">http://rolledout.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=23712736</a><br />
<br />
It was a fairly simple gank but the execution was very smooth, props to Josh Tsutola for 1st rate scouting and Garothar for his bubble work.<br />
<br />
With the fight over and the locals posing no real threat to our light fleet, the focus turned to extracting our caps to a jumpable LS/NS.<br />
The locals has critted their static while running sites so we finished it off with our HIC and looked for a route.<br />
(At this point I also logged in an alt at home and went to salvage the site I had run earlier. Girl’s gotta earn a living!)<br />
Their static was a C5>C3 which lead to HS and it also had an incoming C5 which had a NS that was 1 jump to LS for the pilots with jump skills and only needed 1 mid-point for the pilot with JDO level 1 *cough*-Braxus-*cough*. Perfect.<br />
Well, almost perfect.<br />
<br />
Turns out that the C5 with the NS exit was occupied by our very favourite Russians, Quantum Explosion.<br />
It was now around 3 hours after down time and while this isn't prime time for Russian groups, it's not a bad time for them and there was some activity in their hole with at least a stealth bomber and 2 T3s moving around.<br />
Obviously moving 3 unsupported caps without web support (our Lokis couldn't assist as they'd be collapsed into NS) through a hostile WH with actives is not ideal but we didn't want to give up the exit so we went for it anyway.<br />
As our caps entered warp to the QEX hole, a hostile Legion was reported on the connection, right on schedule!<br />
The call was made to proceed and all 3 caps jumped into the hostile system, irrevocably closing the exit behind them, and hit warp to the nullsec hole.<br />
<br />
Let take a short break here to consider how this must have looked for QEX.<br />
The majority of our corp plus allies had spent most of Saturday attacking one of their main C6 bases.<br />
We then had an agreed upon 24h cease fire, which for those counting had basically either just expired or was about to expire, with the agreement that all evictions were cancelled.<br />
And now here we are, by pure coincidence, throwing 3 capitals into another one of their systems!<br />
Awkward...<br />
Cease fire or no cease fire, I would not expect anyone to sit idly by while 3 hostile caps crashed into their system.<br />
<br />
Quantum Explosion seemed to hesitate here for a bit, unsure what exactly was going on, and our Nag and Nid made it into warp to the nullsec. Unfortunately our Moros, who was last to jump, did not make the warp before a Tengu and Legion decloaked and tackled him.<br />
He attempted to drop a mobile depot to fit warp core stabs but it was quickly destroyed by the 2 T3s before it onlined.<br />
At this point, the other 2 caps had arrived at the NS and the Nag had made its exit, being of no help here, and had mid massed the NS hole on its way out, raising serious concerns regarding the ability of the NS hole to take both remaining caps even if the Moros was let go.<br />
Our Nid was still lingering on the WH side of the hole and the last ditch suggestion of fitting a rack of stabs off his depot and coming back for the tackled Moros to allow him to fit stabs off the carrier was made on comms.<br />
In the 3-5 minutes since crashing into their hole, QEX ships had started to pop up on dscan. <br />
'Moros on D.' <br />
'Armageddon on D.' <br />
'Archon on D.' <br />
'2 more Moros on D...'<br />
The welcoming party was coming, and it wasn't friendly.<br />
<br />
Never the less, Fido immediately dropped his depot and fit his stabs. 'YOLO!' was heard on comms and his Nidhoggur initiated what may well have been its final warp back to the stranded Moros.<br />
On landing, both caps hit align back to the nullsec and Braxus scrambled to fit his stabs. <br />
'2 stabs'<br />
'3 stabs'<br />
'Warping!'<br />
The Moros had been successfully extracted and the Nid followed right after.<br />
<br />
On landing on the NS the mass question was raised and the Moros offloaded its valuable modules and cargo into the Nid as it would be jumping first, being the much lighter capital.<br />
The mass held and both caps made a safe exit to nullsec to much praise on comms, cloaking up at a safe to wait for their cyno extract.<br />
<br />
All in all it was a great finish to the weekend.<br />
10/10 would roll out again.<br />
<br />
JMJMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-32021632739070271182014-04-28T00:08:00.000-07:002014-04-28T00:08:43.861-07:00Time For An Intervention<br />
<br />
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<br />
Ok, it's time we had a chat wormholers.<br />
No this does not apply to all of you but to those it does, cut this shit out.<br />
<br />
The thing I'm talking about is talking in local in WHs.<br />
<br />
For the past few months I've been seeing my local chat window flash more and more often when scouting chains and it's really starting to piss me off.<br />
<br />
Waving hi in local to me when you see me jump in is about the dumbest thing you can do. It immediately alerts me that there is someone else present and it also tells me that said person is not smart and most likely a total noob.<br />
I guess you feel clever that you spotted me in some cloaked ship parked off a WH? Ok, congrats. Now how about instead of alerting me, and anyone else who might be visiting your system, that you're around, how about you use your advantage of knowing I'm there to try kill me?<br />
<br />
There are <i>VERY </i>few good reasons to speak up in local chat in a WH and all of them involve the other people in the WH already knowing that you're there.<br />
Information and surprise count for a hell of a lot in wspace and every time you speak in local you are losing information advantage and losing credibility as a competent pilot.<br />
<br />
While this is sadly no longer as true as it used to be, wspace has always attracted a higher caliber of player due to the inherent difficulties of living there and as such, I expect better than to have random scrubs wave at me in local.<br />
I don't tolerate it from people I fly with and I immediately lose respect for anyone who does it without a very good reason.<br />
<br />
Just don't do it.JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-63255937783942751412014-04-07T17:31:00.002-07:002014-04-07T17:32:50.586-07:00Confidence, Estimations and RiskConfidence, Estimations and Risk<br />
<br />
Risk is an inherent and key part of all aspects of EVE. Each time you undock a ship you are taking the risk that there exists someone with the means and willpower to blow it up. People who survive in EVE learn through experience and knowledge what risks are worth taking, when to take them and how to avoid them.<br />
EVE is one of the only games where you can very easily lose everything you have with no way of getting it back and it is this real risk that makes EVE what it is.<br />
One of the first rules all capsuleers will hear and need to learn is 'do not fly what you cannot afford to lose' yet how people go about defining and maintaining this rule varies wildly across the reaches of space.<br />
<br />
I find EVE requires developing a balance in your risk taking. These days, especially in wormholes, it is not hard to replace ships, even pimped out T3s and capitals, since ISK is not hard to make but I still do not go and blindly throw my Proteus into every fight I can, even if I can replace it at will.<br />
I don't consider myself to be risk averse but no one is expected to whelp multibillion ISK ships into no win scenarios if the scenario can be avoided or if lesser or more suitable ships will do the same job or even better.<br />
<br />
So how do you know when to fight? There are a lot of people who make the call to always fight and while I certainly appreciate this approach, and tend to take it myself, you need to at least know what you're getting yourself into and what tool to bring for the job.<br />
<br />
When deciding if to fight, you can make two mistakes. A) You can under estimate your opponent, or B) you can over estimate them.<br />
Underestimating the enemy is an obvious mistake and tends to lead to you waking up in a station going 'what happened?'. You can avoid underestimating your opponent by scouting properly and assuming they know what they are doing with the ships they have.<br />
As a general rule, I find if you assume people are at least 80% competent in the use of their space ships, you will almost never overestimate them since in realty, most people are far worse than 80% efficient at piloting their ships.<br />
Unfortunately, assuming people know what they are doing is what leads us to overestimating people, since a lot of them do not.<br />
Overestimating is a different kind of mistake, but it is a mistake none the less. It doesn’t lead to your death but what it does lead to is missing fights; not engaging and generally scaring away people by bringing way too many ships to the point where people won't engage you. <br />
I find I fall into this trap a lot.<br />
As I mentioned before, I like to assume people are able to fly their ships to 80% efficiency. I also know the ships I fly quite well and tend to know what they can and what they can't handle so if I'm facing odds that I know I can't handle at 80% enemy competency, I tend to be more careful than I should be and it generally ends with me sitting in space wondering why they won't engage me or why they ran away, since in reality, the 4 BCs that I brought 3 guys in T3s to blow up instead of just my Proteus were T1 fit and being flown by 4 month old toons that could in no way fly them at 80% efficiency. Oh well.<br />
<br />
So how can you make accurate estimations on the enemy's abilities so that you can get good fights out of them? Well, the most important one is to know who your enemy is. Are they a 3 year old, large wormhole entity full of bittervets in T3s with 100mil SP? Yeah, they might know what they are doing. Are they EVE Uni or Brave Newbies in assorted T1 junkers? Well, these corps are designed for rookie pilots, they don't have maxed skills and 90% of them will have T1 guns, T1 tank and poorly fit ships. This kind of context matters a lot. <br />
<br />
In SUSU we found this out a few times with Brave Newbies. The first couple of times we tried fighting them we brought guardians, tech 3s, ewar support, the entire wormhole PVP package in what we considered to be suitable numbers for fighting a force of T1 cruisers, BCs and BSs outnumbering us about 2-1. <br />
At the time we were annoyed that they wouldn't fight us but in hind sight, the call not to engage us at that time was spot on. As their CEO put it in local 'There's no way we can break 4 Guardians'.<br />
Eventually we figured it out and went in to pick a fight in T1 cruisers with minimal (ie 2) T1 logi support and they gave us a great fight.<br />
<br />
In this day and age everyone and their mother flies T3s in wormholes but not all of those people are willing to really risk them in combat. <br />
I hear large WH entities complain a lot about people not fighting them but they all do exactly the same thing. They roll out their 25 T3s and 5 Guardians and start kicking in doors. Well think about it, what kind of fights is such a fleet actually going to find in w-space?<br />
The answer is very few.<br />
You'll get to gank the odd site running group and you'll get to have big fights against other large groups just like you with the exact same fleet comp on the rare occasion you're both kicking in doors at the same time but as for the randoms you run into? Yeah, not going to happen.<br />
It's plainly obvious to everyone except for the groups who do this why people won't fight them but with very few exceptions, these groups will never ship down or actually offer reasonable fights.<br />
Take what KILL did a while ago to REPO as a typical example. They got mad that REPO wouldn't fight them, placed an eviction fleet into their system and then demanded REPO fight them or get evicted.<br />
Now, REPO are no scrubs and they did go and fight but given they were severely outnumbered, the result was about the same as if they'd sat in their POS and self-destructed.<br />
<br />
At the end of the day, most people do actually want to fight but they do not want to fight with zero chance of winning. Can you really blame them for that?<br />
I find it extremely useful to have some way to interact with forces you can't fight head on. Personally I use a 100mn Tengu for this role as it's a ship that I will willingly throw into virtually any and all situations, even blindly, since it has a very high survival rate if I find myself in too deep. You can throw it solo against 20+ ships quite safely and while it does require paying attention and some pilot skill, it lets you mess around with forces you can't brawl with and at least interact on some level.<br />
It doesn’t have to be a Tengu either, any decent kiting or sniping ship will do for giving your larger neighbors something to chase.<br />
Obviously no ship is unkillable and I have lost 5-6 Tengus in PVP but in the end it always comes down to flying what you can afford to lose.<br />
<br />
The key to finding good fights has three main components. <br />
Firstly, you need to have confidence in the ship you are flying and you need to know what it can handle. This is something you will need to learn from experience.<br />
Secondly, you need to be able to make estimate regarding your enemy and what they can handle. Will they run away if you bring logistics? Do they have backup? Can you deal with their Guardians? This also takes practice but being able to anticipate how your enemy will deal with a situation is very valuable.<br />
Thirdly, you need to take risks. PVP without risk is not really PVP. Killing a lone Drake with 5 Proteus with 3 Guardians for support has no risk and hence is not exciting and barely counts as PVP at all. On the other hand, slugging it out against an equal force is always going to be more satisfying, win or lose.<br />
<br />
Bottom line is this: When in doubt, shoot it. Is it bait? Shoot it, see what happens. <br />
The amount of things you shoot should not change. What should change is what ships you bring to each situation.<br />
Enemy has us out numbered in brawlers and we have no logistics? Kiting time. Enemy is in T1 ships with no support? Better leave the tech 3s in the hanger. Time to go shoot a bait Gnosis? Where’s my 100mn Tengu.<br />
In the end, situational awareness and knowing when to ship down makes better fights for everyone.<br />
Sadly, shipping down is a concept most people in wormholes have forgotten.<br />
<br />
As always, don't fly what you can't afford to lose.<br />
<br />
<br />JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-80179461331920575092014-04-07T17:19:00.004-07:002014-04-07T17:20:38.920-07:00CSM MinutesSeriously, Just Stop<br />
<br />
So the CSM minutes has been released and they contain an alarmingly high level of bad ideas for wspace.<br />
I will be going through the full wormhole related section below, the full minutes can be found here:<br />
<a href="http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/csm/CSM8WinterMinutes2014.pdf">http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/csm/CSM8WinterMinutes2014.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<br />
Wormhole-related topics<br />
With Fozzie, Greyscale, Bettik, Masterplan<br />
<br />
<br />
1) WH effects.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Chitsa brought up the topic of Black Holes. He said they’re not worth living in at all, and suggested making them provide industrial bonus effects. When asked what the current effects were like, James described them as “putting on a blindfold and going roller-skating on an ice rink”. Fozzie says that CCP could consider changing them, but they would also want to consider changing other systems, such as Pulsars and Wolf Rayets (mostly due to inability to buff capital reps because of those systems). The CSM expressed their support."</blockquote>
<br />
The first paragraph is presented as a discussion on Black Holes but it is in fact much more than that with the sneaking in of Pulsar and Wolf Rayet effects so let’s break it down.<br />
Short of a few deranged loons, no one anywhere ever likes Black Hole systems and they are almost universally empty and avoided. The idea of turning them into mining/industrial systems is an interesting one and I see no real issue with it.<br />
<br />
So that's the good, now for the bad.<br />
<br />
Here we see another prime example of CCP tacking on changes we do NOT want onto changes we DO want.<br />
So we're going to change Black Holes? Ok cool, lets change Pulsars and Wolf-Rayets too while we're at it!<br />
Wait, what? Why?<br />
The 2 are in no way related what so ever and yet have been lumped together here as if they were one and the same.<br />
<br />
Allegedly, CCP want to change Pulsars and Wolf Rayets so that they can make fleet boosts apply to capital local reps.<br />
Um, ok. I guess. Nope, you lost me.<br />
Let's assume that fleet boosts actually need to apply to capital local reps, though personally I don't see why.<br />
Would making that change make capitals over powered in these 2 WH systems?<br />
<br />
Let’s start with an Archon in a C6 Wolf Rayet. <br />
Currently a well fit Archon can perma tank roughly 27.7k with fleet boosts (just the resist ones), without overloading or popping drugs, which in effect means you need at least 3 dreads to kill it outright through its reps if the pilot is good.<br />
If you want to go the neut route, you would need 2 full neut Bhaalgorns to make it unstable running just its local tank or 3 if you want to fully cap it out without it running local tank.<br />
For comparison, you need 1 less dread outside of a Wolf Rayet to kill the same Archon, number of Bhaals doesn't change.<br />
So what changes if you buff the tank by the rough 35% that applying the other 2 fleet links would add?<br />
Well to put it simply, you need either 1 more dread or 1 more Bhaalgorn to kill the Archon.<br />
Ok, so there's clearly an effect but surely the whole point of making boosts apply to caps is to make them better right? <br />
I hardly think this change is game breaking in any way, especially considering how much stronger Dreads were made in their buffs while Carriers have remained unchanged.<br />
<br />
So what about C6 Pulsars and Chimeras?<br />
Here you have the issue on the other side of the equation with cap regen being buffed by the Pulsar while actual tank is unchanged. As such, a Chimera in a Pulsar doesn't inherently tank any more than anywhere else but it can afford to drop cap mods for more tank which ends up having a similar effect.<br />
Currently, a Chimera can tank around 20.6k while needing 3 Bhaals to neut it out under tank (or 4 without running tank), or you can tank 26.5k and drop the number of Bhaals by 1.<br />
Note that I'm talking about fits you're actually likely to run into, not 40bil officer fits that can, and should, get much better stats.<br />
If you buff the tank by 35% you actually get a very similar result to the Archon in upping the numbers needed to kill/neut it by with the same fits.<br />
That said, there is one big difference between the Archon and the Chimera in that the Chimera can be fit in a way where it has low tank but so much cap regen that it is virtually immune to any amount of neuting which means that it becomes very difficult for low DPS small gangs to kill as they can't cap it out.<br />
I understand why people may complain about that but I really don't have an issue with it. If you want to engage carriers in a Pulsar, you need to bring a combination of neuts and DPS which I don't see an issue with.<br />
<br />
All in all, Pulsars and Wolf-Rayets are currently very well-functioning system types that are balanced and have a good level of upside and down side.<br />
They do not need any changes, even if cap reps are buffed.<br />
<br />
<br />
2.) K162 Delay<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"CCP Bettik then suggested a mad science idea, where incoming wormholes would not spawn the signature for the K162 immediately, but instead it would be delayed for an amount of time. James disapproved strongly of the idea, and expressed that such an advantage should be balanced by being unable to leave the grid until the signature is spawned. Chitsa got excited and strongly approved of the idea.<br />
<br />
CCP Bettik then explained that there are two options, where they could just delay it on the sensor overlay, but not to probes, or they could delay it for everything, including probes. Chitsa suggested a delay of three minutes, while CCP Fozzie proposed it could be a variable number of minutes. Chitsa was supportive of the idea. Malcanis suggested that the delay could go down to 0 minutes. Chitsa expressed that such mechanic would increase wormhole PVP as well as reinforce wormhole space as a harsh space to live."</blockquote>
<br />
This has been done to death in the threadnaught on the WH forums and I've posted about it before so I'll merely summarize here.<br />
Yes, there should absolutely be a delay on the overlay for K162 WHs.<br />
No, there should absolutely not be a delay on being able to probe newly spawned K162s.<br />
<br />
The Ideal situation here would be to disable the overlay entirely in wspace and go back to how things were before.<br />
<br />
<br />
3.) More Valuable WHs<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Chitsa proposed the idea of making some wormholes more valuable than others. For example some wormholes could have dual statics or increased chance of outgoing connections. Greyscale agreed that it would be something interesting. Chitsa expressed that such system would be great as players would need to find out by themselves as to which system is more valuable. James proposed the effect could even be a roaming effect. CCP and CSM were in general agreement that it is something worth looking into."</blockquote>
<br />
This is a really bad idea.<br />
As soon as you make some systems inherently 'better' than others you end up with a massive arms race and will end up with a few huge groups holding the systems and no one else being able to get anywhere near them.<br />
If you want proof of this, go back and take a look at what happened in nullsec with Tech moons.<br />
<br />
<br />
4.) Lowering WH Income<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"CCP suggested making w-space systems less profitable the more POSs there were in the system. James explained that this was effectively true already, as there is no way to increase income and the more players, the further income needs to be split."</blockquote>
<br />
Another terrible idea, well handled by James.<br />
<br />
<br />
5.) I Don't Even...<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Greyscale asked what would happen if K162 wormholes did not spawn a signature, and was strongly rebuffed as this would vastly reduce the number of connections available in w-space." </blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7ql5ZBwDKechVoNJZBwJoDBU53dOsYKkkDlh3eQQry03UiSDrF5kyJrejXMrKWp8TXjNfnFiAiMx0j5HznLLieGcQNbJO0c3E2O1d5qE6zbj7UrypWNQiwTdP2bngCqlRShITgAPOwAVB/s1600/never_go_full_retard1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7ql5ZBwDKechVoNJZBwJoDBU53dOsYKkkDlh3eQQry03UiSDrF5kyJrejXMrKWp8TXjNfnFiAiMx0j5HznLLieGcQNbJO0c3E2O1d5qE6zbj7UrypWNQiwTdP2bngCqlRShITgAPOwAVB/s1600/never_go_full_retard1.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
6.) C7 Space, AKA: AFK Cloaky Central<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Masterplan proposed adding some more systems without any moons. This was well received as well. Chitsa mentioned that such idea was already discussed a while back and it was called C7 space.<br />
Greyscale then proposed making ships not disappear on logout in this new space."</blockquote>
<br />
Just Stop.<br />
What exactly would be to point of this new C7 space?<br />
A place where you can't anchor POSs, can't log off, can't live out of an orca... seems like a fantastic place to never go!<br />
Even assuming you could log out normally, what would adding these systems bring to WHs?<br />
I would need to hear some extremely good reasons why this space is needed before I'd be on board.<br />
There are tons of empty existing WH systems, no need to add more.<br />
<br />
<br />
7.) The Take-Away<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"In summary, Bettik said his take-away was the geography needed a bit of a shakeup, rather than just the content. Chitsa agreed with the idea of shakeup as wormhole space has not had its fair share of shakeups compared to other spaces."</blockquote>
<br />
I have no idea why this was the take away CCP got but whatever.<br />
Does WH geography need a shakeup? I don't know. It's certainly true that it hasn't had any shake ups since its introduction.<br />
<br />
It may seem like I'm super conservative and don't want any changes to wspace but it's actually not true. <br />
I would love some changes to wormholes but I am not willing to sacrifice the great system we already have in order to get them.<br />
The simplest most effective way of shaking up the WH geography would be to add more wandering connections which is something people have been asking for from the very beginning.<br />
<br />
Currently C1-3 WHs have wandering connections from kspace and wspace, C5-6 systems have wandering connections from kspace and C4s have none.<br />
I would propose adding wspace wandering holes to C4-6 and wandering kspace connections to C4s.<br />
This can't be hard to implement for CCP, it wouldn't break any existing functionality and is easily manageable by adjusting the spawn rates if they become problematic.<br />
<br />
<br />
All in all I don't think either CSM rep handled these issues very well with Chitsa being particularly bad at it.<br />
I hope the next round of WH CSM reps do a better job.<br />
<br />
JMJMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-87882336919508799592014-03-24T15:30:00.003-07:002014-03-24T15:31:19.525-07:00Stop Touching My WHsStop Touching My WHs<br />
<br />
<br />
So the latest and 'greatest' idea from CCP regarding K162 WH detection is the perfect example of why I'm a huge advocate of as few changes in wspace as humanly possible.<br />
<br />
Here is the full proposition as posted by Fozzie here:<br />
<a href="https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=331782">https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=331782</a><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Hey everyone. Team Five O has been working on a few concepts for improvements to wormhole mechanics and we wanted to run one idea by you all to start some discussion in the community. This idea has already been discussed with the CSM, and we don't currently have specific plans to implement it but we think it's at least worth getting discussion started.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>We have been thinking about and discussing the way that the Sensor Overlay has affected Wormhole life, mainly in the ease with which players can now observe new wormhole signatures appearing (which often indicates that the entry of hostile players may be imminent).</i><br />
<i>We investigated what would be involved with delaying the appearance of signatures on the sensor overlay, but that solution is somewhat unsatisfactory since players could always return to the old trick of spamming probe scans to check for the new sigs. Basically, the Sensor Overlay had only made the existing problem more visible, and it would be better if we could get right to the source.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>The potential change would be to delay the appearance of the signature beacon when K162 dungeons spawn. This would prevent the dungeon from appearing on probe scans or the Sensor Overlay for up to a few minutes.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>This change would make life in wormholes a bit less safe, and increase the sense of real danger that unknown space should include. The flipside is that actively hunting for pvp in wormholes should present more targets that have a slightly shorter notice to your arrival.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>The delay could take a few potential forms, either a set timer of a couple minutes, a timer that has random elements or even one that is variable depending on the amount of mass that passes through the wormhole.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>This would obviously be a very significant change to wormhole mechanics, and we think it may be a very good opportunity to shake up wormhole life and further encourage the best parts of the wormhole experience.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I'd like to repeat that this change is currently not planned for any specific release, but we would like to start community discussion on the idea and see where it goes.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Let us know what you think in this thread, and we'll be watching closely.</i><br />
<i>Thanks!</i><br />
<i>-Fozzie</i></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
Ok, so let's break it down in a timeline.<br />
<br />
- Life pre overlay meant you had to drop probes to see any sigs and had to watch for new sigs using probes if you wanted to see them. No one was complaining about this well functioning system.<br />
<br />
- Odyssey happens, sensor overlay introduced. Now you don't need probes to see new sigs, they show up right away automatically. This change a) wasn't asked for b) wasn't like by basically anyone in wspace c) was hugely demanded for removal from WHs. All in all a big success.<br />
<br />
- Now CCP seem to want to do something about it, ok fine. So what's the solution? Is it to put things back to how they were pre sensor overlay? No, apparently not. Apparently it is to roll the change back even further and make it so that you can't even use probes to detect new incoming WHs for an unspecified period of time.<br />
<br />
<br />
I have no idea why CCP keep trying to 'fix' or 'make better' WH core mechanics when there's never really been any issue with their core mechanics.<br />
<br />
Here we have them adding a very bad feature in the overlay that wasn't asked for, wasn't checked with the community prior to implementation and was universally hated in WHs after release and then instead of simply removing it like we're asking for, adding a new feature again in a detection delay on K162s that, again, wasn't asked for and isn't liked by roughly 75% of people that have been responding to the thread and various polls. At least this time they asked us about it first so, progress I guess...<br />
<br />
<br />
Let's look at the proposed change itself and what it would mean for WHs.<br />
The change is pretty simple, it's just adding some period of time after spawning where a new K162 exit WH cannot be detected on the overlay or even with probes.<br />
<br />
Assuming the delay is not something absurd like half an hour, this might seem like a small change but in reality, even if it's 30 seconds it is a major change in WH security and makes it completely impossible to have any security in a WH apart from raw numbers of pilots.<br />
<br />
The main concern is obviously for people who PVE.<br />
The only WH PVE I've done in years is C5/6 capital escalations and while the risk is increased there too, I'm going to argue that this is the smallest issue of all activities. The reason for this is that the number of corps that can even warp a fleet into a C5/6 site is quite low and the number of those that can kill a site running fleet is even lower. It's also very difficult to warp back to your POS when a new WH spawns when you're scrammed and/or in siege/triage so if a group that can fight you does happen to connect, you're likely going to be fighting, delay on sig detection or no delay.<br />
<br />
The affect this has on other classes is much more profound. <br />
If you roll into a C2 and see a Drake + wrecks on scan, how long does it really take to be on grid with it? 1 min? 2 min? 5 min if you're really slow, there are 30+ anoms and you take a smoke break half way through looking for it?<br />
If people running low class sites can't watch probes for new sigs they have very little chance of escaping if a new hostile WH connects to them.<br />
<br />
Let's not even get into what this does to the already laughably dangerous activity of WH mining.<br />
<br />
<br />
This also has an effect on PVP operational security.<br />
If you're bashing a tower, camping a system, conducting a fight whatever, you have no way of knowing when a potential 3rd party connects to you.<br />
Obviously, in a PVP scenario you may well want to take the fight anyway but a non zero amount of time to prepare is generally nice.<br />
<br />
<br />
Sure, a part of me wants to go along with this change and say 'fuck it, I don't do PVE anyway, let's just kill anyone who does'. Thing is, you can catch people already anyway, it isn't that hard.<br />
Adding a probe detection delay on incoming WHs is a typical CCP style of change that adds a feature to address an issue in completely the wrong way.<br />
<br />
I guess I should be glad CCP seem to be listening and noticed that WHers hate the new overlay but they need to actually fix the issue in the way that we're asking for, not by taking it way too far and doing what they think we're asking for.<br />
<br />
Yes, the auto detecting sensor overlay needs to be removed from WHs. No, a probe detection delay does not need to be added.<br />
<br />
<br />
All in all this is exactly why I'm always against any changes being made to WH space.<br />
Hell, even in the best case scenario where CCP remove the scanner overlay from WHs and leave probe detection without a delay, where do we end up? Exactly where we were 4 years ago, in a well functioning wspace.<br />
<br />
<br />
JMJMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-80664754281553785742014-03-10T22:38:00.001-07:002014-03-10T22:39:01.373-07:00This House is not a HomeThis House is not a Home<br /><br />The issues of living in a POS and POS mechanics have been the hottest topic around the wspace water cooler for some time now.<br />WH dwellers live exclusively out of POSs, or nothing at all, as it is their only option but POS mechanics are old and have not kept up with the modernization of EVE life.<br /><br />The suggested fixes to the matter of POSs have varied wildly from 'don't touch it, you'll break WHs' to 'scrap it entirely and give us modular POSs with docking' and everything in between.<br />Personally, I lean much closer to the 'don't touch it' end of the spectrum as I simply do not trust CCP to redo POSs well and maintain the feel of WH living if they fully redo them.<br />For instance, I do not want docking of ANY sort anywhere near my WH home and I consider removing the POS force field mechanic a deal breaker on any changes.<br /><br />That said, POSs very clearly need an update so I'm going to go over what I consider to be the major points that need addressing. I am going to be venturing slightly into the corp management/roles area since it is very closely linked to some of the major POS issues.<br />Unfortunately (or possibly fortunately?) I have zero experience on running any sort of industry out of a POS so I will only be touching lightly on it but given how often I hear people complain about it, the image of POS industry I have is that it is also in need of major review and updates.<br /><br />Note: These items are not in any particular priority order.<br /><br /><br />POS Setup<br /><br />Anyone who has every set up a fresh POS knows how time consuming and tedious it is to do. There has already been a small pass done by CCP on this a few years back when they removed anchoring timers on most mods and reduced onlining timers but it is still very poor.<br />This area needs improvement in 2 ways:<br /><br />1. There needs to be an onlining queue where you can queue up as many mods as you want and they'll go and online in that order without you needing to wait for one to finish and then hit online on the next one. Would function similarly to the skill queue and would make onlining a POS way simpler.<br /><br />2. You should be able to save POS setups in the same way you can save ship fittings. In order to use one, you would need to online the tower and set its layout. Then if you go to anchor a mod at it that is on the loaded layout, it would automatically go to the predefined location as per the layout and anchor there without each mod needing to be manually placed.<br /><br /><br />POS Security and Access<br /><br />This is the big one for most WH groups. Security on current POSs is so limited that it actively limits how much a group can grow until it hits an inevitable security wall of too much risk.<br />Currently the only security you can put on a POS is a force field password and you can set 3 levels of corp role based access to storage mods and even if you have the role based access setup, the people with higher level access will have access to the items/ships in the lower access storage as well as the people with the highest level access having total access to all your POSs, including pulling fuel and tearing down towers. Clearly you can't give a 3rd of your corp starbase configuration level access.<br />This forces large WH corps to set up many 'personal' POSs that are secured by force field password and are shared by a small group of people, at most, that know and trust each other. Many large enities have upwards of 50+ such POSs in their home WH which in a 200-300 man corp (about as large are WH corps get) is extreme to absurd levels.<br /><br />The way I see it, POS security should work in a similar way as chat channel access currently works. If you have a module level allowed usage list it would allow corps to specify exactly who has access to view and/or take from a particular SMA/CHA or use production mods ect.<br />Ideally this should be able to be set on the POS level and then further altered on the module level so that you don't need to set it manually for each and every module.<br /><br />Personal SMAs that work in the same way as personal CHAs are also very much needed.<br /><br />If proper module level security was implemented to POSs it would allow a far greater number of people to live out of the same POS without risking all their stuff to people they don't know.<br /><br /><br />Refining Array<br /><br />Currently the maximum yield you can get when refining ore at a POS is 75%. Now, I haven't refined or at a POS or elsewhere in over 4 years so this doesn’t really affect me in the slightest but it does seem like this is a super extreme penalty for refining outside of a station.<br />I do not know what CCPs original reasons for this may have been but I don't see how upping the yield to somewhere in the 90-100% range would hurt anything.<br />Currently even C1 corps are choosing to build Rorquals in their WHs for the sole purpose of compressing ore so that they can haul it out to high sec to refine it. Many of those corps then haul to minerals back into their WH for further industrial use. This kind of tedious work around should not be needed for manufacturing items in WHs.<br /><br /><br />Offline POSs<br /><br />WH space is littered with old abandoned towers long left to rust in space, their owners long gone and not likely to return.<br />This topic comes up reasonably often among WH denizens, many of whom want to be able to unanchor and scoop the dead towers.<br />Personally I don't feel you should be able to just straight up take them but I do agree that removing them should be easier.<br />I would suggest that an offline POS tower should have zero shields so that you only need to chew through its armour and structure points to blow it up.<br />Admittedly this is not a super important change but it would clean up the streets of wspace somewhat and unclutter our dscans.<br /><br /><br />Self Destructing in Force Fields<br /><br />This shit has to go, enough said.<br />If not outright banning it, James Argent recently suggested that any SDed ship inside a warp disruption bubble should give a kill mail to the bubble's owner. This is an idea I like a lot in the alternative to just banning SD inside a POS.<br /><br /><br />So apart from the admitted industrial changes I'm sure are needed, that's actually the end of my list.<br />Honestly, I don't think that the 'POS problem' is anywhere near as big as people make it out to be. Most of the issues are small items with the big ones being POS setup and POS security.<br />The security changes are sorely needed and I would urge CCP to prioritize them over everything else but I am also quite sure they'd be the hardest for them to implement.<br /><br />In summary, I actually really like the POS system. It just needs a few user friendliness upgrades and a real security system. Apart from that, I'll take a space stick with a force field over any modular POS with docking/mooring/whatever-else-that-isn't-a-force-field any day of the week.<br /><br />JM<br />JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-75964143977920507012014-02-03T20:55:00.002-08:002014-02-03T21:05:51.469-08:00Damage Projection? How Does It Work?Damage Projection? How Does It Work?<br />
<br />
So this is an argument that has been around forever. Which ships have better damage projection? How useful is damage projection? Why are you killing me from all the way over there? These are all questions that come up regularly in space fights and the answers to them vary wildly depending on who you ask.<br />
<br />
In WH space, the debate basically comes down to this: Is a Legion better than a Proteus in a fleet fight?<br />
Pretty much all Proteus pilots, myself included, consider a Legion to be a low tank, low DPS junker that has no place anywhere outside of HS incursions.<br />
On the other hand, there are hard core Legion pilots who swear by them and always talk about the Legion's sweet, sweet damage projecting goodness.<br />
<br />
So let’s take a look at the 2 ships and see what we find, specifically in terms of damage projection in an extended fight.<br />
(I will be ignoring any implants.)<br />
<br />
I'm going to start with tank actually since how we look at it actually does affect damage output of the Legion.<br />
A Proteus is almost always fit with a plate, 2 EANMs, 1 explosive plating/hardener and 3 trimarks for tank and it gets around ~150k EHP with this setup.<br />
A Legion can be tanked the same way and it actually gets about ~5k more EHP with this setup. The issue is that if it is tanked like this it can only fit 2 heat sinks. The alternative is dropping the hardener (thermal in this case) and fitting a therm rig. This keeps the resist profile acceptable and allows for 3 heat sinks but drastically drops the EHP to ~117k. Personally I don't feel this drop in EHP is acceptable, especially in fleet fights, and since the 2 heat sink fit's tank compares so nicely to the Proteus, I'm going to use that fit as a base line for the rest of the comparisons also.<br />
<br />
Raw DPS wise, these ships are not even close. Proteus tops at 1033 DPS with Void while the Legion tops at 640 DPS with Conflag.<br />
Given the vast paper difference in DPS, the only way to properly compare then is indeed at range as the Legion pilots say so let’s give it a go.<br />
<br />
Void vs Conflag:<br />
Here the Proteus does more DPS to 7km where the Legion takes over out to 13km or so, after which the only thing doing damage are the Proteus's drones.<br />
<br />
IN MF vs CN AM:<br />
OK, here we see the Proteus taking top damage out to 10km AND actually retaking the top DPS after 15km, albeit mostly due to drones.<br />
<br />
Null vs Scorch:<br />
Ok, this pairing is probably what the Legion pilots are on about I suppose. Still, the Proteus does the most DPS (and we're talking 780 vs 450 here mind) out to 17km where the Legion again takes over and is hitting for 450dps out to 35km.<br />
<br />
We can pretty clearly see that yes, the Legion does have more range than the Proteus, though that should be pretty obvious when directly comparing blasters to pulse lasers.<br />
So what about other scenarios where both ships are not using the same type of ammo?<br />
Well, let’s load Null into our Proteus and see what happens to all of the other Legion ammos.<br />
Conflag? Nope, Proteus always does more DPS. IN MF? Still nope, Proteus always does more damage!<br />
<br />
Ok, where does this leave us?<br />
Well, the Legion pilots are right; the Legion does project DPS better than the Proteus. But only with scorch. And only outside of 17km. And only assuming the Proteus pilot doesn’t move closer to the target.<br />
But in the end, yes, in a large fight where the targets are spread out across 50km+ of space, you're probably better off with a Legion for damage projection, even if there is only 450 of it.<br />
<br />
So is that it? Proteus relegated to small scale brawls, time to train up Legion subs for fleets?<br />
That day may come with the upcoming T3 nerf, BUT IT IS NOT THIS DAY!!<br />
<br />
Due to the recent-ish long range medium gun changes, Proteus pilots everywhere can rest assured that anything the Legion can do, they can do better.<br />
That's right, let's talk about rails here.<br />
<br />
What happens if you shelf the trusty neutron blasters and strop some 250mm rails on your proteus? How does the scorch matchup look now?<br />
In short, laughable.<br />
250mm rail Proteus does more damage than a scorch Legion at all ranges with a single tracking enhancer and everywhere apart from 34-35km with a triple mag stab fit.<br />
Additionally, loading spike ammo lets you hit for 400dps out to your lock range. Now there's some projection for you. <br />
<br />
I'm looking at a tracking sub fit so there are no drones which tops out the DPS at 705 with 3 damage mods or 620 with 2. Adding drones ups it to 860dps but the tracking sub is really needed.<br />
Still, at 700dps implanted and more than fine tracking with Javelin ammo, the 2 damage mod fit gives you a ship that can still respectfully brawl as well as providing the best projected DPS available in any armour T3 fleet.<br />
<br />
So what about a beam Legion? Well, you can fit them and the DPS is slightly higher than the Rail Proteus but the fitting on the Legion is much worse so you need to use ACR rigs and the ammo for the Beams is not as versatile as the hybrid ammo so the Legion loses out pretty badly in the comparison.<br />
<br />
TL;DR: Don't fly Legions people!<br />
<br />
<br />
Does this mean that the blaster Proteus is dead? Not really. <br />
While I would now argue that a rail Proteus is the best thing you can bring to large scale fights, the fact remains that very few WH fights take place at ranges beyond the 17km range under which the blaster Proteus is undisputed king.<br />
There is also the fact that the tracking on the 250mm rails is just shy of god awful, forcing the use of the tracking sub system, a tracking enhancer and a tracking computer to compensate for it which means you lose the versatility and added DPS of drones as well as a web.<br />
<br />
Never the less, I have swapped out my blaster boat of choice for the rail version for now and will be flying it for the foreseeable future to see how I like it.<br />
<br />
Here's the fit I've been running:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><br /></i>
<i>[Proteus, JM - Flying Dutchman]</i><br />
<i>1600mm Reinforced Steel Plates II</i><br />
<i>Corpii A-Type Adaptive Nano Plating</i><br />
<i>Imperial Navy Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane</i><br />
<i>Centum A-Type Energized Explosive Membrane</i><br />
<i>Federation Navy Magnetic Field Stabilizer</i><br />
<i>Federation Navy Magnetic Field Stabilizer</i><br />
<i>Tracking Enhancer II</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Corelum C-Type 10MN Microwarpdrive</i><br />
<i>Republic Fleet Warp Disruptor</i><br />
<i>Tracking Computer II, Tracking Speed Script</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>250mm Railgun II, Javelin M</i><br />
<i>250mm Railgun II, Javelin M</i><br />
<i>250mm Railgun II, Javelin M</i><br />
<i>250mm Railgun II, Javelin M</i><br />
<i>250mm Railgun II, Javelin M</i><br />
<i>250mm Railgun II, Javelin M</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Medium Trimark Armor Pump II</i><br />
<i>Medium Trimark Armor Pump II</i><br />
<i>Medium Trimark Armor Pump II</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Proteus Defensive - Augmented Plating</i><br />
<i>Proteus Engineering - Power Core Multiplier</i><br />
<i>Proteus Propulsion - Localized Injectors</i><br />
<i>Proteus Offensive - Dissonic Encoding Platform</i><br />
<i>Proteus Electronics - Friction Extension Processor</i></blockquote>
<br />
I have only had one opportunity to take it out so far but it has already impressed me with how it behaves on the battlefield.<br />
<br />
Ironically, the first thing I did with it was brawl at point blank with it on a HS WH against a Harbinger and 2 Drakes because the residents in our static decided to attack me there while I was moving to HS. In this scenario it was very apparent that a blaster Proteus would have been better but I still managed to push all 3 ships through to HS without any problems at all so it still held its own just fine.<br />
<br />
We then went to kill some other Drakes and a Harbinger running C2 sites in a random WH 11 jumps away from our HS. This fight showcased the damage projection of my new toy beautifully as I was able to follow and point the Harb which was attempting to flee while still applying full DPS to the primaried Drake.<br />
The fight also showcased the surprise factor a rail Proteus provides since no one expects it. Near the end of the fight a Falcon warped in at 70km to try save the last Drake. He completely ignored my Proteus, likely since I wasn't pointing the Drake, so I was able to lock it, burn to my 54km point range and kill it before it noticed what was happening.<br />
The other thing this fight highlighted was how much I absolutely HATE EC drones and why I never fit the point range sub on my blaster Proteus as we lost points on the first Drake and the Harbinger due with myself and the cloaky Proteus we also had both getting jammed by EC drones. Damn Harbinger was in structure too...<br />
<br />
On our way home one of our guys in a frig called out that there was a Tornado moving around in out C2 static with the HS and I found it sitting 50km off the HS WH when I jumped in which happens to be well within my point range and well within my gun range so rail Proteus bagged another one on its way home. Point range sub DOES have its uses!<br />
<br />
All in all I am happy with the performance of the ship so far any will be using it in place of my blaster Proteus for the time being.<br />
<br />
Fly rowdy,<br />
JM<br />
<br />
<br />
PS: It should be noted that the Loki is by far the worst T3 for damage projection but it makes up for it by being an excellent support ship and having very versatile close range gun and ammo choices.<br />
<br />JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-28482104383061938242013-12-29T21:06:00.003-08:002013-12-29T21:10:43.001-08:00Interceptors Are a ThingTIL; Interceptors Are a Thing<br />
<br />
So I lost my Tengu alt's Tengu last week in what ended up being a rather fun duel.<br />
Being Christmas, most of space (and certainly WH space) was pretty dead so I decided to log in my Tengu alt and pay a visit to BNI in their lowsec home, figuring they'd have plenty of things around to shoot.<br />
<br />
I got through the half dozen odd LS jumps without incident and started poking around their home station which most of them were parked on. They were busy chasing around an ex corp mate who was buzzing around belts in his Caracal and I managed to catch one or two frigs in by playing tag along.<br />
After an hour or so I was getting bored and noticed that the Caracal was at a belt that I had covops eyes on along with a Crow that seemed unrelated to either party so I decided to go see if I could have better luck with the Caracal than BNI were having (to be fair, I think he was on his 3rd Caracal so BNI did have some luck).<br />
<br />
On my landing the Caracal bailed immediately but the Crow came to play. I wasn’t worried about that since I knew the DPS on a Crow is effectively zero against a shield T3 and that its tank is also basically zero against pretty much everything so even though I almost certainly couldn't catch it, I should be able to drive it off easily.<br />
<br />
Turns out that I might have been slightly wrong on a few counts...<br />
<br />
The Crow settled into a 23km orbit and was moving at 5.9k/s. This should have been my first sign for concern but having admittedly little experience in frigs (I'm not allowed to fly them) it didn't even occur to me until afterwards that this meant he had a full high grade snake implant set in his head in addition to 3+ speed mods fit which more than likely meant he knew what he was doing quite well.<br />
Anyway, there's very little that a 3k/s (overloaded) Tengu with the agility of a freight train can do to get out from under a point of a 6k/s Crow with the agility of a mosquito so I hit F1, missiles away.<br />
<br />
My second alarm bell started ringing when I found out that my faction Scourge ammo could not break the passive recharge on said Crow. At this point I had one more chance so I reloaded and started overloading when his shields stabilized at ~40%. This had the desired effect and his shield slowly dropped to 20%, well below peak recharge. <br />
Unfortunately, this was around the same time my heat damage hit ~85% and I had to stop.<br />
<br />
Looks like I'm in trouble here...<br />
<br />
At this point I decided to try break point after all.<br />
All this time I had been burning away from the belt we started at in order to put distance between me and any reinforcements that might come to the belt since he was calling out that there was a tackled Tengu to be had in local.<br />
With me moving at 2.1k and him orbiting at 23km at 5.9k, the closest he was getting to me was 20km. Now, my Tengu has a faction web on it that overloads to 18.2km so I figured a direction change with a burst of heat on the AB might just do it.<br />
Turns out even at my best efforts, I could get him to 19km but was always ending up about 500m short :(<br />
If I had a MWD, slingshotting out of point range or into web range would have been simple but the slow acceleration of the 100mn made it impossible.<br />
That said, I DID somehow manage to break his point range once and warp off. However, because I am so very bad at this game, I chose another belt to warp to instead of a station and since the Crow pilot was, unlike me, good at the game, he followed, landed well before me due to the new warp speed mechanics and caught me again easily. The dance continues.<br />
<br />
At this point I know I'm in a heap of trouble since even though no backup had yet materialized, some BNI had seen us at the belt and it had gotten mentioned on their comms a couple times which I was listening to. I decide to log in my main in his 100mn Tengu and see if I can make it in to assist since 2 Tengus can definitely kill the Crow.<br />
I jump out of our WH and set destination. 16 jumps.<br />
Ok, we'll see. I hit the edge of LS space just as the first wave of reinforcements descend on my Tengu alt. <br />
The reinforcements are kitchen sink junkers from BNI including a few frigs, 2-3 cruisers and, importantly, a Rapier decloaking 10km from me...<br />
I figure I'm very dead since a DPS supported Rapier is sad face for a 100mn Tengu. I hit overload on everything, point the Rapier and start shooting since that's my only chance.<br />
I do a quick check and my top speed with heat is ~1200m/s. I am dual webbed and now considerably slower than the cruisers gaining on me.<br />
By some miracle, the Rapier is weakly shield tanked and I manage to melt it fast. By now all the other ships have caught up and I am still webbed but I am accelerating so only single webbed and by an Atron at that.<br />
I kill off the Atron in a couple volleys and start pulling range at an acceptable rate, webbing a Stabber off me.<br />
<br />
I somehow live and get out to range at 20% shield where I stop overloading and decide to send the Crow a one word mail: "Ransom?"<br />
I'm not a fan of ransoms as such. I never offer them and have never paid one to date. That said, the Crow definitely deserves a pay out here so I figure I'd ask.<br />
I also decide the second Tengu plan is still a good one and start pushing through lowsec with my main. Sadly, he runs into a camp 2 jumps out and while it was a camp I'd gladly engage normally, I AM dual boxing hard and decide to evade and dock instead. My alt is on his own.<br />
At this point my mail gets answered: "How much?". I start off with 250mil, figuring he'll counter offer but it looks like he's not that interested and he never responds.<br />
<br />
Round 2 of reinforcements include a very annoying Navy Vexor with sentries which REALLY hurt as well as the better part of the entire BNI fleet which had just returned from a roam.<br />
I pick off a few more frigs but we're done here. I GF in local as the webs start landing and switch my focus over to getting my, not cheap, pod out which I do manage.<br />
<br />
Farewell Tengu:<br />
<a href="http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=21091317">http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=21091317</a><br />
<br />
All in all I don't have any regrets and thoroughly enjoyed the engagement :)<br />
Props to the crow pilot, next time I will have precision ammo in cargo ;)<br />
<br />
JMJMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-44016512133327227892013-12-09T16:58:00.002-08:002013-12-09T17:02:13.902-08:00Weekend ShenanigansWeekend Shenanigans<br />
<br />
Due to various factors, mainly getting back into Magic the Gathering pretty heavily and deciding to reinstall and play through Skyrim, I have not been particularly active in EVE for the past few months.<br />
That said, I did get to play properly this weekend and had some fun fights while I was at it so I figured I'd post a recounting of the highlights.<br />
<br />
<br />
Saturday<br />
<br />
The first occurrence was on Saturday evening (AU time) a few hours before downtime. As most people know, this time of day is fairly quiet so I was not too surprised when I logged on and there was only one other person, K'mtar, online in corp.<br />
Regardless, I decided to have a bit of a poke around. I started by checking our chain which looked pretty normal, few C2s, HS exit, C5 connected to us. <br />
One thing I noticed was that the C5 bookmark in our home system was not named with our usual convention but rather was labelled "C5(TEEMING WITH HOSTILES)". Needless to say, I was intrigued and asked K'mtar if he knew anything about it. Turned out the BM was a few hours old, apparently we had fought a few guys from there with a kill and a couple losses.<br />
Before I even got a chance to go check it out K'mtar calls out a Brutix moving from our static into the C5. When it was gone we put his eyes in the C5 and mine on our static to see what's up. Before too long a Prowler moves out through our static followed shortly by 3-4 pods, presumably to pick up ships.<br />
At this point I decide I want to pick a fight and park my Loki pilot on our static in her dual web PVP Loki advising K'mtar, who is in his cloaky Proteus, that I am doing so. Given there ARE only 2 of us online and we DO each only have access to a single combat ship (My main was offline in highsec at the time, nowhere near our entry) I decide to hedge my bets a bit a log in my Archon pilot, leaving him at my POS for the time being. While my Loki pilot is highly skilled and I'm sure K'mtar's Proteus abilities are good, 2 T3s, one of which is cloaky fit, are probably a poor match for whatever ships those pods come back in, not to mention the 2 other pilots we've seen, so a little security can't hurt.<br />
<br />
While my Loki is still in warp, K'mtar calls out that a hostile Proteus is coming from the C5. I land on the static and the Proteus doesn’t show so it's a cloaky. I chill out for a bit and then get an activation: Onyx. The HIC bubble goes up immediately which is a pretty solid indicator that the pilot is expecting backup and not to lose his ship so I hit warp on the Archon and light up on the Onyx with the Loki.<br />
The Proteus decloaks shortly and K'mtar calls Tengu and Abaddon in route from the C5 while he is on his way to assist. Fight is on squire!<br />
There are a few more activations and as the Tengu and Abaddon reinforcements arrive a Hurricane and a Vagabond join the fray from the static.<br />
<br />
Let's pause here for a brief interlude and talk about EVE's most broken mechanic.<br />
During this time my archon has landed, hitting the edge of the HIC bubble, and I throw a rep on each friendly ship and attempt to pay little attention to the carrier since even out of triage there's no chance of the hostiles breaking its reps.<br />
Needless to say I was perplexed when I glace over a few seconds later and what do I notice? That my Archon is no longer locking anything! How odd...<br />
A few more moments of investigation reveal that my Archon had in fact been jammed. Now, the astute reader may notice that I have not listed any ECM ships among our enemies which would be correct since they had none.<br />
Yup, my 86.4 sensor strength Archon had been jammed out by a single flight of EC-300 jamming drones from the hostile Proteus which each pack a mighty jamming strength of 1. Thanks CCP...<br />
Not only that but they scored a second jam on me once the first was up so I went 'fuck it' and hit triage, leaving K'mtar to kill the jamming drones with his warriors.<br />
<br />
Back to the combat.<br />
Given that our enemy has no logistics here, I'm expecting 1 of 2 possible outcomes here.<br />
1. They bail given that they can't hope to beat the Archon. <br />
Or,<br />
2. They bring in logistics to stabilize and muster a fleet from highsec to violence my Archon.<br />
Option 1 here is generally more likely when dealing with an unknown group but I do know more than a few groups that would be very happy to come kill a tackled Archon so I put another pilot on login screen, my Moros pilot. The idea behind being to log it in at the first sign of logistics to attempt to end the fight which, given we have a 3 webs between our 2 ships, it should be able to do.<br />
<br />
The fight is our Loki and Proteus vs. Tengu, Proteus, Onyx, Abaddon, Hurricane and Vagabond.<br />
At this stage the opposing force is sticking close to the wormhole with the exception of the Tengu which has decided to kite away so I call it primary. Tengus are reasonably good kiters but it's very hard to do against a dual web Loki so I'm able to pin it down about 30 off the WH and go to work. It goes down in good time, even with K'mtar scrammed and webbed 20km off it, and in the meantime his friends have pulled off the WH to come assist which works great for us.<br />
The Hurricane goes down next, followed by the Vagabond. The shield ships melt under the Wolf Rayet effects.<br />
<br />
At this stage the HIC bubble is still up and the remaining 3 ships do not seem to be interested in leaving and that option 2 is starting to nag at me so I make the call to end this and warp in the Moros.<br />
It has the intended effect. Bubble goes down immediately and the Onyx and Abaddon make their exit, leaving the Proteus stranded under Loki webs and Proteus scram.<br />
Killing a Proteus in a C5 Wolf Rayet is never short work but the Moros lets us take it down before it inches its way into jump range of the static. I have no doubt it would have gotten away without the Moros DPS.<br />
<br />
With the dust settled, I wait out the timers on my capitals and warp them off to my POS.<br />
While K'mtar and I are looting the field there is an activation on the wormhole and the Prowler pokes its head through. He must have spawned close to the WH as I am able to lock him and shoot him to structure before he jumps back out.<br />
<br />
Here are the day's results:<br />
<a href="https://zkillboard.com/related/31001904/201312070000/">https://zkillboard.com/related/31001904/201312070000/</a><br />
(I'm using zKill here, even though it sucks, as EVEKill won't post the Proteus KM for some reason...)<br />
<br />
<br />
All in all it was a fun fight, even though the Archon made it quite one sided.<br />
Thanks to K'mtar for being a solid wingman and props to Balls to the Walls for living up to their name and sticking it out against the odds.<br />
<br />
Regarding the call to bring my capitals out, I guess there will be people calling me out for over escalating but I stand by it for the most part.<br />
The Archon call for me was a no brainer. Had I not brought it out we would either have not fought or I would have whelped my Loki and, more importantly, a corpmate's Proteus which is poor form when it can be avoided. Also, had the hostiles brought a single logistics boat and not a split tank fleet, we would likely have gotten no kills, even with the Archon, with our very limited resources.<br />
I will admit that bringing the Moros was a bit of a dick move but I'm not used to hostiles sticking around after taking 50% losses without some sort of agenda so the call was made.<br />
(As a side note, bringing a battleship always makes me want to bring a dread...)<br />
<br />
<br />
Sunday<br />
<br />
I logged in much earlier on Sunday so there were a good number of corp mates around, which for us is 6-8.<br />
As always, someone is out scouting and they call actives in a C2 where we had apparently ganked some POS bashers earlier.<br />
(<a href="http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=20815309">http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=20815309</a>)<br />
Turns out there are 2 parties with POSs in said C2 and one is apparently trying to evict the other.<br />
<br />
With activity called we move a small gang down the chain and the scout calls a Drake and a Gnosis on the C2 WH from our static.<br />
The 2 ships jump back and POS up before we get there so we wait to see if they'll do it again. There isn’t any reason for them to make the trip again but then again, there wasn’t a reason the first time either. *shrug*<br />
I'm still working with my Loki pilot and decide this is as good a time as any to move my main back into our wormhole since the entry highsec is 5 from Jita so I log him in and hit auto pilot in his 100mn Tengu so I wouldn’t need to pay attention.<br />
Meanwhile, we get bored of waiting and people want to use the highsec so we disengage stealth mode and start putting obvious traffic through the entry hole.<br />
Turns out one of the pilots we ganked earlier is now sitting on the highsec side of the entry hole in a Tengu so we keep an eye out and one of our guys puts a drag bubble off the HS hole in line with the POS with the active Drake and Gnosis which also should pull from the second, currently empty, POS for added bonus.<br />
<br />
At this point a pilot from the second POS logs in and ships to a Falcon which warps away from his POS.<br />
I decide to try my luck and warp my Loki to the planet his POS is at and them to the HS hole at 70km. Turns out the drag bubble does pull from his planet and I hit it in the Loki.<br />
A few seconds later I hit the Falcon and decloak it, pew pew ensues:<br />
<a href="http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=20819173">http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=20819173</a><br />
<a href="http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=20819172">http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=20819172</a><br />
<br />
As a pro tip, whenever you warp to a WH at a set distance from a celestial in a cloaked ship, move out of the line of warp when you land. Especially if you land in a drag bubble!<br />
<br />
Anyway, I pod the Falcon pilot and warp back to the WH back towards home, landing just as the Gnosis lands 50km off it!<br />
I try to go for it but it gets out so I retire the Loki home and bring in my main in his Tengu to take over as he has reached the entry system by now.<br />
I decide to park my Tengu 70km off the WH the Gnosis had warped to in line with his POS in case he got cute and did it again.<br />
<br />
Let's take a moment to think about the actions of the Gnosis pilot in this situation.<br />
You see 3 guys that were attacking your POS killed.<br />
You then see numerous ships passing through your WH to and from HS.<br />
There are flashing comments in your local chat about a Falcon kill.<br />
And you have just warped at 50km to a hostile WH in a Gnosis where you narrowly got away from a mean looking Loki.<br />
So at this point, what's your next move?<br />
Well, warp to the WH at zero in the same Gnosis and jump through to check it out obviously!<br />
<br />
Yeah, guy lands at zero just as I land at 70km, which I am NOT happy about because I assume it means I'm going to miss him again when he warps off.<br />
I call it out and one of our guys makes haste to get back on the hole on the other side. Instead of warping off, the Gnosis jumps through where our man is now waiting and holds cloak long enough before jumping back for me to get into point range on my side to catch him when he comes back through.<br />
The kill from there is academic as the Gnosis fit is a thing of glory:<br />
<a href="http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=20819378">http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=20819378</a><br />
<br />
While the Gnosis hunt was going on, the previously podded Falcon pilot returns to the WH in a Venture and is now sitting at his POS in a Scorpion<br />
We take a guess that he is keen on getting his corpmate (or alt I guess) into the WH in his Tengu, which is still sitting patiently in HS, using the ECM boat for cover so we hang around the HS hole to see if anything goes down.<br />
While we are hanging about, a wild Heron lands slightly off the WH (remote BMs are awesome) so we blow the Gnosis pilot up again while we wait:<br />
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=20819617<br />
<br />
Turns out the Scorpion pilot was trying to do exactly what we thought and before too long the Scorpion lands 100km off the WH, which is about 130km off me since I'm orbiting the hole.<br />
Short on other options, I take a direct line towards the Scorpion, hitting the heat button on my afterburner as I go. I don't have any speed implants on my main as he is not the pilot I generally use for 100mn Tengu work so my speed tops out at 2.8k/s when heated. Will have to do and it does, I hit point range just as the hostile Tengu jumps in and warps off, tackling the Scorpion.<br />
Now, tacking an ECM ship by yourself is always sketchy at best since it almost always ends with you getting immediately jammed and the ship warping off and given that yesterday my Archon was getting jammed repeatedly by stupid EC drones, my hopes of holding the Scorpion were not great.<br />
My corp mates in slower ships are busy bouncing off celestials to warp back in on me to get more points but apparently the picked the furthest possible warps so they never get there.<br />
Luckily for me, BoB's favour was with me and I didn't get jammed at all, much to the Scorpion pilot's dismay:<br />
<a href="http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=20819786">http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=20819786</a><br />
<br />
He was cool about it and said hi in local afterwards, advising us that losing 3 ships in a day was enough for him and that he was logging for the day.<br />
Thanks for playing, was fun interacting with you :).<br />
<br />
<br />
To round out the weekend a few of us decided to venture into the wasteland that is highsec to extract some BoB's justice from a non-believer.<br />
I'm not too familiar with the backstory myself but Lotor advised be that there was some guy who has been making disparaging comments regarding SUS on the Podside podcast and saying mean things about us while boasting his own superior talents while he is in fact a highsec miner.<br />
Naturally, we can't let that stand so we kitted out some Catalysts and performed the glorious work of BoB:<br />
<a href="http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=20822797">http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=20822797</a><br />
<br />
This was actually my first time ganking in a Catalyst. I'm a big Tornado fan myself so I was sceptical when advised to use a puny destroyer but I must say I am a fan.<br />
Can definitely see myself using them again for future violence.<br />
<br />
<br />
All in all had a fun weekend and I'm hoping to get to play more in the new year.<br />
Till then, fly fun.JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-15721214725273529072013-10-24T17:22:00.002-07:002016-05-30T23:06:56.825-07:00Gonna Need a Bigger GunGonna Need a Bigger Gun<br />
<br />
Ok, so it came up again in a comment on a Mittani article:<br />
<br />
"Aside from that I've got mixed feelings on the state of w-space, dreads serve as an excellent field-leveller for smaller corps<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Let's start with how dreads actually function against other ships in w-space:<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
Add the fact that 90% webs exist to the mix and even orbiting at 500m won't help you:<br />
<a href="http://dontshootx.com/killboard/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=16491">http://dontshootx.com/killboard/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=16491</a><br />
<br />
Logistics - So, got sick of your Archons getting vaporized by dreads? Switched to low sig Guardians? Well, don't get too attached.<br />
Yeah, even the tiny sig of a skirmish link boosted Guardian isn't safe against the blap dread.<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
So with dreads being so strong against all subcaps, why are they not a balancing factor for small corps? <br />
<br />
Well, there are a couple of reasons.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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:<br />
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.<br />
If you escalate a fight against a large WH corp with capitals, they WILL respond in kind and to a larger degree.<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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? <br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
Even we in lowly SUSU got in on this action recently:<br />
<a href="http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=19870013">http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=19870013</a><br />
<br />
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.<br />
People know what dreads can do now and they know how to engage them, or to stay away from them if they need to.<br />
<br />
All of this will lead to your no so glorious death if you escalate with dreads against a larger force.<br />
<br />
<br />
This was my first experience with dread blapping:<br />
<a href="http://dontshootx.com/killboard/?a=kill_related&kll_id=9960">http://dontshootx.com/killboard/?a=kill_related&kll_id=9960</a><br />
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.<br />
Even after they bounced a planet and came back at zero they continued to die.<br />
AHARM have not brought a BS to a capital fight since that day.<br />
<br />
<br />
So what would I like see done with dreads in WHs?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
<br />
That said, the level of rape they bestow upon sub battleship target needs to be toned down. A lot.<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
I would make them do less DPS versus targets 500m sig and below.<br />
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.<br />
The dreads would still hit the cruisers the same but they would do a lot less damage to them.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Anyway, enough rambling for today.<br />
Remember, people everywhere love killing caps. If you bring it out to play, make sure you know what you are getting into.<br />
<br />
JMJMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-31051650012711614922013-10-13T17:06:00.000-07:002013-10-13T17:06:08.424-07:00There Is No SkiffThere is No Skiff<br /><br />So I blew up a Les Jihad Joe piloted Skiff on the weekend. Or did I?<br />There is no kill mail and no loss mail for the engagement but since I was there and did blow it up, how can this be?<br />Well, the answer is quite simple really; the pilot of said Skiff waited until his ship was in 10% structure and then promptly ejected. The consequences of said action are twofold:<br /> 1.) It means your ship loses the benefits of your skills and drops to negative structure points, at which point it poofs into nothingness without leaving a kill mail behind, even while under fire. <br /> 2.) It means you're a chicken shit coward who has pissed me off and now owes me a kill mail of greater value.<br /><br />Now, I fully appreciate not wanting the shame of a mining barge loss on your kill board but perhaps you should have considered that before deciding to mine in a wormhole. Also, given every other ship in your corp is warp core stabbed to high heaven, why not your mining ship?<br />(The ice harvester upgrade that dropped was a nice touch btw.)<br /><br />I have heard of this, in my opinion, exploit being used by super pilots in nullsec to deny kill mails on their derped ships but it's the first time I have seen it in practice. Looking back at how it went down, the ship didn’t actually look to explode as soon as the pilot ejected but rather when I next hit it.<br />Looking through my log after the gank, the last blow I had listed was for a negative value which I found interesting.<br /><br />Personally I think this is a blatant exploit that should be fixed by CCP in the same way self-destructing was.<br /><br /><br />Later on I received a mail from an old corp mate which contained a chat log from the Bite Me INC (an old corp of mine) public channel where Kakiv Wavingstar, industry director of Les Jihad Joe, was attempting to gain information on my alts which led to some amusing comments from old corp mates which I appreciated.<br /><br />Kakiv clearly doesn't read my blog since if he did, he would know that I have no alts.<br /><br />Here's an extract of the convo log:<br /><br />[13:18:29] Warlord Shat > Jack left a while ago hes a good dude though<br />[13:18:37] Agoniad Ractop > spy<br />[13:18:48] Kakiv Wavingstar > jack is a spy?<br />[13:18:51] Warlord Shat > Yeah he is a massive spy though<br />[13:18:54] Warlord Shat > :P<br />[13:19:02] Kakiv Wavingstar > damn<br />[13:19:11] Warlord Shat > ...We are joking<br />[13:19:42] Agoniad Ractop > yeah....joking<br />[13:19:57] Kakiv Wavingstar > can you proviens me with it's alt character?<br />[13:20:53] Zara Arran > why the interest?<br />[13:21:10] Kakiv Wavingstar > he harrast us in our WH, try he and is corp tried to siege our WH, we now he is still in our WH and scout<br />[13:21:26] Zara Arran > that... sounds like jack<br />[13:21:34] Warlord Shat > Lol yeah<br />[13:21:55] Kakiv Wavingstar > lol<br />[13:22:15] Warlord Shat > A scout is only for infomation what you have to worry about is the fleet that is behind him<br />[13:22:26] Warlord Shat > if you keep tight wormhole control you will be fine<br />[13:22:57] Agoniad Ractop > you will need plenty coffee :)<br />[13:23:04] Kakiv Wavingstar > yeah, but he play on a difference timezone, it's difficult<br />[13:23:10] Warlord Shat > I know<br />[13:23:21] Warlord Shat > its whats great about wormholes<br />[13:23:32] Warlord Shat > you need good timezone coverage is you wanna be safer<br />[13:23:32] Kakiv Wavingstar > do you think he is planning a second attack?<br />[13:23:50] Warlord Shat > Did he get kills his first time around?<br />[13:23:54] Zara Arran > honestly, with jack, you never know<br />[13:24:21] Kakiv Wavingstar > he's got somme kill, blow up our nid<br />[13:24:31] Zara Arran > lol<br />[13:24:32] Kakiv Wavingstar > with is corp mate<br />[13:24:32] Warlord Shat > then yeah<br />[13:24:46] Warlord Shat > he will hunt you endlessly<br />[13:24:57] Warlord Shat > you can't give someone a niddy kill and expect it to be fine<br />[13:25:24] Kakiv Wavingstar > they we 40 went the attack our nid<br />[13:25:52] Kakiv Wavingstar > many we're player not in the same corp<br />[13:26:16] Kakiv Wavingstar > so we didn't see them comming via the HS<br />[13:26:54] Kakiv Wavingstar > went the attack was up, 30 non-corp player from the HS come our scout did see them<br />[13:27:23] Kakiv Wavingstar but that's not the point how's many toon Jack Miton as?<br />[13:28:12] Warlord Shat > quite a few<br />[13:28:22] Kakiv Wavingstar > can you name it?<br />[13:29:02] Warlord Shat > No that is enough free intel for today<br /><br /><br />I sense these guys will be on my shit list for some time, should be fun :)<br /><br /><br />PS: I wasn’t on the Nid kill mail, nor did I have anything to do with the attack on it, LOVE the paranoia though :D<br /><br />JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-18350878571014220522013-09-29T18:18:00.002-07:002016-05-30T22:59:43.562-07:00Stalker Fleet AssembleStalker Fleet Assemble<br />
<br />
A large part of playing EVE in the AU time zone, especially in wormholes, is that you need to be able to find things to do by yourself when the rest of your corp is asleep. One of my favourite past times is camping out in other people’s holes and just generally pissing them off, er, I mean having good fights with them! Doing this requires relatively little asset investment and can be done quite effectively even while afk.<br />
<br />
The only real challenge in this line of entertainment is finding the right kind of targets so to assist in doing so, about 2 years ago I started purchasing scanning alt characters off the market to fill up the spare slots on my accounts.<br />
These scouts are nothing fancy, just a few mil SP, Astro 5, Covops 4, astro supports to 4. They go for (or at least did when I was in the market) for 2-3bil, skill dependent, and are worth every penny.<br />
I like to think of them as wormhole bookmarks that I can park in a system for weeks or even months without caring and they allow me to drop by and visit whenever I like.<br />
They are also out of corp which helps when scouting targets.<br />
I had to break out EVEmon to do the math but I currently have 13 fully covops capable characters across my accounts, including my mains.<br />
<br />
So how do I use these scouts?<br />
Well, some I use as backup scouts in our home system, others I have parked in systems of 'interest' but what I mainly use them for is keeping tabs on active low class wormholes with HS statics that I like to visit from time to time to shoot stuff in.<br />
Generally these tend to be C2s with HS and C3/C4 statics though I don't insist on HS static systems but generally those are the most active.<br />
I only really have 2 selection criteria on deciding which systems get the honour of hosting an authentic Jack Miton scout alt:<br />
<br />
1.) They are active in the AU time zone.<br />
2.) They piss me off.<br />
<br />
The first category of people is self-explanatory since they give me someone to interact with in my TZ. I also try to make them fun groups that will actually come fight me. Often these are larger entities that don't have AU TZ as their peak time but do have some actives on at that time.<br />
Previous groups in this category include The Kairs Syndicate, Clann Fian and Valkyrie Coalition, all of which were great fun to mess around with, though sadly I have since removed scouts from all 3 systems as they were needed elsewhere at one time or another, as well as the corps themselves fading in activity.<br />
<br />
This brings me to the other group; people who piss me off.<br />
This category mostly includes people who will not fight us when we connect to them, people who smack talk in local or, in the very special case of the most recent addition to this group; people who smack in local right after not fighting us.<br />
These people I treat very differently than the first group. I am not longer interested in fun fights with these guys, their holes I visit for ganks and general griefing.<br />
Generally I will have 2 scouts in these systems, one that I openly show to the locals, most people add this one to their watch list, and the other that I take care to keep hidden. I also often keep a PVP character and ship logged off inside the system itself, rather than just coming to visit. <br />
This offers several fun griefing opportunities. Firstly, it lets me keep the scout they do know about logged in day and night to keep them paranoid about their activities and if they are POSing up/being careful when the scout is on, I can log it off and swap to the scout they don't know about and watch them go about their business in apparent safety. It can also be quite entertaining to get my known scout 'accidentally' collapsed out of their system or even podded, only to blow up their orca next time they're rolling a hole carelessly.<br />
Keeping the PVP toon in system allows for faster response times to gank opportunities and means any scouts they leave on their exit holes are worthless.<br />
Lastly, just had a fight with the locals, ended up jumping to highsec and now need to head out or go to sleep? Don't forget to leave your PVP ship orbiting their WH within jump range on the HS side :)<br />
<br />
Anyway, as I briefly mentioned earlier, I have had to pull most of my deployed scouts out of target C2s over the past 6 months or so for various reasons but they are now free again and my month of camping BNI's lowsec with my combat toon is over so it is time for the stalker fleet to assemble once again.<br />
So if you live in a suitable wormhole, you might find yourself hosting one of my alts soon.<br />
And for those of you who will not fight when we come visit, know this; you owe me a kill mail. It can be yours or it can be mine, but either way I will get it.<br />
<br />
Oh and if you decide to really piss me off? Remember, I'm not stuck in your hole with you; you're stuck in it with me.<br />
<br />
JMJMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-29389658138219800732013-09-19T06:40:00.002-07:002013-09-19T06:40:29.130-07:00My Alts Are A LieSo as most people would have noticed, CCP made some rather terrible changes to the EULA.<br />
I was going to write up about it but I doubt I could have done it better than this:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://themittani.com/features/james-315-responds-new-anti-scamming-rules?page=0%2C0">http://themittani.com/features/james-315-responds-new-anti-scamming-rules?page=0%2C0</a><br />
<br />
I highly recommend giving this article a read.<br />
<br />
Also, I have no alts, my alts are a lie.JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-10167165409330863122013-09-18T21:55:00.003-07:002013-09-18T21:56:06.488-07:00Have You Got What It Takes?Have You Got What it Takes?<br /><br />"What skills do I need for wormholes?" is a question that gets asked all the time on the forums. It was asked again a couple days ago and I decided to think about it and write up my personal recommendations.<br />The skills you need do vary based on what class of wormhole you live in and what kind of PVE and PVP activities you partake in so I'll split them up between PVP and PVE and try to cover the class ranges.<br />These skill recommendations are for general wormhole living and are designed to allow you to participate in as many activities that wormholes have to offer as possible.<br /><br /><br />Ok, let's get the very basics out of the way first. <br />You need probing skills. They are the very first thing you need to train if you want to play in w-space and the absolute minimum probing skills you need before venturing into a wormhole are Astrometrics 4 and all the support skills to 3. You should also get the support skills to 4 very early into your wormhole career.<br />Scanning ship wise, you need a covert ops. No, a tech 1 scanner does not cut it. There is one allowable exception and that is if you're in your very first wormhole, you have been there for less than 2 weeks and you are actively training covert ops pre requ skills.<br />You should have your covops skill to 4 and need cloaking 4 so that you can use a covops cloak.<br /><br />Given that there is very little you can do in w-space that does not involve shooting something, you will also need to have some sort of combat ship capability. As a basic start point for low class w-space you should be able to T2 fit a battlecruiser with T1 guns for PVE and be able to fly a T2 fit cruiser with T1 guns for PVP. These are really the bare minimum ships that will let you participate in WH combat.<br /><br />There is also non-combat PVE in wormholes which consists of mining, gas harvesting and PI.<br />Of these I would highly recommend you stay away from mining as it isn’t profitable and you will die. A lot.<br />The PI in wormholes is the best anywhere, regardless of WH class, so it is recommended that you train up some skills for it as it is free income. (That said, I have zero PI skills and don't do it at all, but each to their own). <br />Gas harvesting can be very profitable and training gas cloud harvesting to 5 is a very good investment if you live in a wormhole, along with venture skills.<br /><br />You will also need to train salvaging to at least 3, preferably 4, so that you can get those tasty tasty nanoribbons and Noctis skills to go with.<br />Likewise with hacking and archaeology.<br /><br /><br />Now that the basics are out of the way, let’s break it down by WH class.<br /><br />Class 1 and 2.<br />The above bare basics will do here. A battlecruiser can easily run all the combat sites here and this is as 'entry level' as WH PVP gets.<br />Note that you will still run into a lot of groups with fancy ships but a cruiser will get you started.<br /><br />Class 3.<br />The basics will do here too but you will not be able to run the combat sites by yourself in a battlecruiser so some people in your corp will need to have remote repair skills trained to run sites in small groups.<br />You may want to train battleship skills here as the sleepers start to get bigger but a BC still works.<br />If you do want to solo the sites you can do so but you will need to skill up and invest in a T3 cruiser, command ship or T2/Faction battleship.<br />PVP here is much the same as C1-2s.<br /><br />Class 4.<br />Here you start getting into higher class WH interactions more and how you operate will depend a lot on your static. Basically, the skills you need will depend a lot more on what your static is than on the fact that you live in a C4, specifically what ships you will need for PVE.<br />The sites are no longer soloable and how you run them will depend on your corp. Generally it will involve remote rep Tengus or Domis, or logi supported battleships.<br />At C4 level, you should really have T2 weapon skills and BS skills. You should also be able to fly T2 cruisers, specifically HACs and at least one of recons or logistics, if not both.<br /><br />Class 5 and 6.<br />Here is where the heavy weights of w-space play and if you live here they will expect you to be able to interact with them at least a bit so you should have a decent skill set to play with.<br />While you do not need to bring it to every fight, you should have access to and skills for a well fit PVP tech 3 cruiser in C5/6 space. You should also seriously consider training logistics (specifically the Guardian) if you have not already as Guardians are a vital part to the vast majority of PVP fleets here.<br />At this level you should also at least consider training capital skills as PVE is run almost exclusively with dreads and carriers. If you find yourself attacked, you will also need those capitals to defend yourself. If you don't want to train caps, Loki or Rapier skills are highly recommended as they are used for webbing in PVE.<br />If your corp does not use dreads for PVE, you will need a T2 fit, including guns, battleship.<br /><br /><br />Notes for specific skills and ships.<br /><br />Logistics.<br />If you train this skill at all, and you should, you really should take it straight to level 5. This rule applies everywhere but in wormholes, where you often need to squeeze the absolute most out of your limited resources to come out on top, it is especially important.<br /><br />Tactical Weapon Reconfiguration.<br />Train this to 5. Personally I wouldn’t get in a dreadnaught without T2 siege.<br /><br />Command Ships.<br />These are very good WH PVP ships and are recommended if you can fly them. It is also highly recommended at least a couple people in your corp can fly them and fit links as they make a huge difference for PVP and you will need them for PVE.<br /><br />Salvaging.<br />You need this to 5 to access the advanced sleeper wrecks but you can get around this by rigging your salvaging ship, which you always do anyway.<br /><br />Orca.<br />An orca is very useful to have in all WH classes apart from C1s. It's obviously not a skill everyone will train but your corp will need access to a few orca pilots for collapsing and hauling.<br /><br />Carriers.<br />Not all ships are created equal and for carriers this is especially true. If you're training a carrier, make it an Archon. It is vastly superior to all other carriers in every way. The obvious exception is if you live in a pulsar, in which case train a Chimera.<br /><br />Dreadnaughts.<br />Here you do have some choices, just stay away from the Phoenix as it is just bad. All other dreads are fine to train, though the Moros stands out as top dog in the dread world.<br /><br /><br />This more or less covers everything you'll need to know about skills for wormholes.<br />Additionally, most WH corps will have some sort of fleet doctrines, joining pre requisites or recommended skills they will want you to train which will depend of the corp.<br /><br />As a final note, the nature of WH space is that quality matters. Numbers still play a large part but a highly specialized pilot in the right ship can often turn the tide in a fight. I highly recommend that you find a useful ship that you enjoy flying and skill to fly it at near 100% efficiency and get practice doing so.<br />This goes double for key role pilots such as Guardian, Ewar or capital pilots.<br />JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-44100640675275338882013-09-15T22:03:00.002-07:002013-09-15T22:03:28.402-07:00Anomalous Mining<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Anomalous Mining</div>
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<br /></div>
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It's been a little while since Gravimetric/Ore sites were
downgraded to Anomalies from Signatures and since I have the pleasure of
ganking a few miners in w-space lately, let's have a look at how this change
has affected WHs from the ganker's perspective.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Firstly, let me just say that mining is a profession that
I take zero part in but understand that it is essential to EVE's economy.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
CCP have been giving miners all sorts of handouts on
golden platters over the past 6-12 months or so with the mining barge HP buffs,
cargo buffs and ore yield buffs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, these changes were all mostly aimed at highsec mining to make
it harder to suicide gank miners and to make it more profitable in general to
mine.</div>
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I have no doubt that the recent move of Ore sites to anomalies,
which do not need to be scanned out with probes, was intended by CCP as a
benefit for miners who, in general, are too lazy to scan out sites to mine in
kspace (certainly in highsec).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However,
this 'boost' for miners is a very big double edged sword in wormholes where
needing to probe out the site you are in is not so much a hindrance as it is a
safety buffer.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Before the changes there was no way to find and kill an
active miner in a wormhole without dropping at least core scanner probes, or
more likely combat probes, which the miner has a chance to spot on dscan if
they are watching it like they should be.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
In addition to being able to spot the probes, this meant that
the miner had several minutes from you jumping into the system until you were
even able to be on grid with them.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
By comparison, you can now be on grid with the miner
within 20 seconds of entering the system, even if you have never been there
before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All you need to do is enter
system, hit dscan, notice mining ships, warp to the Ore site.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Add to that a 54km heated point range on a Proteus
(or even more on an Arazu) and you can simply warp to zero and you'll more
often than not be in point range of whatever is there.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Not needing to use probes dramatically reduced the window
a miner has to notice you entering system and if your WH entry is off dscan
from the Ore site, it closes it entirely.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
WH space has always been the single most dangerous area
for mining but now it is out right foolish to do so.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
That said, there are still plenty of people willing to
take the risk to gather their Ore in w-space but since most miners are not
completely stupid, there are a couple significant changes that have occurred
regarding WH mining.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Firstly, while they used to be reasonably common, I have
not seen a Hulk or a Mackinaw in a wormhole for many months.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Miners look to be going far more favourably
for cheap T1 mining ships or even lowly Ventures.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Secondly, virtually every mining ship I have come across
lately has been warp core stabbed (and I have missed a few because of this).</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Bottom line is that the days of max yield fit Hulks in
w-space are well and truly over.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
So what does this mean for the hunter?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, it means a few things.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Miners in wormholes are now very easy to catch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before you needed to have probes and to be
able to use d-scan effectively to locate the ships and then run a combat scan
in as few cycles as possible to catch them and now you just warp to their
site.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, I would highly recommend
bringing 3 points of tackle to guarantee a catch as the ships will be stabbed
way more often than not.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
In practice, the overall change is that there are less
people mining in wormholes now than ever before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The miners that do remain present little
sport as the effort to find them is literally zero and since they were not
smart enough to move their mining operations to a safer area, they generally
are not smart enough to pay close attention to d-scan either, seemingly
preferring to rely of their warp core stabs.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Blowing them up is still a fine hobby, but the
satisfaction of getting a 100% lock off a single probe scan is now gone.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Many PVP players hate all miners on principle and while I
would never join a corp that mines as a regular past time, it is a valid play
style.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
That said, each play style has a time and a place and
wormholes are becoming less and less the place for mining.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
The move or Ore sites from signatures to anomalies was a
pretty big shafting of WH mining by CCP.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
PS:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am going to
invest in a Sabre as missing miner kills to warp stabs is not on.</div>
JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-91901639946660019062013-09-09T23:06:00.002-07:002013-09-10T01:02:58.767-07:00Musings on HACsMusings on HACs<br />
<br />
Ok, so unless you've been living under a rather large rock, you would have noticed that the entire HAC line up has had an overhaul in the latest patch.<br />
<br />
The reception of the new HACs has been generally mixed and I tend to fall in the 'not good enough' camp on the changes but I have decided to fly exclusively HACs on my main for a while to try them out and see if they are a viable alternative to my strategic cruisers for WH armour brawling once CCP take them away from me.<br />
<br />
I actually started this trend before the changes with the Zealot. Before the changes the Zealot was the only HAC even remotely worth a damn for close range armour fleets with the rest of the HACs ranging from pretty bad to god awful to 'lol Caldari'.<br />
<br />
So let's have a look post changes.<br />
<br />
CCP look to have learned at least something from what they did to the poor Rifter and Hurricane in the frig and BC balance passes, ie: making them complete junk compared to the other buffed ships in their class, and the Zealot is still a top level HAC.<br />
<br />
So what about the other HACs?<br />
<br />
Well, I'm not interested in the least in Caldari HACs for 2 reasons; 1) They don't armour tank and 2) as far as I'm concerned, if you're flying a Caldari T2 cruiser that isn’t a Falcon, you're probably in the wrong ship.<br />
Vagabond is also a shield only ship that has very little use in a WH so I'll leave that for now as well.<br />
<br />
This leaves me with the Sacrilege, Munin and the 2 Gallente HACs to armour fit and play with.<br />
<br />
I also decided to go for resilience in my HAC fits since that is what they are allegedly for and so have been going with 5 slot tanks over the more common 4 slot tanks.<br />
The tanks consist of T2 1600mm plate, faction EANM and 3 active hardeners, along with a T2 resist rig for the hole.<br />
This may seem like overkill but the result is that these HACs tank a serious amount more under reps than a Proteus or Legion and even a bit more than a Loki. They can also overheat the tank for even more tank.<br />
Running active hardeners makes them vulnerable to neuting so I have made cap boosters mandatory on the fits.<br />
<br />
The first new HAC I added to my hanger was the Ishtar. I looked at both Gallente HACs but the Deimos still remains a kite/snipe ship that is utterly disappointing up close, where I like to be, and so I quickly dumped it in favour of its drone boat brother.<br />
Note: I'll admit that the new Deimos does have its role but that role is something I have no use for or interest in.<br />
<br />
Since I have T2 heavy drone skills and not T2 sentry drone skill on my main (I know right?! Sue me...) the new heavy drone bonuses on the Ishtar suit me perfectly and I dusted off some Ogre IIs and electron blasters.<br />
The main issue I always found with the Ishtar before the changes was that it was one of those ships that seemed specifically designed to be unfittable. It had high, med and low slots but could barely fit 2 of those properly. <br />
Well, the days of 800mm plate Ishtars with light ion blasters look to be over. I was extremely happy to find that the ship is very fittable now and I was able to get a T2 1600mm plate, MWD, AB, small cap booster and a full rack of medium electron blasters, along with proper tank and tackle, with just a single fitting rig. Very nice.<br />
Stat wise the Ishtar has a bit less EHP than the Zealot (which I'm more or less using as a base line) but a decent amount of DPS more, even with my no damage mod fit. The Ishtar's resistances also lean more heavily into therm/kin than the Zealot's at the expense of its exp resist which I like since explosive is by far the least used damage type in WHs. Yes, it's weak against Lokis which are prevalent but it does considerably better than a Zealot against a Proteus which is very relevant.<br />
<br />
I have not had much chance to play with my Zealot or Ishtar yet but they have both performed very well in the few fights I have used them in.<br />
One thing I will definitely note as a weakness of the Zealot is tracking. If you find yourself alone in a Zealot without a web and get tackled by a frigate, you best hope you have friends close by as you won't be able to do anything to it.<br />
I found this out when I went to kill a Harpy and had to shamefully log in my Loki pilot to come web it.<br />
I'm yet to use either ship under heavy fire but am happy with both so far.<br />
No they don't have Proteus DPS or T3 EHP but they do have Legion and Loki DPS and do tank better under reps than any T3.<br />
<br />
I will stick to the Zealot and Ishtar for now but am looking to try the Munin next.<br />
I really hope the Munin works well and the Minmatar line up is severely lacking in the armour brawler category with the only viable option being the Loki, which I hope the Munin changes have addressed.<br />
Unfortunately, initial EFT fitting do not look promising and I suspect the Munin will not cut it.<br />
<br />
I'll also give the Sacrilege a try but I'm not really a fan of missiles so I'll leave that for last.<br />
<br />
Will do a follow up post once I get to play with all the HACs a bit more.<br />
<br />
JM<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5195584760140045259.post-30773186168981878702013-09-09T20:21:00.001-07:002013-09-09T23:07:00.265-07:00Bravery in the Unknown<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Bravery in the Unknown</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
by Jack Miton</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I have been around in the realm of WHs for a long
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are those who out date me by
a few months by since September 2009, I doubt there has been a week where I
have not visited at least 1 wormhole and certainly not more than a month where
I did not live in a WH.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
There are many people living in WHs today that have a
similar history from whenever they first found the joys of the unknown space
lanes but there are also those new to wormholes who are just discovering their
many mysteries, dangers and joys that we, the 'veterans', often forget or take
for granted.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
To us, wormholes are no longer the scary places of
nightmares where cloaked predators wait to pounce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mechanics of wormholes are our bread and
butter and it is we who are now the nightmares we used to fear.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
In my time I have seen a lot of people do great things in
w-space and I have also seen a lot of people do some monumentally stupid things
and make incredibly bad calls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Such is the way of w-space.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I have been finding lately that I often forget what it is
like to be new to wormholes, to make mistakes due to lack of knowledge and to
follow others blindly into the unknown.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
This brings me to my story.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
As you may or may not be aware, we in SUSU have had
several dealings with the Brave Newbie Initiative over the past few months and
for the past couple of weeks I have had an alt in their lowsec home system
where I have been picking fights, rather meanly, in my PVP Tengu.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Last night I got home and decided to see if any of them
wanted to play.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After checking the
system, there was little to no BNI activity and additionally, there are another
hostile group of 6 or 7 that was also trying to kill some newbies so I wrote
the night off and was going to go to bed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
First I decided to check their Mumble comms (yeah, they
have open comms!) and what should I discover?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The reason their system was so quiet was that there was a C3 wormhole
connected to it and that they had a fleet of 15 or so assorted cruisers, BCs
and BSs bashing a large, undefended tower in it.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Now this was a wormhole, my home turf.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was no way I was going to bed without
at least playing a little so I boated a scout down to probe it out.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Note that this was not the wormhole living part of BNI
but the main lowsec core of the alliance.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Let's take a short break here for a situation/expectation
check.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Situation:</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I have a 15-20man fleet bashing a large POS in a C3 WH
whose only connection is its LS static.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Expectations:</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
- Cloaked scout sitting on the entry hole at all times.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
- At least half the people in fleet hitting dscan at
least every 30 seconds.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
- The other half of the fleet watching for new sigs.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
- At least 3 scouts with probes in the WH to scan new
exits if needed.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
- POS bashing fleet to have full PVP fits on at least half
of the ships.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
- Fleet members to have the exit bookmark, or access to
it in corp bookmarks.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
These are expectations from my WH experience and I would
never in a million years even think about conducting a WH POS bash without all
of them being filled.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
As such, this was my expectation going in and I expected
not to catch them by surprise or to be able to fight a force that size for
long.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
So what was the reality?</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Firstly, no scouts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On the WH or elsewhere, the fleet had zero covert scouts anywhere in system.
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
(Apparently there was a single probe launcher on one of
the bashing ships, 'just in case'.)</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
No one in the fleet was watching dscan and they didn't
notice me until I was on grid.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I cannot talk strictly about fits and I assume there were
some points in that fleet but what I can say is that all of the ships were
afterburner fit because apparently MWDs are bad in wormholes, according to
their FC, and he told them all to AB fit their ships!</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Some members did in fact not have the exit bookmark and
had to ask for warpins when the fleet was leaving.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Given my expectations, I warped in at 50km when I engaged
as I expected their 6-7 cruisers and 2-3 tier 3 BCs to be able to chase me down
and lay down decent damage.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Needless to say, had I realized they were all AB fit, I
would not have been so careful.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
As it was, I managed to kill a bomber and then started to
work on an Oracle but since I was being needlessly careful I was out of point
range and it warped out in deep structure and I missed it just barely at the
next 2 planets it bounced off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I need to
invest in a sabre pilot...</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
After that I went back to the POS but the FC realized
they couldn’t deal with me and warped the fleet back to the WH before I got
into point range.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Shortly after this BNI rolled out the works for me and
camped the WH with fast tackle, a few T3s (including a webbing Loki), and a
kitchen sink fleet with way more DPS than my lone Tengu could handle.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
At this point it was also hitting 1am for me and with
work at 7:30 I didn’t have time to stick around so I waited out my timer and
logged off in the WH.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Always remember: I'm not stuck in here with you, you're
stuck in here with me.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Sadly, this was deep AU time zone and no one else was on
in my corp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Have we had even 5 people,
this would have been much more fun.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
As it turns out, the other hostile party that was camping
their system also found the wormhole at some point during the night and I woke
up to find multiple wrecks and corpses on dscan.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Looking into it quickly, I found that they had bombed the
POS bash fleet to decent results:</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<a href="http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=19557898">http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=19557898</a></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
While this operation did not go as planned for BNI, I
truly hope that they are not discouraged from w-space after this as these kinds
of people are exactly what w-space needs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not for the free kills or laughs at their attempt but for the initiative
they show in braving the unknown and generating content for themselves and others.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
In particular, their FC was a 3 month old character yet
he directed the fleet competently and calmly even under fire.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I spend a lot of time poking around low class wormholes
looking for fights in the very same Tengu and I've lost count of the times the
people who live there simply will not fight in any way, regardless of numbers.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
When faced with an enemy that out classed them, BNI did
not just run and dock/POS up like many of our wormhole brethren are known to
do, rather they reshipped and came back to fight.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
This is the kind of new blood we need and want in
wormholes.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I hope they take their lessons from this event and
continue to participate in the unknown in the future.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
To BNI, there is no mercy in wormholes and you should not
expect it from myself, the environment, or anyone else should you venture there
again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That said, you are most welcome
to fly here again and should I run into you, I'll be happy to engage you more
directly next time.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Take care and keep flying bravely.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
JM</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
JMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15903294950915336456noreply@blogger.com0