Post-Inferno Incursus

The other day I was roaming about the Forge and wandered into RvB's FFA system. I'll poke my head in there sometimes, but its often unoccupied. I was in a trusty Rifter and feeling pretty cocky. I saw an Incursus jump through the gate and knew I had him from the start. I was doing everything right. I was keeping out by the edge of scram range to utilize my falloff versus his, overheating guns. When he got me into armor, I had my overheated small repairer ready to go. There was no way I was losing the fight.

TFirish3's Rifter was destroyed.

At first I was confused. I had him to low armor at one point and I was sitting pretty. After the fight, the pilot asked me how I was pumping out so much DPS without any damage mods. I'm pretty sure we both thought I had it. So what happened?

Inferno happened. I had forgotten all about the buff to Incursuses (Incursi?), and to Merlins for that matter. The previous bonus to falloff was instead changed to an armor repair bonus, and there was some more general tweaking. I fired up PyFa today to see just how strong the Incursus has become. Results are as follows:

[Incursus, Inferno Incursus]

Damage Control II
Small Armor Repairer II
Adaptive Nano Plating II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II

1MN MicroWarpdrive II
Warp Scrambler II
Stasis Webifier II

Light Neutron Blaster II, Federation Navy Antimatter Charge S
Light Neutron Blaster II, Federation Navy Antimatter Charge S
Light Neutron Blaster II, Federation Navy Antimatter Charge S

Small Hybrid Collision Accelerator I
Small Hybrid Burst Aerator I
[Empty Rig slot]

Hobgoblin II x1


Well that's quite a fit. I was able to pack on a full rack of neutron (most powerful) blasters, the full MWD/scram/web complement, and still had 4 slots in the lows to play with. The small armor repairer is a must-have for the solo/small gang option. After that, it was all about boosting resists and speed. With this little fit, the Incursus has 195 DPS, 57.5 HP/s repair, and goes about 3.3 km/s. On the other hand, that Rifter I lost has 126 DPS, 40.1 HP/s repair, and does about 1 km/s (Afterburner fit, still has room for MWD if desired). No wonder why I lost. That's one heck of a boost for the Incursus.

Needless to say, I'm eagerly awaiting the delivery from Red Frog Freight to Blue HQ in Liekuri. Its nice to see Gallente ships becoming useful again. Incursus, here I come.

Some Inferno Changes Rumored

Blake over at k162space linked a pastebin entry with a few interesting changes yesterday. Here's the link to the pastebin, which Blake said he found at Reddit.

To break it down, it looks like we have two big time (potential) changes. One is for industry and one is for combat. In combat, we've got the introduction of Micro Jump Drives (MJDs?). From what I'm reading, it seems that MJDs are a navigation system that is explicitly noted as a Battleship class module. It has a spin-up time, ie not instantaneous, but when it activates, it shoots the ship 100km in the direction it was pointing. When the ship lands it still has its same velocity. Also, there is a signature radius bloom akin to MWDs while the MJD is spinning up. Lastly, it says that ships are affected by warp scramblers and warp disruption fields. So does that mean an MJD is shut down by these? Not so sure, but it does certainly make sense.

My initial reaction to MJDs is meh. I somewhat understand the mechanics, but its not quite there yet for me. Battleships are big and slow. These new drives give them they ability to dictate range to some extent. The problem is that whole "big and slow" thing gets them caught before they get to use the new GTFO ability. Another possible thought is that the MJD could also be partially to combat Tier 3 Battlecruisers to some extent. I still see it as problematic though. By the time the BS lands on grid again after a micro jump, would it realistically be able to lock a nano BC and scram it in a reasonable amount of time? I'm still thinking no on that one.

Overall, I understand that Battleships could certainly use a buff. The 3rd Tier BCs definitely put Battleships farther away from the front lines in many cases. The Battlecruisers are faster and more agile than Battleships and they generally pump out similar damage. The MJD might be a step in the right direction, but I think to be a truly effective BS buff, the spin up time has to be relatively short, and optimally, you could choose a distance (say between 100km and 1000km) to Micro Jump to. There are certainly more potential stipulations or add-ons, but that's what jumped out at me to start.

The second major change thrown into the pastebin is that NPC drones are getting bounties put on their heads. Hopefully CCP has the good sense to take away drone alloys if this is the case. Otherwise its just a huge buff for the DRF. Regardless, this puts drones on par or better than other rats, creating uniformity to NullSec space. If the alloys are removed though, this is a huge buff for the mining profession, and you can bet on it having a huge impact on all market operations too. I'm going to send CCP Diagoras a tweet to see if he can tell us what percentage of minerals come from drone alloys. I hope he can field the question and its not too specific. If we do get an answer, it should be indicative of just how important mining is about to become.

The drone ratting change could be pretty crazy. It actually relates to something I've been thinking about in terms of botting recently too. I know people lament the amount of bots in Eve right now and many say that CCP wasn't hard enough on them with the new banning initiative. My concern is that the bots really do help prop up the economy. If the minerals they produce come back to HighSec and get turned into the ships that everyone is buying, the decreased supply of minerals is going to drive up ship prices.

 

 

Supply Shift Inward Increases Price Levels

I think such a change would probably just be for a short while, but it could be significant. Prices would probably spike for a month or two after alloys get nerfed, but then mining will become profitable enough for people to start actually doing it again. I still think that mining needs a legitimate buff in terms of the activity itself rather than a nerf on drone alloys, but its certainly a start for the mining profession. 

As a disclaimer, none of this information is official yet. Not even close. On the other hand though, I saw a similar pastebin regarding Crucible changes before they came out, and most of them were true. That one introduced Tier 3 BCs among other things, and the only legitimate changes we saw were that the Naga became a Hybrid boat and the Talos lost its web bonus and drones. Sidenote: that would have been an incredibly sexy Talos to fly. Anyway, just thought I'd be thorough and not get everyone's hopes up too much. It all looks plausible though. Waiting on the dev blog then.

Inferno Dev Blog Teaser

Just when it seemed like Dev Blogs had all but settled down, CCP Unifex posts one releasing the name and some core concepts for the summer expansion. Its mostly a lot of nothing, but he does hint at some interesting concepts.

• "Reinvigorating Concord-sanctioned warfare" - Redesign of the War Dec mechanic, clearly. Should be interesting to see. This should have an interesting impact on CSM campaigns, especially Kelduum Revaan who has made this a key part of his platform. Given that it'll be done before he even could take office, that can't really be a major selling point anymore (besides revising it if CCP messes this one up). 
• "Looking to introduce many new things which will mix up all forms of combat in a way not seen for a long time" - If anyone has even the slightest clue what this means, please post in comments immediately.
• "Factional Warfare will be seeing changes to make it more relevant and fun by giving real reasons to fight for your faction" - This sounds somewhat encouraging. FW has been a growing interest of mine recently, and it sounds like it needs a boost pretty significantly. I hope Mittani hasn't convinced CCP to make Faction Warfare "Nullsec Lite" though.
• "Revealing more concrete steps in the link between Eve and DUST 514" - Pretty straight forward here. Just please don't mess up Eve too much.

 The Dev Blog mostly seems like a lot of nothing, and Unifex admits that. It definitely is intriguing however. It sounds like there will be a series of small releases over the coming months, and the full Inferno will be released in the May-June time frame ("Just before the summer"). I think the big positive to take away from this is that there doesn't seem to be much fluff. CCP is apparently still operating along the same general philosophy as Crucible, but with the increased time they can roll out some bigger features as well. Its going to be quite the spring season with the CSM elections and all of the hopefully awesome Dev Blogs coming out.