Transport Ship Bonuses

As my security status drops, I have had to consider how I'm moving my gear out so I can continue to pew. This led me to look into the Transport Ships category. Particularly, I'm looking at the cloaky transports that can fit Covert Ops Cloaks. Let's be honest, these ships are pretty great for logistics runs. They're relatively fast, align well, and they have a decent cargohold. The cloaky transports are fantastic, and you have no excuse for dying in them in lowsec. Even in null, your odds are still pretty darn good.

Here's my problem though. Every single ship in the "Transport" class has that stupid bonus to either armor or shield repair bonus. Let's break it down with a Viator. The fitting layout is one high, three mids, three lows, and two rigs. Now let's consider what modules and rigs are essential: Covert ops cloak and microwarp drive. After that, its at least agility modules and rigs and maybe cargo mods if you're greedy or you really need it. What does that leave the ship with? Not a lot, to be honest. At all V skills, it has plenty of CPU left, but only 2 MW of power grid. Not a lot of room on there for an armor repairer, huh?

Looking through all of the cloaky transports, the song remains the same. The decreasing order of cargo size runs Viator, Prorator, Crane, and Prowler. The order for align time is just the opposite. All four of them have distinct issues with tanking though, especially the active variety. Fitting for the required Cloak/MWD plus tank leaves room only for small armor repairers and either small or maybe medium shield boosters. I can't find any fit that tanks more than about 100 DPS. Holy useless bonus, Batman.

The thing is, these ships shouldn't be super tanky. If there should be such an industrial, its the other half of the transport ships. The covert transports have safety in their cloaks. Given this, there is no reason to have an active tank bonus for these ships. In fact, there's almost no reason to train Transport Ships past level one unless you need the CPU for the Covert Ops Cloak for some reason.

There are a few ways the Transport bonus could be fixed for these ships. First, take out the armor or shield repair bonus. Its useless, no one uses it, and even a frigate will roast your Transport if it gets caught. Replace this bonus with a new one, that could go a few different ways. The most logical would be either a bonus to cargo or navigational skills. The cargo bonus would be much appreciated since they run a bit light on space as it is. The navigation bonus could be better agility, better speed, longer duration of afterburners and MWD's, or even something else. All of these would be useful, but none are present right now. You could even just add a passive resist or HP buff, and it would still be more useful than the active tank bonus right now. Something needs to change.

Transport Ships don't need a change like some other ship classes do, but right now they have a 100% useless bonus. Given that CCP is undergoing such an effort to tweak ship balances, it makes sense that they give this class a quick once-over. I'm looking forward to being able to say "I told you so," if and when they get around to looking at these ;)

Officially A Bad Person & A GCC Rant

After just five short days in Waffles, I'm already below -2.0, meaning I'm not allowed in 1.0 space. In my book, that makes me officially a "bad person," if the negative security status previously wasn't enough. And the kill that put me over the edge, you may ask? Total domination. I was out roaming in a Myrmidon, and came across this little beauty. He didn't even put up a fight. -2.0 killmail. Yup, that's one cyno frigate down. Nothing like a good fight to push you to a new milestone.

Going lower on the sec status scale has been something that I've been considering for a while now. I'm looking forward to going -10.0 in the coming weeks. Its mostly just a badge of honor, but its a nice one to have.

The only part that bothers me with the lowered security status is that it makes logistics a little bit more difficult (see: logging in an alt). Related to that is the fact that my Macbook is on its last leg here. I've had it for three years, and its pretty burnt out from so much Eve (oh, and that engineering degree that put hours upon hours of running Matlab). Anyway, after flying the Viator on my alt to get gear out here, I'm not too worried. On the other hand, my Viator fit only has 7.7k m3 of cargo space, meaning it can't even fly out a cruiser hull. I'll have to look into some other options for that. Regardless, I'm headed towards a nice, even -10.

Now, on to my GCC rant. I know I'm not the first person to say this, but GCC is just not a fun game mechanic. The other night when a gang disrupted our lovely little POS shoot, I aggroed one of the frigates that wasn't red to me, giving me GCC. Once their gang took off, we resumed the POS shoot. I didn't realize that going back to shooting the POS continues to extend the timer with every shot, effectively keeping GCC for as long as we were out there. To recap, besides the 15 minute timer, which is already too long, any aggression (even legal war decs) keeps restarting the timer. That doesn't make much sense to me.

Personally, I think GCC should be changed to five minutes after the last illegal aggression. Five minutes is more than enough time to get away from the bad people who shot you, but it doesn't waste a pirate's night waiting out GCC. Also, extending the timer for legal aggression doesn't make much sense at all to me. If you're going about business as usual, there's no reason to get more criminal flagging. I'm actually surprised this mechanic hasn't been tweaked by CCP in recent memory, but here's to hoping that does happen and soon.

Recruiting My Roommate

Settling into my new place IRL, I was chatting with my new roommate about Eve. He's a big time gamer, but had never taken part in our lovely little universe. On the first day we got down here I tried to sell him on it, but he refused, saying he had never really gotten into MMOs. "Just wait," I thought. Its been a little under two weeks, and I got him to fire up the client and log in the other day. Man, its a different take on the New Player Experience when you actually have a new player in front of you.

When he first logged on, the character creator was the first part that popped up, naturally. He'd never really been interested in creating characters in previous games and so he decided to randomize until he saw an option he liked. Then he got to the screen where you have to take a picture of the character and was amazed by the level of detail in facial expression. After a "Wow," he was back to the previous screen, making sure his character was done exactly how he wanted. Hooked already.

Once he got in game, I directed him towards the tutorial missions. He's generally been PvE focused in other games, and I told him that it would be a great way to learn general controls. Its pretty funny watching him buzz around in a Velator doing approximately 45 DPS. He's enjoying it though. He turned the graphics up to high and fell in love. I'm surprised that two things I take for granted (character creator and graphics) were two big selling points for him as a new player. As a side note, the one thing he hasn't liked so far is the general UI. Fair point.

I have to say, its been an experience for me so far, and I can't imagine what he's thinking. Questions like how do I warp and how do I train a skill are beyond foreign to me, but that's the level he's at. I think my biggest problem is trying to get him involved in too much. I want to get him set up with EFT/PyFa, Evemon and iPhone apps. I want to get him into Pvp. Its a bit frustrating for me because he's just not ready yet. Hopefully he can get it relatively figured out soon and I can take him out on a roam or at least point him in the right direction. Regardless, it could be a lot of fun having some more RL friends get hooked on Eve. Let's hope CCP's work on the NPE works like a charm this time.

Wrapping up the POS Bashing

Tonight was another night in the Oracle cleaning up some of the space trash. Luckily, the Waffles & PL supplied some dreads to help drop the POS's coming out of reinforced. Its unbelievable how much quicker it is to take down a POS with Cap support. I pity anyone who has to do it any other way.

Everything was going smoothly for quite some time. On the third POS of the night for me, local spiked and in came a decent sized gang. Our fleet didn't have much in the way of light tackle given our mission, but we had to stick around to support the dreads. The enemy fleet got tackle on a couple dreads, so they went into siege and waited out their timers. Once this happened, our fleet was committed, at least for the short term. As the battle went on, we ended up taking down a large part of their fleet before they warped off. I was impressed to see the results. The dreads jumped out safely to a friendly cyno at the end of their siege cycle.We held the field.

Apparently there is only one more day of POS shooting left. After that, its on to actually targeting and violencing ships instead of towers for a while. I'm most certainly looking forward to that. I've racked up a few kills this week, but nothing really of interest. Its time to start getting back to basics. Looking forward to seeing what gangs the FCs are taking out this weekend and learning the ropes for real. My plan is to stick to tackle, bombers or battlecruisers to get my feet wet. I'm ready to go.

Joining SniggWaffe

Over the weekend, I applied and joined up with SniggWaffe. The Waffles are affiliated with Pandemic Legion, but from what I've gathered they don't directly fly together too often. No problem for me there. I want to jump into low & null and take fights where I can get them; I don't need to be actively flying with PL members all the time.

Not sure when I picked up the massive bounty btw

Why the change? For me it was pretty simple. RvB is great, but I needed something more. I'm not going to pay for multiple accounts so that I can smash Rifters into other Rifters forever. Again, that's no knock on RvB at all, but I want to upship and take on some bigger challenges.The question, then, was a matter of where. I'd known of SniggWaffe for a while, and saw on the forums that they were recruiting. As I've said before, I respect PL, so I decided this would be a natural choice.

Upon joining, I had to wait for forum access for comms, putting me a bit on the outside for fleets. I was still able to get on board for a good old POS bash though. All I had around was a Tornado, which does the job well but wastes a lot of ammo at the same time. I spent most of the weekend grabbing ships, shuttling them in via a Viator and fitting them. I'm glad to be mostly done with that part of the process.

A banana boat with Tachyons

Tonight we were still bashing POS's. Some we had to reinforce and some were coming out of RF, but it was pretty rough both ways. I did learn my lesson regarding the Tornado though. An Oracle with T1 ammo has no need to waste charges.  Its a fantastic POS take-down ship, which is just like being the best at winning staring contests... its really just not all that great.

I did manage to get in one good fight tonight, but sadly I was on the wrong end. A fleet mate and I split a gang across a gate and tried to take down a Sleipnir before getting the hell out of there. The isolation worked pretty well, but I botched a jump instead of a reapproach and got caught up. I neuted the Sleipnir and gave it everything I had, getting him into hull before I dropped. It certainly would have been a nice kill to start my time in Waffles. I think the pilot's direct quote in local was "I JUST PEED MY PANTS." Yeah, it was that type of close. Oh well.

Its been a very solid start to the new corp overall though. I'm well settled and ready to hit the ground running. The first deployment should be a damn good time too. The next task is finally getting the dust off of that Thanatos and getting it over here. Meanwhile, I'm hoping for some actual fleets instead of POS bashes (for at least some part of this week). Time will tell.

Boosting The Battle: Command Ships vs T3s

At this point, its pretty apparent that CCP is going through a large-scale rebalancing effort for all ships. As I've talked about in previous posts, I think its been very well done so far, with the exception of only Supercapital roles perhaps. One thing I'd like to bring up is the current roles of fleet boosting ships. I know that Rixx posted a piece on how he thinks off-grid boosting should be removed altogether, but I'm not going to argue either way on that issue. While off-grid boosting is still a part of the game, I think the balance between Command ships and T3's needs to be looked at.

Right now, Strategic Cruisers are much more effective at providing links. The easiest comparison to look at is the Loki & Claymore. With the Loki Defensive - Warfare Processor subsystem, the Loki gets 5% bonus to effectiveness of Skirmish Warfare links per level. The Claymore only gets 3% per level of Command Ships. Right off the bat, that seems like a problem to me. That's especially true given that the Defensive Subsystem skill is a 1x multiplier versus Command Ships 8x, and Command Ships require a much larger skill investment overall with Racial Cruiser and Battlecruiser V.

This isn't even the start of the problem though. Tech 3's are incredibly versatile. Anyone who is using a T3 as a pure booster (alt) will clearly set it up with the Covert Subsystem and likely an expanded probe launcher. This can easily be setup with 3-4 warfare links to boot, no problem. What you get out of that is an unbelievable advantage: a ship that can launch probes, cloak up, provide a warp-in and then GTFO and boost you to victory. That's a pretty awesome advantage for "solo" or "small gang" pvp.

The Claymore, on the other hand, has almost none of those advantages. It has the lower bonus for warfare links and none of the cloaky-warp upside. You can fit an expanded probe launcher on it, but it has no bonus for scan strength of probes or fitting requirements. It can field three warfare links without need for Command Processors, but the Loki has no problem tacking on two or three of those to get the links fitted. The only advantage currently to Command Ships is that you can fit these three links without gimping a combat fit. But with boosting as it stands today, very few people bring their link-fitted ships on grid anyway.

This whole deal doesn't seem quite right in my opinion. T3's should not outdo Command Ships in the role that CS's were designed for. Strategic Cruisers were meant to be a jack of all trades, not the ultimate ship for every task. The balance is clearly off.

What's the answer then? There are a few options. First of all, if RJ's proposition of ending off grid boosting goes through, the problem would solve itself in terms of balance between these classes. No one will leave a gimped Loki on grid to get primaried, but the Claymore (and other fleet command ships) can hold its own, especially with appropriate Logi to prop it up. But if those changes don't go through and off-grid boosting remains, the bonuses on these ships need to be changed to bring them in line. Either Command Ships need a buff or T3's need a nerf or maybe even both. A cruiser should not be beating a dedicated bonus-providing battlecruiser hull. No questions asked.

I hope CCP takes a look at this over the next few months (years?). Its not necessarily an overwhelmingly important fix, but the current situation is out of balance nonetheless. Give Command Ships back their rightful place in fleets and as off-grid alts!!

Three Years in Eve

My first character's three year birthday in Eve was two days ago, and I can't believe its been that long already. The best part is I'm having more fun now than I've had yet in Eve (Note: If you're a carebear, please, please, please go try PvP somewhere. It doesn't matter what form, just go freaking do it).

Let's recap the journey over the past year. I finally stopped being a little bitch and started shooting other peoples ships. I have just shy of 60M SP and just over 400 kills. Its nothing crazy, but I'm starting to come into my own, I'd say. Also, just like CCP's prediction regarding the three year mark for players, I shouldn't be going anywhere any time soon. I think I'll be in Eve as long as my schedule allows it and the game doesn't tank (dont mess this up, Dust 514).

What's next? I'm glad you asked because I have some goals for my next year in Eve. First and foremost, its about PvP. I plan on getting over 1000 kills lifetime, and hopefully over 1000 on the year. Its ambitious, but I want it. In line with that, I'd like to cross into Battleclinic's top 10,000 pilots. I'm around 40,000 right now, but I've been trending upward pretty rapidly. I'd also like to start FC'ing. I feel like its the logical next step in my internet spaceship career. I feel pretty confident that I could step into that role. I'll probably welp a couple of cheap fleets first, but I'll get there.

I suppose my last goal is monetary. I'd like to cross 20 billion in liquid isk. That might actually be the toughest on the list, especially as the more I PvP, the more isk I spend.The most difficult part about this one is just keeping motivated to log in and change orders regularly. I usually use that time to catch up on podcasts though, so life isn't too bad.

To wrap it up, cheers to my best year yet. Here's to year four being better still. No bitter vet syndrome here. See you in space.