Unless they’re immune to ECM (or falcons get a serious nerf, which is possible) they’ll never be worth the money they cost. Sure you’ll be able to blow up ratters and people who engage you solo (but hey, you can do that already in a vagabond), but the first small gang you meet is going to take away your expensive toys.
As to availability they take quite a wide variety of stuff to construct (some of it from deadly level wormholes) so it may be a week or so before we see one in game as people are still working out how to cope with that pve level.
Meanwhile, for those who are curious, Kenny recently fucked the permacamp in Pr- and dropped towers in 49-, after which the AKA (Anti-Kenny-Alliance) forces organized an OP to bust Kenny forces. We failed. Numbers weren’t high enough and with 1400+ people in local, we did some damage but ultimately lost close to a dozen cap ships (if not more) for roughly equal support kills on both sides.
Lag was horrible, but combat was still possible.
Razor pilots have been told that at least for the next month or two, there is to be no ratting at all and we’re all supposed to be down in the combat theatre with ships that we’re not afraid to lose. If we don’t stop Kenny here, they’ll be able to push back into Delve.
Have you been in many fleet fights? Or faced 50+ roaming gangs? I’m not asking to be snarky, but until you’ve experienced that sort of combat, what counsel wolf is saying probably won’t make sense. There’s a reason, for example, that all the major alliances use buffer tanks on their fleet ships, and their support ships, rather than active tanks. And that reason is, simply, when you come under fire even the best tank in the game will not have enough time to complete many cycles and the HP’s that can be repped are simply insignificant when compared against a good buffer tank.
And your tank really doesn’t matter when you come under concentrated fire. Even battleships that can survive double doomsday blasts will melt in seconds flat if the enemy fleet primaries them and isn’t lagged to shit. Buffer tanks add valuable seconds (and seconds are life itself in combat). Active tanks mean nothing. Hell, with ten Zealots on you, you’ve got something like 2500 DPS hitting you, and that’s if they’re at maximum range. If you’re primaried by a sniper HAC gang (and especially if you’re bubbled), no tank in the game will save you other than the “GTFO and warp/jump” tank.
Oh, and checking out the subsystems, I really don’t see flying a T3 ship any time soon (and I’m almost at 50 mil SP’s myself). My Zealot is already nearly as effective a sniper as the Amarr T3 ship, at a fraction of the cost, and I won’t lose a single SP if someone pops my Zealot. If you’ve got your subsystem skill trained to V, even for a rank 1 sill, that’s a hell of a lot of time lost if you get popped. Even losing a subsystem skill at IV would be a real bitch. And unless my math is really off, a T3 ship with subsystems only to III doesn’t perform all that well when compared with a HAC/Recon whose pilot has those skills at V. For the price of losing a level IV rank 1 skill ,I’d much rather put half a day of training towards something I’d actually keep once I finished skill training.
Yeah, they do look like fun solo ships, but in a roam or a fleet fight I’d bet they’ll be primaried, fast. As it is I wouldn’t want to take them out on a solo hunting trip because I’d be nervous about jumping into bubble camps. Hell, my Rapier was almost caught by a bubble camp a few hours ago. And as counsel wolf points out, a Vaga can do the job quite well anyways (at least against anything lighter than a well tanked BS that isn’t taking heavy rat fire, or a drake).
T3 seems to be a toy for those with more than enough SP’s and more than enough cash.
I’m not seeing them as solo ships, I am seeing them as Gang ships. But in terms of the Proteus, the tank isn’t even active, it’s passive, it’s got 3200 armor HP native, and resists better than a Deimos/Ishtar if you’re using the right subsystem. We’re not talking about getting into major combat situations here, that’s what the Megathron is for. I’m thinking of it for roaming around W-Space.
As for fleet engagements I’ve been in ones that involved 40+ ships so yes I know what it’s like to watch a Raven pop in like two seconds. That being said, if fleet war was what you were thinking of using the ship for then you’ve got the wrong idea. Get 5 dudes in a gang with 5 Strategic cruisers, and you’re going to have a seriously mean little gang.
I just don’t see what those 5 guys could achieve in t3 cruisers that the same guys couldn’t do in say a falcon 2 vagabonds and 2 zealots for a small fraction of the price and without the annoying SP loss. In fact in a fight between those 2 setups I’d put my money on the HACs and recons.
It’s not quite the doom and gloom that you might paint it with:
The pr- camp lasted a month, by any metric it was an incredible success. In that month we melted 500 faction poses and took sov over most every system in Delve.
They had to call in help from a vast array of unreliable people to get the camp broken. If AAA+SE+Coven+Atlas+assorted others hadn’t come to help them Kenny would still be spinning in pr-. Many of that list are pvpers of the ‘good fights’ variety who won’t hang around for long long meatgrinder engagements.
In the midst of the fight over 49- we managed to break EXE’s JB link to empire. EXE is now en route to a slow logistics death.
The timer is ticking on our sov 3s (in fact SVM ticked over today, the other station systems wil follow in the next 10 days or so). Once those kick in kenny is fighting fortress delve again, only this time they’re doing it with no income and no place to base out of.
The cap losses hurt for sure, but GS pilots at least get replacements and it’s likely other alliances will have similar programs. We also have the dyspro moons of delve providing money, Kenny have no income, their losses will hurt more. What is more worrying is the new physics that occurs when you cyno in a blob of cap ships (I’m sure you’ll have heard the RzR crew complaning about this) but that affects both sides.
For all the fact that kenny et al ‘won’ the battle yesterday we still have a substantial pos majority and they managed to destroy not a single tower. Goonswarm has fought this kind of thing before, losing the fleet battles but winning the strategic war. They have to spend hours each day pounding their BS against resist heavy caldari poses covered in ECM mods, all we have to do is put stront in them and rep them up after the russians go to bed.
As for the ‘no ratting at all’ rubbish I’d be a little worried about that. generally we see things like compulsory ops and 100% tax rates from our enemies not our allies, if the game ceases to be fun, then someone somewhere is doing it wrong.
At this point I really have to ask how often you’ve come up against competent enemy Falcons.
One Falcon can easily remove 2-3 ships from effective combat from 240 km away. There’s a reason I admitted in my original post that they’re a likely nerf target.
Here’s a tidbit that might interest people of the popcorn munching delve war spectating variety.
There’s long been speculation that the AAA betrayal of goonswarm and ROL’s seccession from Red Alliance were fuelled by real world cash from an ‘anonymous benefactor’ Evil Thug admitted that he had been payed off in a chat we managed to get a transcript of but that was just hearsay etc. Then the following post appeared on the russian eve discussion forums. Theres a post from one guy then a reply from another, the second post is the interesting one (translation courtesy of one of the goonswarm members):
So we now have a player who has admitted dumping $100k of real money into the current war, which is just incredible.
A corp that splintered off the main Russian alliance (Red alliance) forming its own alliance (Red.Overlord). The politics behind it are vastly complicated and mostly impenetrable to non russians but the spark event was over goonswarm preventing ROL running a complex in goonswarm space which was worth roughly 1-2b isk per day to them.
It turns out one of the leaders of ROL had sold rights to run this complex to a tenant corp (we think for RL money and which rights were of course not his to sell) and when called out on this chose to declare eternal vengance rather than admit he was wrong. Then people with serious real money started buying up a power block to oppose us which I presented evidence for in a previous post (interestingly enough we have absolutely no reason why)
Now that we’ve abandoned our old holdings ROL have largely taken them over (including the complex constellation), so we’ll see how long they stay interested in the delve war now that there’s nothing really at stake for them in it.
Is a good read for anyone with even a passing interest in EvE. Columns should ideally be read in date order, I wasn’t aware of the most recent column when I wrote the post from the rich guy a few posts ago, so that column covers some of the same ground, only better.
Well, not gloom and doom, but 49- is within jump range of 319, and having an enemy foothold in 49- is bad news. The fact is that if we want to turn this into a mopping up action, we have to stop BoB asap.
Oh, undeniably. It worked very well and allowed Delve to be purged. And it was time for it to end anyways. I’d wager that the reason that so much of the NC has drifted away is that PR- brings back bad, bad memories of VFK- and those IRON cowards. Not to compare you to IRON by any extent, but the opening stages of the Max Campaign were some of the worst time I’ve ever spent in EVE.
That is very good news.
RZR participation has dropped significantly, unfortunately. Largely due to PR-, I’d argue. We had roughly 50 members NPC’ing up in Tenal the night the 49- clusterfuck went down. I can understand compulsory participation and such and I really don’t have a problem with it. Most established characters should have a missioning alt or something anyways, and special accommodations can always be made for those who need to earn ISK. Besides, I’ve never heard PvE described as fun. And we’re still allowed to roam
As someone who can’t play until he gets a new computer, I must encourage that you guys keep this thread going. If I can’t play EVE, at least I can read about it to keep me busy. (my laptop doesn’t have the right shader files since the update and my desktop’s motherboard is getting flakey)
BTW… you caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan run EVE without the right shader, you just can’t undock or use a mouse cursor. And you run at 1 FPS. But, in case you’re able to switch skills or market pvP without a cursor… from a Razor alliance mate:
The current AF (assorted ‘foes’) gang shooting a Dickstar[sup]tm[/sup] in 49- numbers 30 BS, down from ~700 a few nights ago. So Razor are doing just fine participation wise, we really appreciate everyone who shows up though, especially in euro time.
Yeah, I’m sure that the RZR CEO’s had a ‘come to Jesus’ talk with their members, and now participation isn’t so low anymore I think most folks in RZR are there because they like pewpew. And now that we’re fighting again instead of gate camping, we should see a dramatic change.
Edit: wait, just read that again. The whole gang involved in combat now numbers 30, not 300? Weird… I just noticed that an op had been scheduled since I logged in last night. Ah well… keep up posted please I can’t X up just yet.
