Killed Blood Raider FOB using three tinker rattlesnakes yesterday, seeing only 4 Omens in FOB’s defensive fleet. Is it how the thing supposed to work?
Someone later did FOB solo in VNI, twice:
Did we find a bug in FOB defense AI? Were we lucky with our 3xrattlesnakes?
Taking one down with a single VNI seems a bit extreme though it must have taken a while to burn through 3 million HP. Maybe they need a squadron of space superiority fighters to deal with drones.
3 Rattlesnakes seems reasonable. Expected value of loot is 100 million - divided by 3 players.
I have no doubt CCP are studying the data and will make balance changes.
Yeah, they are suppose to be accessible to small groups. If they are too hard no one will do them.
There have been some losses though and I think it is far too early to say whether they are “too weak”. They don’t pay an exorbitant amount so I don’t think there is any danger they are going to become overfarmed anytime soon. It could also be they are tuned to have a random response where most of the time they are relatively simple, but occasional drop an atypically large response fleet and wipe you if get compalcent.
As Do Little says I am sure they are monitoring how the players are doing and will tune accordingly. The VNI kill does seem maybe more like a bug (or maybe there was a fleet of 5 logi repping through the pirate DPS?), but perhaps there is some strategy of killing Guristas/Blood Raiders elsewhere in the system which then leaves the base undefended. In any case, I think we lack the data and don’t have enough experience to tell if they are working as intended, but unless you can somehow get some crazy unbalanced income out of them, I think we afford to give CCP to collect data and tweak things.
As it seems now, the composition of defensive fleet depends on amount of offensive modules in highslots. Since all the rattlesnakes only had cap and shield transfer modules in high, we saw just 4 omens defending the base (which to me sounds quite ridiculous).
Same thing was true for VNI - it had no turrets or missile launchers in highs, and was repping the drones to prevent 4 cruisers defending the base from focusing on drones (as it seems now, the defensive fleet prioritizes logists over everything else).
I’m pretty sure the defense of the FOB should be smarter than that.
Let me repeat - in both cases (3xRattlesnakes and 1xVNI) the defensive fleet consisted of 4 omens producing negligible amount of damage. Drones were ignored by defenses in both cases.
Edited to add examples:
Earlier the same day
This does not look right to me, at all. I’m all for making sure people can take on those structures, but now they just aren’t challenging. Any single ship that can fit drones and tank about 300dps under serious cap pressure can kill those FOBs. I didn’t check, but it seems that any drone ship + couple t1 logis will do the trick as well. Or is it working as intended?
I thought the minimum fleet size to get a payout from these was 10?
Oh so that’s why we only had like 25mil per pilot for killing this thing.
Still, the loot was worth about 200mil, not counting the money we potentially can get from selling the faction standup module bpc (have no idea how much those worth)
Still, even 200mil worth of loot for about 40min of easy FOB bashing sounds like a nice isk/hour rate.
BTW, I see that VNI becomes a standard ship to solo this thing: https://zkillboard.com/kill/66094617/
Single VNI is going to take down FOB in about 1:15hr or so… Most probably without any support from logi.
Until CCP patch this bug / semi exploit of limited spawns in response to drone boats. 
Yep. My main concern here is that they’ll choose the “easy” way out of this thing by allowing defensive fleets to prioritize drones over logi ships, essentially making drone boats unsuitable for FOB assault.
What does the term “tinker” refer to?
RR shield/cap?
remote cap transfer. We only used small shield transfer module to be more “logi-like” so to say 
I don’t think we really needed it. If logi ships are indeed prioritized above everything else by those dumb blood raiders, cap transfer would’ve been enough.
4 large cap transfer modules on each ship seemed to be sufficient to both withstand FOB’s neuts and tank cruisers’ dps. Dunno what would’ve happened against fleet of “normal” size.
Fit we’ve used:
[Rattlesnake, blood raider fob]
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Co-Processor II
Power Diagnostic System II
Power Diagnostic System II
Shield Boost Amplifier II
Shield Boost Amplifier II
Pith X-Type X-Large Shield Booster
Thermal Dissipation Field II
Thermal Dissipation Field II
EM Ward Field II
EM Ward Field II
Large Remote Capacitor Transmitter II
Large Remote Capacitor Transmitter II
Large Remote Capacitor Transmitter II
Large Remote Capacitor Transmitter II
[Empty High slot]
Small S95a Scoped Remote Shield Booster
Large Egress Port Maximizer II
Large Egress Port Maximizer II
Large Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Garde II x2
I found a Garista FOB and dropped by at 100km+ to see what it looked like with a permarun Proteus. 30 seconds later I was locked up, neuted ,webbed, and ecm’d and managed to partial warp out prior to being engaged. What is your VNI fit that could handle this and take down the FOB?
We didn’t use VNI, we’ve used rattlesnakes. I can imagine VNI fit that will tank about 300-400dps under FOB’s neut pressure, but if you really want details you can ask those guys:
What are these?
Do they drop anything?
New pve stuff.
So with Tuesdays patch CCP fixed the issue/exploit that ships with no offensive hi-slot modules only caused a single, small spawn of npc’s from the FOB.
Thing is now this is fixed, no-one will bother with them. The npc spawn rate is frankly bonkers for hi-sec pve. In order to do these you are looking at a gang size approaching an Incursion Vanguard Squad. But the reward is not worth the effort. If I can put together an incursion squad I am going to run incursions!
FOB’s are a good idea, but currently the risk / reward equation is off.
Unless … (put on your tinfoil hats everyone)
High sec dwellers are already having to deal with npc mining teams hoovering up belts, perhaps FOB’s are just another step along the road of making hi-sec unappealing to the masses?
How about some stats @CCP_Larrikin ? how many FOB’s have been killed by proper fleets vs those killed by empty high slotted drone boats?
Some of the first FOB’s went down to Spectre Fleet, but after doing a couple of each they said “meh, not worth it” …https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/78s6ke/an_epilogue_of_the_new_pirate_fobs/.
According to zkill, no Blood Raider FOBs have been destroyed since 08:47 on the 5th, and no Guristas FOBs destroyed since 06:49 on the 5th.
What’s the point developing content that nobody will bother to engage with? It’s simply a waste of time and resources.
Also, throwing more NPCs at players is just lazy game design. FOBs as content actually have a lot of potential - timers, different NPC mechanics, a killmail, attacking a structure etc - why not exploit that potential for the benefit of all players, not just those that can form groups?
I dont know, its a mmo, make some friends and youll go far.
What is the point of playing a mmo if playing with other people is punished and playing solo is the most effiencent way.
I believe the problem is incursions are over blouted compared to everything else in highsec
What are you talking about? Several are dying every day?
