Is this being used as intended?
3 bumping cenotaphs can kill pretty much any ship in any system.
Concord doesn’t matter.
Use warp disruptor to reset 3minute warp timer.
Broken?
Yes. Do you see an issue with this? If so, what?
Also, I would like to formally state that this method of ganking is known as “Hyperchunking”. Kind of fitting since the Cenotaphs work by eating your HP in chunks. Name is my way of paying credit to Globby for his genius in using game mechanics. Here’s a video paying tribute to the greatness of it in its original and perfect form:
The Cenotaphs aren’t doing the bumping. The most popular and most effective ship for freighter bumping is the Machariel.
What do you mean? The Cenotaphs are destroyed by Concord. The presence of Condord isn’t to prevent ganks, but to provide a punishment or retribution for committing a criminal act.
Clever use of game mechanics!
No, not at all. It’s easy to counter.
Yeah Mach can bump but I have seen it being done with just 3 ceno and a hauler. That significantly reduces the risk v reward.
Concord on grid no-longer matters, neither does the sec status of a system. Yes, the ship dies but the ship is a shell. You’re telling me that concord just leaves a bunch of dudes running around your ship blowing ■■■■ up? Doesn’t make sense.
I have nothing against ganking as it is, but this does seem a little dirty even for ganking standards.
“Clever use of game mechanics” this statement is true for everything until it is deemed an exploit.
So you’re saying that the 3 Cenotaphs were bumping you, preventing your freighter from warping? That doesn’t seem very likely.
This is the way CCP has designed the whole ganking experience. Seems like it makes sense to them, no?
What is an exploit exactly? In most cases it’s just using mechanics to your advantage. If you get kited by a frigate with a scram / web, are they exploiting the strengths and weaknesses of that situation in order to produce a better outcome?
No rules are being broken here. Game is being played as designed and as told CCP what would happen when they implemented the 3-minute bump timer.
Yes, it’s intended that ships can destroy other ships in pretty much any system if they bring enough firepower.
The Cenotaph is an interesting ship that can bring a lot of firepower, but it’s also rather expensive and cannot stack damage. Often there are cheaper and more cost-efficient ways to kill other ships if you’re killing in areas of space where loss of ships is guaranteed due to CONCORD.
CONCORD will destroy the Cenotaphs if they illegally attack others in HS space.
If you’re referring to the recent reddit post of a cargo-expanded freighter being killed by three Cenotaphs, it was a low HP cargo-expanded freighter carrying enough value to cover the loss of three expensive Cenotaphs.
That freighter pilot made multiple mistakes to get to that point.
Why would it be?
it takes so long to pull off because of the time the breacher pods take, it can be hard counter by a solo logi
Cenotaph ganking is the most efficient way to gank freighters outside 0.5 and 0.6. What would require 50+ catalysts now requires 3 cenotaphs.
It is clearly overpowered and even those using it admits that. And every day more and more players jumps on this train so I bet it will be nerfed sooner or later.
Why is it overpowered?
- damage ticks even after ship is destroyed, pilot podded or logged off.
- security status doesn’t matter, with this strategy you can gank freighters in 1.0 and it will require same amount of ships as in 0.5. In other words it doesn’t matter how fast will CONCORD arrive at all. The damage is guaranteed.
- basically no counterplay
- requires onlly 3 accounts/players as all three cenotaph pilots can be on same account - you shoot with pilot A you quit and reopen the account, login second pilot etc. then you just need 1 account/player for bumping and 1 account/player for looting
Currently Cenoptaph costs 850mil, you need three and you can gank any freighter that doesn’t use bullkheads. It doesn’t even have to be 3x expanded which is usuallly limitation for freighter ganking even in 0.5/0.6. That means it costs 2.5b to gank such freighter. So as long as the freighter has 5b cargo it is worthwhile.
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Exploit ok, maybe not. But certainly extremely overpowered.
It may replace 50 Catalysts in damage, but costs as much as 200 catalysts.
The only benefit is that it allows you to gank with fewer accounts so that even players who aren’t multiboxing a dozen ships can gank.
And to be honest, I think it’s good that EVE does a tiny step away from the heavy multibox requirements.
Well yes, continuing damage is part of the design. It continues to tick intentionally. This allows the Cenotaph to continue to have effect on a target even if the Cenotaph dies, disengages or the target manages to warp off.
It’s all design.
The fact that this design is good in HS ganks is emergent gameplay.
How?
As far as I know it has exactly the same counterplay as Catalyst freighter ganks.
Don’t get caught, don’t get bumped, don’t be carrying too much value, use bulkheads and if you do get caught only other pilots can save you if they arrive in time with enough force and repairs.
In what way are Cenotaph ganks different for counterplay?
The gank still takes a long time as each Cenotaph has to wait for the previous one’s breacher pod to run out. Plenty of opportunity for counter-ganks to happen if anyone were paying attention.
That’s pretty awesome to hear.
Do you know how ridiculous it is that EVE pushes players to have dozens of clients open to accomplish something?
Even 5 accounts (three cenotaphs, bumper and looter) sounds silly to me, but I say it’s a step in the right direction, as someone who only plays at most two accounts ever.
Yea, which is worth about 200 Catalysts each.
It sounds like the clear counter is to equip those bulkheads so you can only get ganked by four Cenotaphs, while most Cenotaph gankers will be looking for other freighers, easier targets.
How many freighters carry 5 billion in cargo? And wouldn’t that already be profitable to kill in Catalysts?
I’m neither a freighter pilot nor a ganker, but I see to fail the issue. I see a change in meta, emergent game behaviour.
Why does a changing meta immediately need nerfs?
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Has anyone a list of killmails of such “overpowered” breacher ganks? I struggle to find any, even when filtering zKillboard for Freighter Kills…
https://zkillboard.com/asearch/#{“buttons”:[“togglefilters”,“recent”,“rolling”,“label-loc:highsec”,“label-isk:5b+”,“label-capital”,“attackers-and”,“either-and”,“victims-and”,“sort-date”,“sort-desc”,“page1”,“allinvolved”],“includeAssociates”:true}
However, I agree that th Breacher Pod Mechanic is one of the worst and most stupid mechanics every implemented in EVE Online. It literally punishes people for skilling, for investing into their fits or even for winning a fight, since they will die anyway even after breaking tackle or killing the opponent if they can’t find a quick way to dock or jump. Which in most cases they can’t even do, because they will still have an active weapon timer from killing their opponent. 
As one could see in the AT, that ship gets banned most of the time, nobody really enjoys fighting it. Unless he intends to harcore-kite, which is kinda funny, since the mechanic was meant to “motivate people to brawl”. In WH space there are even agreements (or better: statements) that fights are blueballed if one side brings Cenotaphs.
The only people who like those ships are those who either really don’t understand how bad the design is and just drool for “uhh so new, so fancy, so interesting!!!” or those who just want more blingtoys used for curbstomping targets that never had a chance winning anyway.
But well, it has been predicted by smart people the moment it was announced and hitting it with the nerfbat was inevitable (as also predicted). :shrug:
Unfortunately that changes nothing about the fact that the DOT mechanic itself is horribly stupid in design.
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What do you mean basically no counter play? It has one of the easiest ways to counter it. Your statement alone invalidates any point you were trying to make.
Did i miss something in the vid ? I didnt see any ceotaphs ?
The video is from a while back. What you see in it is called Hyperdunking. Game mechanics were eventually changed so that doing that as seen in the video is impossible.
How it worked was you’d bump a freighter off the gate grid (250km+ sometimes more/less). There was no 3 minute bump timer so you’d just keep him bumped and have your bowhead full of ships keeping at range. You’d warp your gankers pod to the bowhead a board a gank ship, shoot at the freighter, get popped by concord, pull concord to a station, then board another gank ship from the bowhead and continue the process until it was dead.
This allowed you to kill a freighter with 1 ganker. The way they nerfed it was by not allowing you to board ships in space while having a criminal timer. This new method for ganking is similar, but also not the same. Since there’s now a 3 minute bump timer you have to “reset” it by applying a warp disruptor to the target before the timer runs out. So each cenotaph has a point on it and it resets the timer, long enough for you to keep it bumped until the dot wears off and you can repeat the process with the next cenotaph.
So while the video isn’t the same as what’s going on now, it’s.. similar.
This seems to run counter to the intended game design. Should have taken 1 player with 12 accounts to accomplish that so they make more money from subscriptions/plex.
I mean, I’ve been doing this and I have 22 accounts. 12 scouts + gankers + support. CCP still getting their $, don’t worry.
Incorrect. Talos or Catalyst ganking can be easily disrupted.
You can bump yourself - they need you to be immobile. ECM can screw smaller fleets of taloses hard too.
Cenotaph is immune against this.
Can you be more specific?
I’m not an expert on Catalyst or Talos ganks.
But can the ganking ships not simply ‘keep at range’ on the target to drift along if the target is being bumped?
Is this really impossible or are gankers not doing this because they want to keep the amount of commands to their dozens of multiboxed ganking ships to a minimum?
Against Talos or Oracles that are ganking a freighter, Bumping is pretty useless. The Freighter doesn’t speed-up from bumps that much and the Range+Speed of the BCs will always be enough.
What you can do against massmultiboxed ganks is bumping a DST, or Battleship with your own specialized bumper, either a very fast Machariel or a 500MN oversized MWD Cruiser (Navy Omen for example). The impact will hurl the DST or Battleship dozens of km away and/or if you hit the ball of ganker ships, some of them will be catapulted like 50km out. This significantly reduces the incoming DPS on their target, I saved multiple DSTs and some Battleships that way. For great fun, gankers can be pretty salty too 
This is of course useless against Cenotaph attacks, because they only need to “tag” the target with the breacher pod once and then the damage is ticking.
But still: can anyone deliver some killmails of that actually happening? Looks to me like we are talking about a pure theoretical issue here and not something that is actually a problem.
And yes, the easiest thing to “counter” it is simply bringing a Logi as escort that repairs against the DOT. And any other ship than a freighter has to be AFK, else the pilot simply warps off or returns back to the gate and jumps. You can’t bump even a Battleship often and fast enough to stop it from maneuvering if the pilot isn’t completely dumb.
They have limited amount of time to shoot. Once they start shooting, if you bump the freighter they can’t keep range. That is 100% fail gank.
Obviously you need alt or another player to do this, but it works. Against Cenotaph ganking not even this works. And the only counterplay is to not get caught (which the carebears always say that this is not a counterplay at all…) . Once you are you can’t do anything at all.
Lol. Machariel bumps the freigher about 20km off. If not more. Talos has 6km optimal, Oracle 16. Oracle has greater falloff, but once the freighter is moving it wil get grazes. Not that anyone uses Oracles to gank freighters…
??? DST will be cloaked. How are you going to bump it? And good luck bumping the Machariel they are bumping with. That is also going to be cloaked prior to the gank (at least mine has improved cloaking device). They know exactly when the target is coming. They do not sit at the gate prior to the gank, they warp in at last second (oracles) or directly on top of the freighter once it appears on the grid (or is bumped enough) via combat probes/fleet warp.
Bumping is not even used in standard ganks much these days. The reason that Machariel is used for freighter ganking is to bump their own freighter if it gets caught by any chance.
Thats not the point how “far” it can bump a freighter, but how fast.
The BCs can simply keep up with a bumped freighter and it will be dead before it is too far out of range.
I fly laserboats for 20 years, for an Oracle to get ‘grazes’ on a Freighter, that Freighters movement is absolutely no issue. It has to be way out of range for that to happen, and it won’t from a simple bump.
Do I need to go on?
Most DSTs aren’t. If they are ganked, they either didn’t bother to do a Cloak/MWD or were decloaked and tackled. So you have no problem bumping them. I know that because I have done it.
No one said that. You bump the Kronos or Vindicator or Rattlesnake they are trying to gank. And that works pretty, well. I also know that because I have done it.
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