Endurance needs some love

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

The Endurance has been around for some time now, and I very much like the aspect of cloaky mining, however barely anyone uses it, and despite my love for cloaky ships, I hardly can convince myself to use it instead of a Skiff or Procurer.

The issue lies with the low harvesting amount and the lack of a proper storage, which makes it unsuitable for both safety mining and “behind the lines” mining, which is the actual purpose of the entire ship.

The Endurance is the direct competitor of the Skiff, as it is an advancement from the Procurer and I need to invest quiet some skill-time in either direction. While the Skiff gives a great amount of eHP and other defensive options, the Endurance gets the cloaky advantage and a much lower signature. Tests in PvP situations have showns, that the lack of eHP is well balanced with the cloaking advantage and the ability to warp away much faster. So I don’t think there is a need to change the defensive part at all.

What is a problem is the actual resource gain. Let’s compare some numbers (all-5 char, ore strip miner I):

Ore
Endu: 13.5 m³/s (10.1 + 3.4)
Skiff: 24.4 m³/s (18.7 + 5.67)

Ice
Endu: 19.1 m³/s
Skiff: 29.8 m³/s (24.8 + 4.94)

This immediately shows the problem: no miner would be willing to sit in a ship that harvests 50% less than the direct competitor. The Endurance even mines less than the Procurer, which means: it is still more efficient to use a throw-away Procurer than an Endurance, as the ship alone costs more than a fully fitted Procurer.

Also the Endurance doesn’t work well as a “behind-the-lines” mining ship for the simple problem: where to put the ore/ice you mined? If you manage to sneak in an Orca or a Freighter, then it is hardly a covert operation.

Ideas for improvement
The obvious thing the Endurance needs is a boost to the mining amount (as well as the Prospect, but that’s another topic). To be in line with the Skiff, the ice bonus should be at 65% and the ore bonus at 800%, this would bring it to 27.3 m³/s (ice) and 23.6 m³/s (ore), which is shortly below the Skiff. This would make the Skiff still the ship with the better yield, but the Endurance wouldn’t be completely useless. Alternatively you could allow Strip Miners/Ice Harvesters and reduce the bonus accordingly, so the numbers are not that much exaggerated.

The “behind-enemy-lines” mining would only work if the Endurance had some form of self-ore compression, effectively giving it a much bigger ore cargo. An idea would be a smaller version of the industrial core, that automatically compresses incoming ore/ice (so it won’t help other ships), but locks the ship into place in 2 minute cycles. Which would then lead to the interesting situation that when attacked the Endurance is cloaked but cannot move for a while. But to compensate the risk you can fly away with effectively 150k m³ ore in your cargo, yet having a Rorqual is still the much better choice.

2

A high sec ice mining frigate with almost skiff yield, cloak, on-the-fly compression, and increased ore hold, that costs less than 1/5th of a skiff? Hell no. You couldn’t compress while cloaked anyway. You’d be a sitting duck.

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3

I like the Endurance and use it in preference to barges or exhumers for the agility. While I would admit my yield is sub-optimal when you’re mining in relative safety, the Endurance has allowed me to mine a considerable amount of ice in dangerous low or null security systems without consequences, other than having to remain somewhat alert, and without any fleet support. It works very well for its role, and you’re usually only one click away from safety when something nasty shows up. Cloak, align, decloak and warp off, or just wait for the nasty to go away.

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4

An endurance’s strength is in wormholes and contested null where it is either dropping off in a friendly structure or a porpoise. It has the advantage over a skiff in that people will leave them alone because they are so hard to actually catch.

If you want in situ compression that’s a job for a T2 porpoise that you should be asking for instead.

5

The compression idea was just one thing, don’t focus on that too much, I am pretty sure it’s not going to get implemented anyways.

About mining in dangerous space: about everyone uses a prospect for that, because it’s so cheap, you can buy a new one after an hour of mining. Also mining in high-sec now yields about the same reward as 0 or low-sec mining, so that safe-space argument is completely invalid. And if you spend another 20 days of skill-time after than you better get some significant upgrade. The Skiff is one, the Endurance however is a downgrade.

The Endurance absolutely must be able to mine more than a Procurer to be viable.

6

it is viable…it is a F-R-I-G-A-T-E not a cruiser. and should not have higher yield than it does already

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7

Unless ice rigs are in use and ice drones are out, and more often than not they aren’t, it does. The ship is niche but useful. To justify mining at skiff levels it would need to give up a huge chunk of its evasion and that’s the current draw of the ship.

I could see making ice lasers 5-10% stronger but past that it would just make people ask the same thing about barges.

8

The Endurance has evasion as defensive skills, but once you are tackled and webbed you are dead. The Skiff has high eHP as defensive skills, so even when you are tackled you can still call in reinforcements and even kill a solo frig on your own. Both ships are balanced considering the defensive abilities.

You realize that you spend another 20 days of skill-time on the Endurance, right? And what does that get you? A cloaking device and less yield. That’s not very convincing. In fact I don’t know anyone in 0-space that actually uses an Endurance over a Procurer, because why would you do that?

9

Your values are of and you can use mining drones on an Endurance, which is also capable of slipping through a frigate wormhole and mine ice in a shattered wormholes.
A Procurer would be crushed by gravitational force if you would try to enter a frigate hole.

You should use the search function. I made a very detailed analysis of the Endurances mining capabilities in this forums already - look in the mining section, you’ll find it.

The Endurance is fine as she is and I use her very often, well both of them.

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10

Mining drones are included in the calculation. And my values are not off, I let Pyfa calculate them. And they are surprisingly close to your calculation.

The point is: why?
The time it takes you to fly back and forth with the ice in your cargo means you would have made much more ISK just sitting in high mining ice there, also a lot less risk. Other than for fun there is no reason to fly an Endurance into dangerous space.

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By that metric why isn’t every single person superratting at all times?
“that’s over reductive” you may say
Yes

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It is a niche ship for a niche role. It is for shattered wormhole ice mining. The ship is very well balanced for its slot layout. The issues with it are possibly its lack of covert-op access. That, and the abundance of empire ice makes the need/reward and risk of wormhole ice almost redundant.

  • A significant nerf to K space ice
  • Outer Ring Excavation command destroyer as a companion ship
  • increased count/frequency of shattered wormhole access

Might go some way towards things like lowering citadel spam and raising the reward for mining ice.

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13

Not sure if you’ve ever been to 0-space, but everyone who can is super-ratting all the time.

Also miner focus exclusively on ore yield, because everything else is secondary. If you have two similar ships and one mines more the other one is never used at all. The Endurance has some nice features, but none of those even remotely covers the huge loss of ore yield, so no one uses it.

Simple solution: increase the yield to a point where the miner is like “Ok slightly less, but also safer, maybe I use that one.” while the other decides against it and takes the higher yield at a higher risk of loosing the ship. At that point those ships would be properly balanced.

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Who the ■■■■ uses the Endurance to mine ore?

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15

I have several new endurance/prospect alts since I play In off hours I just cherry pick the rare icicles when alone^^

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16

My point exactly.

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It is not that strong a point though. I am using a Prospect to mine in low sec as we speak. It is yielding me 13 m3/sec which is less than your calculated yield (on ore) for an Endurance of a combined 13.5 m3/sec. Yet, despite your quote that:

You also say:

Why a Prospect, if the Endurance actually gives a better yield? Does that not negate your own argument, on the point of yield at least? As to your direct comparison:

That might well be true. But I can just as easily state that (other than myself) I have never seen anyone mine ice in low sec other than in an Endurance (or in fleets of boosted Endurances using a Porpoise).

My final quibble:

That is only true for mineral ores, as all low sec ores can now be got via 0.5 moon mining. It is patently untrue however for the higher (R8-R64) moon ores. I am ninja mining bountiful xenotime right now, which is yielding me 23.5M for each full ore hold on my Prospect (albeit that is at slightly inflated CCP values). I am not going to ninja mine in either, 1) an endurance with drones out that could break my cloak if I need to use it, or 2) in a cart horse of a procurer, - which after you add istabs to make it a bit more slippy is not that great a miner in comparison anyway. But, would I then use a cloaky Endurance, without drones, to mine low sec glare crust? Absolutely. I just park the ice and float it out later in a cheap-as-chips - but still cloaky/MWD - miasmos. Job done.

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Let’s do some math:
So you are in lowsec and find yourself some nice Gneiss, which is currently the highest isk/m³ ore you can mine. Another guy stays in highsec and mines Veldspar with his Skiff (Strip Miner 1 for fair comparison). You make 13 m³/s, while the other guy makes 24.4 m³/s (with all 5 skills).

That means you in lowsec make ~17.6m isk/h, while the guy in highsec in all the safety of a Concord protected Skiff makes ~24.1m isk/h. So by not taking any risks and mining the most common ore in the game that guy makes 37% more isk/h than you in dangerous space mining the most valuable rare ore.

And now the highsec guy could also ramp up the numbers, jump into a Hulk, fit T2 Strip miners and mine 36.5 m³/s and make ~35m isk/h, making almost twice as much isk/h than you. He also has no issues dumping the ore to the next station or getting it to wherever you want to sell it, or parking an Orca next to him on his second account.

See the problem here?

For one simple reason: cloaked warping. Nothing is more dangerous to an Endurance than a gate camp, and in a Prospect you simply hit cloak and don’t care.

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No, I do not.

I do not mine ore in low sec because it can all be had from high sec in 0.5 systems. I do not mine ore in high sec as I can make much more mining moon ore in low sec. Which is what the prospect is for. When that is not possible, I also mine glare ice in low sec in an endurance and trade racial ice in high sec.

The highest isk/m3 in low sec is bountiful xenotime. I have all(?) of these plus the loparite and monazite moons mapped across two regions. Taking the lower option of bountiful loparite as example, yield is 79.2m isk/h. This is based on guaranteed prices from a local buyer and allowing -10% for travel time to drop off cargo. That is still ~225% of the T2 hulk on veldspar.

Bountiful is not that common, but getting enough ordinary xenotime and loparite, with ytterbite and replete zircon as back ups, is quite doable and still yields more than the T2 skiff, although I used to mine gneiss in 0.5, so it does get more towards marginal when you do that. Especially after you plug in player interactions in low sec that reduces mining time but arguably increases game play.

That is very true. Which is why I travel fit it to give a 3 sec align time. That has worked well for me so far. Plus, there are not that many gate camps where I roam and/or their location(s) are usually in the same spots when they do occur. This is all very specific to me, but context is everything.

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I’ve recently completed max skill injecting 3 toons for endurances and I must say I find them a rather good parralel to vni ratters.
They are not the best possible ship for mining ice (forget ore) but they are very expendable and easy to multibox.
I have them parked in a system with ice belt have yet to lose one to players or npcs-went for a buffer+res fit with an ab