I never owned a Rorqual, so what I’m saying could be totally off and maybe doesn’t make sense after all, but I’m going to give a stab at the problem.
The Rorqual is a very tanky ship and it’s also awesome at mining. You want to make it purely into a support ship so that there will be more Rorquals + Barges instead of Rorqual only mining fleets. You’d like to see low and null fleets with a single command mining ship and a bunch of barges and I think that’s a cool thing.
But I don’t think you need to make the Rorqual worse than the exhumers to achieve the goal. For the sake of theorcyrafting, we’re going to assume infinite drone travel speed when calculating yields even though we know that’s not the case.
I think it can still be OK a lone Rorqual mines faster than a “yield hulk” (A Hulk filled with non ORE mining upgrades and no tank). But make it so that while a Rorqual can mine faster than a yield Hulk, it falls behind the output of a Retriver with Damage control and reinforced Bulkhead that is given mining boosts from an Orca with max skills. And then so that the theoretical yield of Rorqual + 3 Yield hulks (but boosted by the rorqual) = 4 Rorqual (real yield will be slightly lower with the Rorquals since drone travel speed).
The Rorqual will still be descent at solo mining but not nearly as good as it is right now. It will be only marginally better than yield hulks such that any group of 4 would be better off only using 1, which might encourage cooperative mining fleets. And these fleets will be more efficient than fleets of only Rorquals since if the mining boost is big enough that Retrivers with damage controls boosted mine more than a Rorqual, then barges boosted by Rorquals will be super efficient.
I’d suggest scrapping the whole waste thing and try to make it so that you’re balancing it by ore/time. But if you’re going to keep waste, why not balance the upper mining ships in the way I suggested using waste-less non-ORE gear (like a tier 1 Rorqual still being better than yield Hulks with tier I strip miners, but then once the group gets larger it’s better to have only 1 Rorqual unless the goal is to bait someone to attack).
I really like the idea of updating/adding modules like tracking computers (mids) or mining enhancers (lows) to be similar to the missile modules.
Change the crystals to be more of a yield/range focus
Add modules for Mids that are scriptable and impact yield, waste, speed
Add modules for Lows that impact yield/speed, waste or a combination of them. (Precision, Damage, Rate of Fire)
This allows miners to have the same choices to be made over yield/waste that mission runners have over damage and tank.
Can you please give us all an exact list as to which mouth breathing CSM members were responsible for the changes? Id really like some clarity here as id like to know not only who to never vote for again, but I’m thinking with this ‘valuable’ input they have provided it would be well worth my time to actively campaign against them ever being allowed on the CSM ballot again. Thank you.
Having loss on compression means for me, i will not be using compression at all, except for a small amount of krystalos possibly to pack along on deployments. Otherwise, we will be moving our moon goo uncompressed to refineries exactly the same way we are doing now. Thank you for adding useless game mechanics that are overly complicated and wasteful for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Good job dev team. No wonder the dev that announced these changes isn’t the dev that’s announcing the update to them. Hopefully he is on schedule for early permanent retirement.
Obviously you have never been involved as a miner in this game. While there were only a handful of answers for ‘what is the best?’ the decision making tree was pretty immense, as it involved where when and how. Things that matter ALOT more when your in a barge with a 15second align time, and a dies in 3 volleys’ from a bomber. Especially when we now play in a universe that includes magical teleportation portals into the deepest parts of nullsec, and open access ACLs so no-one actually needs to spend time scanning out those WH chains for their roams anymore. Or even bothers to have to pack mobile depots and probes anymore. Thanks eve scout.
I’m guessing your intended response to that now is 'live in jita 4/4 with everyone else, yeet out to new mining sites, and yeet back. Buy plex and sell it to replace ship losses."
This is a blatant attempt by CCP to further monetize yet another segment of the player population.
Again, ‘optimization or decision making’ for a miner is so much less about ‘what you put on grid’ and so much more about 'when you try to harvest, where you try to harvest it, and how much you can get away with harvesting, before you are forced to stop harvesting due to pvp
Spend more isk, invest MORE time invest MORE training, be MORE wasteful. Simple and insightful. Also, I have a bridge id like to sell you.
Looking at the new images regarding the mineing crystals and modules, boy am I sure glad I invested 6 months of skill training into all of these previously.
Now as for the rorqual changes.
You think that putting a 10+ BILLION ISK SHIP into space for it to mine just slightly more than a 250m isk ship is 'more in line" and a good idea? Looking at your charts, that first one is based off the base hull, then you have to calculate in the '‘bonus’ from the new mineing crystals, and wasteage bull, and drone flight time.
Side note, also, why in the ever living hell does a t1 covetor mine more than a mackinaw???
When you make fundemental game design changes like this, what is your plan or compensation for those players that have invested years of their time into this gameplay?
If your going to nerf the ever living hell out of a ship that took YEARS to skill for, I would expect that you will be offering 100% redistrubition to ALL rorqual related skills, so we can utilize those SP in useful ships now? And I mean all related skills, and without the sp loss on utilizing extractors, and without the real life money cost of thsoe extractors?
My TLDR is that, yes, you toned the MASSIVE nerf down just slightly, and its still a total waste of time and effort, your still parking chars in stations that used to be out in space, your still not going to see anyone using the new ‘fun and engaging’ gameplay of compression (seriously, this is a game design flaw that cant be overlooked, how on earth did this EVER seem like a good idea to the dev team? Do you guys even play games at all? Like, even candy crush or something? Tedium for the sake of tedium is terrible terrible game design)
Oh, and credit where credit is due, the industrial conduit jump thing could be useful game design depending on which ships are allowed to conduit jump with the rorqual. (also, if you add any industrials that have more than 5K worth of ore holds this is going to be how you can move around uncompressed moon goo/ore/ice without having to deal with garbage compression mechanics btw)
Id like to see an update where we can freely re-allocate ALL mining skills and other related rorqual capital skills at a 1-1 ratio for other skills now.
Also, NPC buy orders put up for excavator drones and rorqual hulls.
Honestly I’d rather this not happen either, but removing T1 waste made this patch a lot more palatable to me.
I’d like to see the Procuererb base Hull buffed a bit more so that some Rneforced Bulkheads can make it as tanky as it was before. And the Orca didn’t need to be enrfed that badly. And I’d like to see the ore hold not split.
I don’t know if I should be upset this new new patch isn’t perfect or happy it went from dumpster fire to not quite there yet.
Yo i like that idea but not about requiring a fleet to borrow their drones…
Keep the nerf to it’s drone yield , but increase the number of drone the orca can use from 5 to 10 or 15
I think I’ve seen it somewhere on reddit, but I tested on SiSi the new type A crystals for mining missions, I have two things to say about them :
I really do like the new colors of rays
All (ore ice and gas) missions cannot be done properly because of the waste mechanic with T2 strip miner with T2 A crystal of the proper type, the asteroid pop before enough ore has been mined to complete the mission.
So ore missions can be done with a T1 strip miner to avoid waste as I understood, but for ice and gas there is no way around it.
Weird that the CSM member that only likes to PVP thinks that putting rorquals back into stations and making everyone mine in barges again is a good idea hey?
Defiantly has the good of the game forefront in his mind.
Tell me sutonia, how do you support your ingame pvp activities?
The only technical problem they ran into was they couldn’t technically design a game update that was an improvement over the current system, so they technically just decided to destroy it all and get everyone to plex for isk now.
Oddly, this IS going to be a buff for faction warfare, if 3/4s of the clusters mining output gets shut off, then those faction warfare bots are going to get alot more for their LP selling ship hulls.
Yes, the journey of 1000miles begins with a single step. But when the journey of 1000miles leads you that much further into the center of Antarctica, should someone not stop you right away and let you know were it is exactly your headed? - In this case, they are headed even further into scarcity, and the scarcity is going to move from the scarcity of gatherable materials, to the scarcity of eve players
Don’t get me wrong guys but I see a golden opportunity here…
The gods just slapped you with an ‘unbearable’ punishment. Then, for no apparent reason, coughothersocialmediathatsmoreexposedthanthisourcough! The gods are hesitating and took a step down to earth to…
ASK YOU, B14TCH!
So get yourself together and come to a consensus. Go to another room, I don’t care!
But please! don’t spoil this chance! I wish my 25 gamestyles that are totally not mining related had a whiff of a chance like the one in your face today!
I NEED YOU GUYS TO BE HAPPY SO YOU TAKE IT EASY ( er ) WHEN YOU GET PEWD’
Say what you think, keep it short and don’t fall for trollbait!
