Have you tried to haul something with even cruiser levels of tank? How about those mining barges with 1 mid slot? Ever tried to make a coveter tanky? It is just not possible, there is no power grid nor CPU available after putting on the strip miners. The Procurer and Skiff are better, but only by comparison. The Vexor gets better bonuses and is only 9 mil to buy. In effect other than a bait ship that cannot do it’s intended role they cannot both haul nor mine and still have any tank at all.
Yeah, I only used a Mackinaw for Exhumers, and that powergrid is really more a constraint than slots for tank
the whole idea of different ships for different mining situations seems to be going out the window. remember when mackinaws and skiffs had bonuses for specific mining matierials. now we are looking at eliminating the tank vs yield differences as said above , procurer for tank, but slower miner, or covetor for speed but no tank. reducing all barges to generic ships is a mistake. if this was a good path we would all be flying vexors for combat and have no need for racial characteristics. it isnt balancing. its making things so similar as to have no reason to bother with skilling more than one type of ship
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The covetor, hulk, retriever, mackinaw are not made for tank. You dont tank them. That is their weakness.
The proc/skiff get the tank while having a weak mining ability.
And comparing mining ships to a combat ship is dumb. Of course the vexor is going to be better because it is a combat ship that is suppose to use drones as its primary source of dps.
I’m not a newb who does not know. mining ships.
Proc/Skiff = High Tank/High DPS with less mining = not true unless you are only worried about destroyers. 5 Medium drones does not come close to the DPS needed, maybe if we got Drone Damage and Drone Links available but that proves my point.
I want CCP to just quit using the miners as bait for the little gankers out there. There is no reason a mining barge cannot tank and gank as good as say a Vexor and an Exhumer as well as an Ishtar, the hulls cost more for the miners, but they can;t stand up to even a T1 cruiser. or a few destroyers.
Each one is mediocre at mining, now after the last rebalance where the Mac/Skiff gained a strip miner and the Covetor/Hulk lost one Mac/Skiff had big bonuses to Ice mining and were specialized for that purpose. There is no reason for having 3 different hulls now. The new mining frigates only have one hull and 3 variations of ships. Why not consolidate all 3 different hulls in to one good one? Making it overly complicated and trading off tank only helps the little gankers get easy kills.
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Proc/Skiff can easily stand up to cruisers. They have plenty of tank and dps to fend off rats as well.
They do not need DDAs or DLs because they are not combat ships. They are mining ships. They are focused on mining ore/ice/gas.
Mining ships are not the only bait people go after.
There is plenty of reason why a mining barge/exhumer should not be as good as the vexor/ishtar.
The vexor/ishtar are Combat Ships, barges/exhumers are Mining Ships.
You don’t compare a IRL Frigate to a IRL Oil Tanker when looking at which one is better for fighting a war. They have different purposes and they are geared out towards their intended purpose.
With the added powergrid 50mn mwds become possible giving the ships a rather sizable increase in speed significantly. Also from experience increasing the base speed too much hurts various play-styles and lower sec safty techniques for barges, I hoped to preserve that. The extra lowslots might at first seem like only a increase to mineing with the shield fit but due to the way mineing enhancers stack cpu it quickly becomes untenable without gimping the fit, adding damage via DDAs is actually a viable way to fill the slot. The proposed damage buff to medium drones for the procurer I imagine will carry through and while its not a heavy deterrent to highsec gankers, that 200+ damage in lowersecs or wardecs is horrifing when you consider the number of procs that might be on a belt. This of course encourages hunters to switch tactics as the drone bonus doesnt include hp, only damage.
Just go sit in an ice field in a covetor in HS. You will be the first one ganked even if 50 ships are there. you will be one shot and the perp gone, due to the restrictions HS imposes. In NS/LS you can shoot first, but not in HS. And CCP took away the Assign Drones and replaced it with Assist Drones, Which means you cannot make others drones attack your target. We used to have blobs of drones attack with one command, now everyone must lock the target and command their own Drones to attack, Gankers love the new changes.
You can easily avoid ganks by just paying attention to local. Not that hard.
There is still a function for that. You can either Assist which the drones will engage when the person they’ve been assisted to engages, or you can guard. Drones guarding will engage when the person they are protecting takes damage.
Actually, people from the other mining ships will pretend to go drop their ore in a station and reship to gank you
Actually that only works for known gankers, but a covetor becomes a target even for the noobest of the noobs
There is also the option to just use the procurer which gankers tend to avoid. There are plenty of options. Demanding that all mining barges/exhumers become harder to gank just because you don’t like dying is bad.
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Well said, there is no reason the drone bonuses do not include hit points and speed, except CCP wants to keep the miners vulnerable. How about making the ships Armor tankers instead? Make a new mid slot module for mining upgrades that decreases mining duration, or do away with it altogether and replace it with ship bonuses per level for mining duration?
If anyone wants to try out modifying mining barges in pyfa as I noted its actually really easy to simulate. Just go to Global in the top bar and hit 'turn overrides on ’ then in the same drop down click ‘attribute overrides’ You can then search for the ship or mod you want to edit and adjust the stats, the nameing can be a bit off. I hope this can add to the thoughtful number based discussion so we can finally get over these ships being a joke when it comes to fitting.
i think someone misunderstood my vexor comment. i wasnt comparing mining ships to combat ships i was simply stating that making all mining barges essentially the same would be like making all combat ships the same. it makes no sense.
it is the variety and choices that makes EVE interesting.
CCP is already trying to force the ships more into armor with the 2-2-3 slot-layout, oddly however as the support vessels, orca pourpose and rorqual will all still be shield focused. So its not unreasonable, just silly at the moment.
You cannot easily avoid ganks in a Covetor in HS. There is no mechanism that allows that. If you try to Ice Mine you will get ganked, unless you are in a Proc/Skiff or an Orca. CCP ruined the Retrievers/Covetors and now they cannot be used in HS, except as bait ships.
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Mining ships are suppose to be vulnerable. A single mining ship should not easily be able to fend off a combat spec’d ship.
They can be.
CCP made the problem, CCP can fix the problem.