I PVE to pay for PVP, but I want to PVP solo... pointless?

Communications Center General Discussion
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Long story short I only want to do missions, or exploration, or anything PVE related because I want to PVP. I get my enjoyment not out of blowing up NPC ships, but out of blowing up player ships.

The problem is that I want to do PVP solo. I don’t like corporations dictating what I can and cannot do with my ships because of their reputation or zkillboard. And the problem with solo PVP is that anything even remotely blingy usually results in blobbing and endless escalation on the recipient’s end, making it an almost no-win situation for the long term (I know, git gud)

So - why drudge through PVE to earn more money, when it is a guaranteed blob / loss in blingy ships for a solo player? I don’t need money to cheese kills with battle ventures or cheap frigs which is about the only thing that doesn’t guarantee a blob. But on the other hand it’s also hard to find people who are actually new players, undocked, mining, outside of highsec, to kill with my battle venture, because new player rates are abysmal. I would love it if I could look for frig fights, learn, sell the loot, move up to a destroyer, look for destroyer fights, learn, sell the loot, move up to a cruiser, etc. But that doesn’t happen, because moving up in size means moving up in price and nobody wants a fair fight in an expensive ship in this game.

tl;dr For a true solo player who refuses to multibox and gets their enjoyment from PVP, what does the progression look like, or do I just look for gudfights in throwaway frigs? Is this game just not meant for my playstyle?

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Pure solo guy here. Maybe a smidge above average pvper. MAYBE.

What about faction warfare? Plenty of solo pvp opportunity and plenty of money. Sounds like a perfect choice for you. The first few billion I made were from looting fights I won in just frigs and cruisers in FW. That was a different time, but there still are a lot of pilots who will fight 1v1. Hardly any in nullsec will.

The way you progress is by figuring out a good ship and fitting for whatever application you need. And by learning it’s capabilities and which ships it can kill more often than not. Eventually you will win more than you lose, especially if you’re disciplined. Also, You may come up with fits that look like prey, but are actually predators for a specific target.

You can definitely make money as a solo pvp pirate but it’s… not very easy to do. And I wouldn’t recommend anything blingy until you’re significantly experienced…

You can also make decent money looting fights or picking off scavengers. Looted a bil last weekend randomly.

Eve is super hard truly solo, but it can be done. I definitely recommend FW.

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Thank you for the suggestion. I will look more into FW. I didn’t realize it was something that could be done true solo. If so, that might be exactly what I’m looking for.

I am not super concerned about turning enough profit to fund solo PVP. Just to have an outlet for my PVE isk to drain into. If that means increasingly blinged frigs / cruisers for (largely) solo fights in FW, that’s great. And if I can run cheese / bait fits sometimes for the lulz, even better.

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That’s only because they are on alliance comms and the pilots of the standing fleet want to shoot stuff. Then one neutral enters local and chaos…

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attacking miners and explorers outside of high sec is pretty profitable.

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Yup, so don’t DO that then. Flying bling stuff most comes from isk tanking, being SO scared of dying that one is willing to pump lots and lots of iskies into ships and implants to not lose but this scares of potential customers. Exceptions exist and tend to end in epic YT videos but almost none of those are true solo and it almost never happens.

If you fly something that’s juicy and is obviously very OP then no one will approach you solo (you might run into occasional unaware), instead they will keep their distance, call in their friends and then blob you.

But if you fly something that isn’t juicy and seems very approachable/engagable (especially if you chose something that very obviously is easily countered by what most of your target ships/players will fly) then they will NOT wait for their friends because they want this solo kill for themselves. The more obvious it is they can counter you the less worried they are going to be, in fact if you do it right they practically hurl themselves at you.

The trick then is to win anyway or have a good chance of doing so. Either by just being better and/or by NOT being fitted like everyone would expect. So if your intended targets tend to fly paper then you fly something that is normally rock so they will all WANT to attack you solo, but you counter fitted to actually being scissors and now you kill them.

The REAL issue is that many people are looking for wins, which generally ends in really “scared” and apprehensive behaviour and obvious OP ships no one wants to engage. I would suggest to instead look for FIGHTS, not wins because that way you (can) keep your ship cost much lower and you end up in more engagements you can actually handle. If you get and do that right I promise you you will have way more fights, way more fun and actually way more kills and less deaths to blobs, percentage wise.

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If you want to fight and win solo in EvE you need to create the conditions for it yourself. Have max skills for your ship/fit, fly reasonable cheap (so you don’t feel the loss, and don’t get hunted/baited), be fast (to escape the blob), and pick your fights/targets.

My primary hunting grounds are Caldari FW lowsec and Pochven. Although I don’t put too much force on the ISK efficiency, I would be able to sustain my Hecates from loot alone.

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Solo PvP is for morons.

Refusing to get into fleet and fight for your FC is basically EVE incel behavior.

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It does sound like your best bet might be FW, at least to train up PvP skills and different styles of PvP. After that you could look at some roaming, typically with cloaks in low or WH.

This might give you a guide as to some of the ways you can approach solo PvP in FW:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/q1rvj0/novice_frigates_yearbook_2021/

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FW is your place because anywhere else you will get rekt by gate camps.

Solo PVP is just fine. It just comes with more challenges…

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OP, Solo is really pointless. The guy you are fighting has multiple alts and can use a “back-pack” to reload on capacitor sticks. It all comes down to who has the most cap sticks. It really sucks.

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Thank you. I do like to do this. That’s why I have recently been roaming LS with a battle venture with double scrams. My target was other ventures who might think I’m just there to mine. Unfortunately there are very few ventures to be found. I killed a Merlin instead.

Do you have another example or two of a small ship fit that is relatively accessible, and the target I would be looking to bait? I have run a PVP heron in search of other explorers, and that’s pretty fun too.

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Thank you for calling me a moron for finding pleasure in a different playstyle than yours.

Hint: I like alternative wincons and playstyles in everything I play. This means I don’t usually have a positive win percentage, but the wins I do get are more fun and enjoyable to me. If you’re just interested in padding your zkillboard you might not understand that mentality. In Eve this means I don’t rely on my sweaty bittervet wingman or 12 to tell me where to go and what to do, while I output 5% of the damage and feel like I “accomplished” something. I want my accomplishments to be my own.

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Is that what happens at the end of a batchall?

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As a solo pvper, who does not multibox, this is how I do it.

  1. I budget and pay for a years sub at a time.

  2. I budget and I dump 20 dollars into plex once a year, and sell it for isk.

Gets you around 2 bil isk. More than enough isk for solo frigate pew pew for said year.

Now with that said, I mostly do frigate pvp. Some destroyer (both vanilla and tactical). And the occasional strat cruiser.

Hope that helps.

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So realistically on a recurring basis you really haven’t found it to be possible to find good solo fights in anything much larger than a destroyer? Anywhere?

It’s kind of frustrating. Imagine how cool it would be if you could find good solo battleship+ slugfests. The fact that most solo pvp is relegated to cheap small ships is frustrating. I don’t know that I would be entertained for a whole year flying the same frigs and dessies into pvp. The tight-wallet nature of many players is… boring, to me. What fun is it to win a fight you were guaranteed to win from the start?

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Well,

I’m a cheap bastard, so I don’t go looking for fights in very expensive ships (often)

And I happen to enjoy the fast pace action of frigate fights. I found that the larger the ship, the less exciting the fight becomes.

Now, you could try baiting in HS. Done a bit of that and it’s fun. But again, at least for me, not as exciting as the thrill of an equally matched frigate fight where your both down to the wire. And to be 100% honest, those fights are rare even in frigates.

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Yah things cost ISK! Crusiers are what? 20-40mil a pop? Thats almost one incursion site (between 5-11mins of killing) It adds up to billions depending on how many times you venture out.

There is a real chance you will meet a gate camp and you are deleted. Biggest group wins.

I do not want to come off saying solo PVP is bad w/o saying directly it’s bad. Now honestly you will have more luck possibly hunting in WH systems. Less chances for camps there. Everything carries a risk of gate camps that hurt the “fun” of PVP. FW/WH/LS/NS.

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I doesn’t have to be a non-combat ship. The trick is to realise that eve pvp is rock, paper, scissors and to then apply that BEFORE you undock so instead of rushing random ships with random fits into random ships give it all some thought.

Look at what kind of space you want to do this in. Low sec, FW (two different things), null, WH, pochven or even high sec. Then check what kind of PvP ships people tend to use and what the most used fit and tactic are for that area. Then start looking at what types of ships those most used ships tend to go after and see if you could alter that ship’s fit to direct counter what you want to fight.

Let’s say that you want to hunt in null, null has lots of people soloing in blaster Hecate’s and other small/fast and short range stuff, their tactic is “rush up close, orbit if needed and nuke”. A Hecate is also extremely agile and pretty fast meaning that they LOVE going after kiters because those generally have trouble fighting up close and tend to lack tank.

So we want to find a ship that a Hecate would love to attack because it’s probably kiting fit and low on EHP. Enter the Stabber, an extremely fast T1 cruiser that is always fit for kiting and is considered to be kinda crap and for poors/newbs. BRILLIANT! How can we make this ship counter a blaster Hecate? For that we need to understand a Hecate’s Achilles heel: range and cap.

So if we make the Stabber be able to scram kite a Hecate then we lower the applied dps that Hecate is going to do to us, at least for a little bit. Meaning we want to have at least a web but also Afterburner, not MWD. This stabber isn’t meant to kite at all, it’s doing the exact opposite of what people expect it to do. So the range bit is sorted.

Then cap, a normal Stabber can fit 2 small neuts due to severe power grid limitations but that’s not really going to hurt a Hecate too much especially not if it has a cap booster, you might get a few kills that way but it’s not that great. What you want is two MEDIUM neuts so lets mess with the fit to make room for those things, the fact that it’s AB fit and not MWD already helps and it turns out that if you downgrade the guns to the smallest medium AC (dual 180mm) you CAN get a whole fit with decent enough tank, enough dps to take out small stuff and those two med neuts.

It’s the perfect counter. Not only will he WANT to attack you because “lol EZ kill” (also meaning he’s not going to wait for his friends to show up, he wants this solo kill), he assumes he can do it in a way that suits him perfectly and that plays exactly into your hand: he will rush into you just hitting approach (he doesn’t want to waste time with orbit because you might just get away) and starts nuking you short range.

All you have to do is target, apply your midslots and OH your AB to then go “keep at range 7000m” and stagger your neuts so you start one, then half way you start the other and for good measure OH the neuts as well. His cap will be empty so quickly it’s hilarious. Suddenly his tackle drops, then his dps stops and he’s dead in the water while you have all the time in the world to finish him. EZ kill. This will also work against other small short range stuff.

If you run into a kiter you’re probably dead, if you run into a cruiser you’re probably dead, if you run into a blob most definitely dead. But it’s a cheap ship (T1 so insurable) and if you take out a Hecate or Nergal or anything else you’ll have a laugh how they died to a lowly Stabber, who cares about the times you lost your cheapo “poors” ship.

Now apply this train of thought to any type of space you want to hunt in, find what works against what you tend to run in to, counter it and keep it cheap so you’ll laugh all the way.

It’s a mind set thing, accept that you’ll die and account for it by making those deaths inconsequential. If someone looks at your KB and sees 10 lost Stabbers it doesn’t matter but if it’s 10 lost bling Orthruses it’s going to look stupid. EMBRACE cheapo ships and fits, that way you get more fights, you (have to) care less about losses and you’ll have more fun.

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Great advice. Thank you. Perfect example.

In this case it seems the most difficult part of the equation (especially for a solo player) is the knowledge required. I will have to do a bunch of research on the third party tools to see where I can go and what I can do. I learned from hours of battle venture roaming that it is nigh impossible to just go out on a roam randomly searching for people and find real targets. Maybe in FW space it is easier. Having read the latest novice frig yearbook report, the vast majority of solo pvp fights were in FW space.

I wish he was still making those reports, but at least it gives me a starting point to look at FW space, see what’s popular, and see what I can come up with to run counter / bait. It’s rough because, although I started this char 10 years ago, I have never been able to find my niche in Eve (hence the post) so I only have 5m SP as I have mostly not been subbed, and in fact played the dumpster fire of Eve Echoes for quite a while since it at least had plenty of newbies and a lot more accessible solo PVP and bait / cheese opportunities.

Anyway thanks again, I appreciate it, great advice. This is what I was looking for.

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