In need of some tactics advice

PvP Gameplay Center Warfare & Tactics
1

Hello there,

I’ve been playing this game for a while and finally decided to get into pvp. While group content is super fun and whatnot, I find myself wanting to go out alone and not belong to any particular groups. So I packed my stuff, moved to Heydieles and decided to be a solo pvper. I got 2 problems however, and hoping to get some advice from this community:

  1. Not really finding a whole lot of fights. I roam the entirety of the frontlines across the Cal-Gal zone scanning complexes and barely get a few fights at a time. People either run from me or there are too many in a single plex for me to engage. Currently trying the cheapest ships possible like T1 frigates to encourage others to engage, but still don’t catch a whole lot. I tried engaging multiple targets at a time in faction destroyers or cruisers, but I die as I can’t yet anticipate how many I can safely engage. Any ideas on what to do? (besides git gud:p)

  2. How do I dodge gate camps? Or figure out they exist, I don’t have alts or planning to get any. I know the theories of approaching the gate or aligning to a celestial and pray but some of these people seem very professional with insta lockers and even smart bombs for pods.

Thanks in advance!

2

I’m no solo PvPer and cannot help you with 1.

For point 2 I have a couple of tips:

  • Make bookmarks near the gates you often take. More than 150km away yet still on grid, and not in line with whatever gates you may be warping in from. These bookmarsk allows you to easily warp to the bookmark instead of the gate, avoid any smartbombs and camp, then warp to the gate from a direction that doesn’t take you past the smartbombs.
  • In case you do not yet have a bookmark near the gate yet, do a directional scan of the gate. Set your dscan to 5 degrees, hold your dscan button and click the gate to scan it. This way you can check if there are any signs of trouble at the gate, like bubbles, common smartbombing ships and things like that. If empty, warp. If not, try to see if you can take another route.
  • If the gate is not within range of your directional scanner, open the solar system map and see if there is a celestial or asteroid belt that seems to be within dscan range of the gate, and warp there. If there isn’t any, drop a bookmark while blindly in warp to the gate so that the next time you’re there you don’t have the same issue.
  • While the other three points may allow you to check this side of the gate, you do not know what’s on the other side of the gate. Without a scout you won’t know, but a useful tool to check the other side of the gates on your route is EVE - Check before you jump! . It’s not failsafe - someone has to be the first to be killed in a gatecamp, but if someone already got caught and shows up on zkillboard, you’re warned if you use this tool.
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3

Solo pvp guy here. Finding fights can be pretty tedious sometimes, a lot of times you may roam for a long time and not find anything, or find stuff you know you can’t really engage. Which is why a lot of my nights end with me killing some random AFK venture, just to have “something” to show for a few hours in space. Not to say that cool fights can’t happen, they certainly do, but there will definitely be nights of 30 jumps where all you find is 20 person gangs, and 10 jumps of empty systems. So you have to learn to take the good with the boring.

Personally I would stick with t1 frigs, I still use them way more than any other ship class, they’re cheap, and allow you to experiment with fits and different flying styles (brawling, kiting,etc.) And when you inevitability lose one, you’re only out 5-10M, even with a T2 heavy fit. My experiences in crusiers has been much the same, I lose them after only a few fights.

Plus t1 frigs can actually take on more than you would expect, you can kill other frigs, dessies (potentially) and some cruisers, especially if you go after ones that don’t have a lot of light drones, or drone bonuses, otherwise you need to make clearing the drones your biggest priority, or just pass on those fights.

I like to use “unusual” ships to try and get fights, like a battle magnate/heron or a venture. They can actually be decent pvp ships, even though they don’t get any bonuses to guns. And most of the time no one is going to view a venture jumping into a belt or a magnate coming into a data site as a threat, so you get the element of suprise on your side.

As for #2 I rarely am that worried about gate camps, I’ve only died to i think 2-3 over the last 2 years of lowsec pvp’ing. If you’re in a t1 frig or some other small fast ship and you jump into a camp, just overheat your prop and jump back through the gate. You’re small and fast, and should be back to the gate before most smaller camps can do much to you just make sure not to fire back or use any e-war as you’ll get an weapon timer of a minute and will be denied the jump, and most likely die.

If you jump into a gang of 20 with insta-lock and all kinds of support ships it’s probably going to be a bad day, but in my experience, unless you’re jumping into a crazy system like Tama or amamake the gate camps aren’t going to be much, if there are any at all.

Good luck on your solo adventure o7

Edit: added some, and fixed some wording.

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Hi. I solo pvp a lot.

The first rule is you’re never going to get a solo fight. You must have an escape plan. Some one big lives in heyd. Snuff box i think, or shadow cartel. I cant remember. But you should have them set to red as basically unengagable. Theyll never be alone and they will always up ship you. Theyre good enough that they know how to counter you and they have enough ships nearby to bring the counter. They will also be in very expensive pods. The fight will look reasonably fair as your fight their slasher in your tristan, but in reality youll be competing with 3 billion isk in implants.

The bookmark advice above is good, although i suggest making bookmarks 200+ km from the gates. This gives you some wiggle room to maneuver closer to the gate while still being able to warp to it.

Your gate camp problem is difficult. Google “eve gatecamp checker”. There is a tool that will warn of camps that have a kill on zkill. If they havent got any kills yet, they’re invisible to the tool.

Generally in a t1 frigate you should be able to just warp away through the camp. People dont like to use ceptors and keres to secure tackle because they cant tank the gate guns. Of course large camps will have enough logi to set it up just for that. Blind jumping through gates really limits your ship selection to make sure you can make it through the camps. Your holy grail for frigates is the astero. Stick a nano and to ddas in the lows, a long point, faction medium shield extender, and mwd in the mids and you have a kiting astero. Your target selection is any frigate without a warp scrambler bonus, brawling destroyers and buffer tanked cruisers / battleships. Your escape plan is preventative in nature. Never get scrammed never get scrammed. Let the target go rather than get close enough to get scrammed. The cloak allows you to make it through the gate camps as long as you cloak on the same server tick as you press warp. Only a sensor boosted zero ping interceptor connecting from England can catch you if he plays perfectly. To practice for this fairly expensive frigate you can fly the tristan, fit essentially the same. You lose the covops cloak but the losses are far cheaper while you practice staying out of scram range. Both these ships benefit greatly from having a snake pod.

By staying out of scram range, you maintain your mobility, even if long pointed, you can disengage from any fight that looks like its going south, and even fight out numbered by maneuvering away from the blob while engaging the closest target.

And the last bit of advice is… start an alt account. On day one, you can have it in a cloaky heron to scout gates for you. This allows you to fly things like blaster thoraxs. Their gameplay is simply to ram into their target with a scram web and heat those blasters until they explode. It doesnt need anything special to avoid camps as you can scout with your alt. As your alt gets sp you can eventually get it into something like a curse, to nuet off active reps of your mains target or to silence that pesky garmur that has your thorax perma tackled.

And one day your main will have a carrier and your alt can light cynos for it, so you can use it as a suitcase to move ships around in its ship maintenance bay, and when you feel froggy, you can drop it on that ratting gila and experience the firepower of fighter groups and a racing heart.

Have fun out there!

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This is a skill of its own. IMO it comes down to 3 things:

  1. Do people looking for fights exist (aka: not LP farmers / bots)
  2. Do they think you’re in a ship they can beat? (Sometimes requires metagaming)
  3. Do you think they are in a ship you can beat? (Sometimes I skip this one and just bathe in a firey loss, rarely a surprising win)

When I roamed the Gal-Cal warzone I had a problem with 1 and 3. It takes multiple days of tedious scouting the entire zone to get a feel for the regions, and understanding who is in your time zone, and then what they typically fly and the kinds of fights they are looking for and how many alts / friends they call. And vice versa: the more you solo PvP, the more others will see you as „that guy looking for fights solo“ (for better or worse) which can open situations. You just kind of have to stick with it. Talk to people who blow you up.

To be honest I have spent more time — and personally believe it easier to find 1v1 fights — in the Minmatar-Amarr warzone. They’re still there in Cal-Gal, it’s more work I have historically found.

The thing is:

  1. Don’t be there (don’t go through gates that typically have camps)
  2. if you have to be there, be there in a small MWD ship to run (frigates usually have decent success warping out or with heated MWD crashing gate)
  3. If you have to be there and in something that can’t run, be in something that can fight back
  4. if you want the choice above, use an alt to scout the gate (you can still fight solo, just use extra eyes for info)

Hope this helps, good luck.

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what kind of “pvp” are you looking for? solo targets are relatively common if you’re happy to hunt gas-huffing ventures. they’re usually found every 10 or so systems in gallente space, which currently has the richest gas.

you can also look at the ingame galaxy map and look for nearby lit cynos. if you can make it there in time, you can gank a helpless cyno ship. occasionally you might find a recon ship like an arazu which you can try to engage.

a smartbombing mauler or gnosis can also bag corvettes, shuttles and pods along popular pipelines.

it really depends on what you’re looking for.

7

Thanks everyone for the feedback!

@Kaivarian_Coste - was looking more into targets that can shoot back and have a somewhat even fight. Though I will not refuse the venture here and there.

8

A couple more thoughts here to round out the discussion -

Target finding

  • Being in the FW lowsec space has advantages in that you don’t always have to roam - especially if you are enlisted you can find a nice plex, and wait for targets. This has a few advantages:
    ** You can establish situational advantages by pre-positioning at your optimal range. If you want to be at range and kite, burn away from the beacon, and if you want to brawl sit on it ready. This won’t inherently win you fights, but is an advantage that doesn’t show up in PyFA or your skill queue
    ** Setting and spamming a short d-scan range lets you see targets before they warp in. This gives you time to decide to change tactics, ammo, or bail out if needed
    ** Even if you don’t find a fight, you earn LP in the process which can help offset losses or pay for shinier ships in the future
  • I personally find lots of fights this way - 1v1s, but also 1vNs and because of positioning and d-scan can make those outnumbered fights tenable and fun
  • You can also stock pile ships for quick return to action and/or reshipping to be flexible in fights

Avoiding gate camps

  • The above strategy helps as you are moving less
  • F10 brings up the map, and if you have your route set will show you the path in space. There are a few statistics for ship/pod/etc kills which can help you identify systems likely to have a camp. This isn’t perfect intelligence, but can help you be prepared ahead of time or to know to change you path or warp in
  • Intel channels often have call outs for camps. Again, not perfect but if you are combining that with other sources you start to build a good picture
  • Tactics are huge - know what you can/want to do before you hit a camp. This more than just “burn back to gate” but should also consider where you spawn relative to the camp and most importantly their tackler. Take the cloak time to look at who is likely to tackle based on ship types, who has remote sensor booster effects. If they are far from you and you are fast, burning away can often be better than burning to gate where you walk directly to them. If you are seriously screwed, consider holding cloak as long as possible and hope someone else jumps through. As soon as they decloak, make your move as the camp is likely already trying to target them

Hope this helps!

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Indeed that works.

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