wtf are you going on about what does this have to do with anything i have said??
. <- Use these sometimes.
Anyway, a ship has to fill a role that is necessary or it’s not worth the effort / risk of trying to balance it with the rest of the ecosystem. It’s not just about adding things for the sake of variety.
Black ops ore hauler I could see room for.
Next question… and I ask this legitimately as I’ve never had perspective on mining outside of nullsov space where the folks that mine just undock and mine.
Is ninia-mining actually a thing in places where jump drives help?
I don’t have the jump drive train because honestly you can’t use it outside of low and null it would be nice if you could oh be something I’ll probably end up training next year once I get everything trained up right now I have my skill train set up for like 300 some days
…Why would you need to ninja-mine in HS?
read the forum link i sent it explains how it is a fun thing but without a hauler it is not at all profitable
I can totally see how it would be fun… but I can’t see why it would be worth the effort. Sure as a novelty, but the profit would be way better to just mine in space you control. If you’re adding ships to make a novelty profitable, I would question the motive for adding ships.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love for it to be a thing. For example, a thread in general I recently started suggesting that moons be consolidated greatly, making goo ninja-runs a very relevant thing. Just at the moment, apart from saying “lol lets do something really weird and inefficient” there’s just no point to it. From my perspective. Hence the question.
it’s more adding a ship to make an entire play style viable. also not sure how greatly consolidating moons will make it easier to ninja ?
… that statement could be used for any form of ninja mining
You have never dropped a fleet of prospects and ganked someone? or gone out in a combat mining fleet through low to see how long you could make it? there is no point to anything in this game you do it because it is fun lol.
Easier? Not at all. Viable, absolutely. You can bet that large blocs would control moons if they were consolidated.
Which is why I asked the question. Is there ever a reason beyond the lulz for ninja-mining?
Nope. When moons first came out, I was very hopeful that only some would be very valuable, which would in turn encourage blops groups to jump in, smash the current mining fleet, take the goo and run. Instead the opposite came true… it’s easier just to slap your own ta-ta down on an empty moon, and mine with impunity.
“Do it beacuse it’s fun” is all fine and good, but it tends to mess with my “why am I doing it the hard way?” mentality.
currently yes very much so if you put down a small pos? in the future no give a brigeable ship 30km ore bay and it will be.
nah instead what happens is these null blocks and particularly groups in NPC null just leave their belts with good stuff still in them some times it hasn’t even been touched. we bridge prospects and a DST set up a small pos for compression and make out with a good deal of isk. but you are required to have the POS something that will be going away
Glad I asked. I’d love to see it become more of a thing… resource scarcity and all that jazz. But that’s at least three different balls of wax to deal with for all of the angles that it needs to be looked at.
In the end, I’ve always enjoyed black ops. When I came back to Eve, the first thing that caught my eye was force recons (falcons specifically). Then I saw blops and it was love at first sight. We’ve recently been doing some very fun blops drops (actual ones, not just that bridging bombers crap) and I’m getting addicted, finding myself responding to pings instead of going to bed when I should.
Anything that leads to more blops-related content has my approval.
what?
just a 30km hauler and it all works
Sometimes when risk aversion is high in the eyes of the FC, the blops and recons stay behind. Blops just bridges in bombers to blap the target, then jumps in after the hornet’s nest has settled down to bridge the bombers home.
Boooooring. I LOVE bringing the battleship in, gives me a fierce case of the shakes when the ■■■■ hits the fan.
I’ll defer on this. Never tried, never had a reason to try, and probably never will have a reason to try. Were I to start mining, I’d just train myself into a rorq and take first pick at a moon or belt, rather than blops into one and try to ninja-mine to profit. Or get a skiff army together. Etc. Faster, easier, more profit. Far less fun of course, but, if the goal is to earn isk, why choose the one that makes less isk with remarkably higher risk?
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to be fair unless you are low on man power the battleship is simply never worth brining. it’s not even always do to the cost as T3s can sometimes out cost the BLOPS. There is nothing wrong with this their roll is just better suited to smaller operations. With some exceptions based on the hull. Bombers are also favored do to the their high dps/iso it takes to bring them so if you have a large fleet you are better off with simply bombers. I would not call any of these less blops than the other.
you want real fun don’t do any of that gank and go ■■■■. use T3s hit your target then stay on grid. don’t use blops for kills use them to create a fight
Hence the reason that I have, over the longest while, constantly had a trickle of threads I’ve authored suggesting that blops should get the ability to hold the grid.
Bombers don’t have it, recons don’t really have it, covert T3s kind of have it, and then we go back to battleships that definitely don’t have it. They’ve got more buffer than any of the rest, but they’re so intensely easy to tackle and apply to that their buffer doesn’t count for ■■■■.
Ganking isn’t exciting, but the risk when it turns out to be bait or when the response fleet is faster than anticipated certainly is. I’d MUCH rather the ability to hold the grid.
As such I’ve often said that blops should get some combination (one or more) of:
- Bomb launchers (god damn this would be terrifying, they could launch bombs at targets and stay on grid to finish the targets with guns. Imagine jumping a wave of these into a nullblob fight right at 30km on a bubbled arty fleet. Instant orgasm.)
- T2 resist profiles and slightly higher base stats
- Force and Combat variants, same as Recons, with current blops becoming force variants and combat variants trading their cloak for a bigger buffer
- A bit more fitting room to make their fits less shiny
I fully agree there’s no reason to bring blops. Bombers for their cost are by far the better choice when there’s 40 dudes in fleet. And that has always bothered me that blops have the same usage profile as a Titan.
no blops are good as they are. T3s have more than enough to hold a grid and blops if your comp is correct are very, very hard to keep tackled. BLOPs are probably the most if not the only balanced class of ships in this game. they have a roll and they do that role extremely well without being over powered. each blops has a magic combination of pros and cons that there is no “best” or “worst” ask any pilot and they will each give you different answers as to what their favorites are.
they don’t need any more tank they give that up for their cloak and jump drive. again build your comp right and these things already take one hell of a punch
get more experienced and you will find out the choice to fit or not fit a cloak is already a big part of the current line. only thing adding a second line would do is break the current balance within the class
you’re in a 1b fit you should be making it shine regardless… the redeemer panther and widow would all have extremely broken fits if given more PG or CPU.
even if that was true that shouldn’t be a problem.
but its not, they have a far larger profile than titans do. however it requires a much more competent fleet and FC to use them. A redeemer has much more DPS than a T3 and is a nightmare to remove if supported, the utility and mobility given to a fleet by a widow (if your not some idiot fitting it like a falcon) is a game changer. The flexibility of the Sin is a huge force multiplier. the panther has one of the most broken fits i have ever seen even able to operate outside of blops fleets.
problem is you need to know what your doing your FC needs to know what hes doing and your theory crafters need to know what they are doing. Its just a lot easier to drop a homogeneous fleet of T3 or massive numbers of bombers.
yet…
Afraid I’m going to have to disagree.
I do agree that they have their contributions to make in their own unique ways… but the benefit to cost ratio is as you say simply not worth it. Properly supported or not, a fully bridgeable fleet will never be able to hold the grid against an equal number of a proper home defense fleet.
You can say things like “if they know what they’re doing” all you want… if the other side knows what they’re doing too, you’re simply out-classed, and you’re going to lose. Add to this the fact that the response fleet knows what they’re countering, they can choose to bring a hard counter.
You’re right that I’m inexperienced at blops drops. But I’ve been in a countless number of home defense fleets. Blops gets pushed off grid easily by an even halfways competent FC, if the numbers are even. Speaking from experience here.
The crux of your argument is that you need to be skilled pilots, and your targets need to be scrubs. The moment they become skilled, your argument falls apart because you’re using gimped ships and they aren’t. You don’t have reinforcements, and they do. You can’t reship, they can.
and that’s exactly how it should be… no blops gang should be able to stand against a properly coordinated defense fleet. I mean you do understand just how powerful this type of fleet is right? the ability to have full control over when and where you fight is huge.
not unless you are dealing with fleet sizes far, far larger than blops are built for. unless your deemer is having its armor alphaed into hull it’s not going anyplace. You seem to come from a place where you are not aware of what these ships can do and you want to put them into a place (holding their own against an equally sized and competent defense fleet) that is completely broken and over powered. BLOPS are great because the floor is low and the ceiling is high.
i was the same when i first trained into blops. hell i did that before even participating in any sort of blops fleet. i thought they were bridges with fluff bonuses after the first few weeks and the omg so awesome wore off. it was years before i even brought one onto grid again and it took forever to learn how to use them.
i also enjoy how you tried to quote me as if i contradicted myself but left out the caveat of “with some exceptions based on the hull” there are far more fleet combinations that work without using blops and they are normally easier to fly. that is not the same as they don’t work.
Losing can be fun, but it’s a pyrrhic kind of fun, and certainly not sustainable at the cost of a blops fleet. Don’t forget that “T3s” aren’t the subject, “blops” are - the battleship, not the tactic. Blops should need to be supported (by bombers, T3s, recons), but as it stands, covert logistics can’t keep up with a real fight and because of that the moment you get into one, you’re toast. The hostile fleet has better buffer, better logistics, and enough DPS to break yours. Trading kills just isn’t viable for blops.
I do very much agree with the idea that their ability to jump in behind the camps and get at the tasty stuff in the middle is an extremely valuable thing that needs to be balanced around, but on the flip side of that, you can’t also say that they could hold the grid, supported or otherwise. They can’t.
Blops can gank skilled targets, and that’s it. Anything more only works when you’re fighting renters. The center of my argument is that they should be able to hold more than they can now. At the very least, they should be on-par with T1 battleships in terms of survivability, where right now only the Redeemer comes even close to that (and is still laughably far behind).
Allow me to re-do that then:
To surmise, it’s not worth bringing in larger ops because the contribution it offers is easily replaced when you aren’t limited by numbers. Your statement about cost doesn’t generally ring true with me, you can get a good covert t3 for generally less than the hull cost of a blops. Yes?
I agree completely they they all have their unique methods of contribution. But when you assert that their contributions become irrelevant in larger groups, that’s a problem to me. Yes they’ve got some decent tools to help them stay on grid, but by your own words any kind of real fight (the not-gank real fun stuff you mentioned) they’re best off just being bridges and letting T3s do the heavy lifting.