There already are. Coercers are much better against shield-tanked ships and artillery ships are best for one-shot ganking on gates or stations dock/undock.
So it is not just catalyst and I haven’t seen anyone use hecate for gank in ages. It is not needed as you can just plex another alt with catalyst and hecate isn’t that much better than catalyst for ganking given his price due to the short time window you have for gank.
Ppls are using also huge variety of cruisers for gate-ganking.
I have seen ppls use stealth bombers to kill freighter too. In past, there were ppls killing them with Taloses too I think you needed like 12 to kill 3x cargohold freighter, right now it is mainly 20+ destroyer what is used for this. I don’t think that plexing 20 accs is cheaper than using 8 accounts with stealth bombers, maybe the reason for using 20x destroyer is that maxing out stealth bomber takes much more injectors/time.
EDIT: oh right I know why hecate/stealth bombers aren’t used that much. It is because you have to haul them from Jita. That is tedious and if everyone was doing it, the price would skyrocket too. I manufacture catalysts and thrashers myself, I bet other gankers do it too. I only import t2 guns which doesn’t take that much space so you can bring it with faster ship. T1 fit is usually enough anyway, especially if you have many expendable alts.
You make some good points. I haven’t seen the gank Coercer, but I can believe it. I’ve just felt for a while that the close range ammo on blasters was a bit out of whack when comparing to other small weapons, but then I’m not primarily a high sec player. And yeah, Hecates aren’t used in high sec as much, but it’s really in low/null that I see the Hecates take over a similar role (killing undertanked targets) that groups of Catalysts have in high sec.
Personally, I treat high sec like it’s dangerous, and I think a lot of the complaining comes from people that don’t think they should be in danger while flying around empire space. That said, I’m having trouble fitting up a Coercer in pyfa that really looks superior to a Catalyst, even when I copy some ganker fits off zkill. Does the gank Coercer rely on the assumption that an enemy is not plugging their EM hole or what?
I think I figured out how to do this. CONCORD doesn’t need to show up later (except the extra time with spawning/pulling). All that is needed is for CONCORD to do slightly lower DPS and don’t drain 100% cap instantly. That way, larger ships like thoraxes or taloses would be able to dish out few more extra shots which should encourage using them.
I am not sure, I never used coercers myself, but killing Gila or Orthus with catalysts is incredibly hard. Gila especially is op as hell. But on z-kill you can see these ships go aways in very few ppls if they used coercers or rather mix - start with coercers to take down shields, finish armor and hull with catalyst.
I bet the mission-ship gankers are fit-scanning their targets too and they choose shipsaccordingly to that. I used to do this with Orca back in 2018, but they were so overpowered back then that a smaller scale corp just couldn’t kill them if they used hull-tank fit.
I am not rejecting Suicide Gank per se.
But I do want people to sous vide gank with living characters, not disposable spam characters.
I love role playing not work.
The best part of the corercer is the range. conflag on a T2 small pulse laser is a lot more than void from a neutron blaster.
with the small time lines available in most ganks, the corercer will be able to start shooting after it lands on grid, where as half of the catalysts will be out of range, or deeply into fall off at the start.
I absolutely agree with that. I do use my main for ganking primarily. But still, retaliation from AG against me is just not going to happen because I won’t be doing any hauling, pve other than abyss where you can attack me anyway but good luck finding gate, nor pvp like wars (because I am not gonna deploy raitaru and pay huge money to wardec, that is not worth it and I am averse of losing that raitaru which I could not prevent since I couldn’t get anyone to join my corp so only I could be defending it).
I am doing PvE in lowsec sometimes but killright is useless there and good luck catching me.
Base ammo damage is the same for all similar ammo archetypes across types and sizes. Void S does the same raw damage as Hail S, for example. The difference lies in blasters simply being the most damaging weapon platform in the game, as compensation for their garbage range and lack of utility. For example, a Light Neutron Blaster II does 36% more DPS than a 200mm Autocannon II.
Hi Dracvlad, I have never argued in favour of a ‘balanced’ approach to the regulation of Highsec ganking. It is, though, a concept I often encounter in your own posts, and those of others who are broadly of the anti-ganking mindset.
Whatever you or I think, CCP seems to regard the activities as balanced - at the moment…
‘Balance’ in ganking/anti-ganking can be demonstrated in terms of play/counter-play, yes; but arguing from that point of view has got us nowhere in the past. You don’t need me to convince you of that!
No doubt, you are unhappy with some aspects of the current state of play, and I understand that, but I have nowhere endorsed specific measures such as an increase in CONCORD response times.
Rather, my point was that if there were to be a change (of any sort) which appeared to benefit both gankers and anti-gankers, the anti-gankers would likely deride it as a buff to ganking, disregarding its obvious mutual advantages.
For the record, I incline to the view that a complete overhaul of the Crimewatch mechanics is very long overdue. I accept that such a review might recommend further limits to the activities of both sides, but I’m hopeful that there would also be positives for gankers and anti-gankers alike. The current system is overly complex, messy.
Recently, playing Star Citizen, I committed a minor offence. Twice. I had to pay a fine, a realistic sum, and endure a term in prison; four hours. It isn’t possible directly to compare the two games, EVE and Star Citizen, and I would not advocate such a system for EVE, but the simplicity of the design impressed me.
‘Discussing things’ with anyone is pointless if neither you nor they will
compromise. I wonder that you put so much effort into it, Dracvlad!
Base ammo damage is the same for all similar ammo archetypes across types and sizes. Void S does the same raw damage as Hail S, for example. The difference lies in blasters simply being the most damaging weapon platform in the game, as compensation for their garbage range and lack of utility. For example, a Light Neutron Blaster II does 36% more DPS than a 200mm Autocannon II.
Blaster ammo is an interesting case because Void ammo actually gets longer optimal range than Antimatter, so I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s identical to similar ammo types like Hail when you actually get to the point of choosing an ammo type in-game. The base numbers are the same, but the tradeoffs are very different. The intended downside of Void ammo seems to be tracking, where Antimatter is superior, but tracking is much less relevant in the case of small guns and ends up creating an interesting result from the same ammo bonuses and penalties being applied across different sizes of weapons. But of course, I’m not the person to come up and declare what the numbers should be. It’s just an observation that Void ammo seems to be very powerful on small ships, which is perhaps relavant to the discussion on high sec ganking or perhaps not.
Ganking is a fine art. It requires training the relevant skills, establish a base of ops, move your ship of choice en mass, find your optimals at gate(s), scope out suitable targets and if you have them, repeat for your alts.
Players who want the ‘rebalance’ of suicide ganking have no idea what they are talking about. I’ve seen it from both angles (AG and Ganking) and achieving a successful Gank is by far the more challenging content.
Another little known fact which is often ignored - it’s extremely straight forward to avoid being the potential gank target by taking the necessary precautions. Yes taking precautions are a minor inconvenience but this game wasn’t meant to be easy. There are Intel channels, use an alt to scout ahead, dscan, don’t use autopilot, don’t afk etc. etc.
Something that is that micromanaged can’t really be said to be a sandbox. Buffing and nerfing stuff every 5 minutes in the name of ‘balance’ is absurd. In any game with predators, the balance has to be on the side of the predator…just as it does in the wilds on Earth.
That is why calls for ‘rebalancing’ are really just veiled calls to completely nerf ganking…when what should really be called for is people adopting a skillset and behaviour that doesn’t leave them prone to being ganked.
CCP is correct in that ganking is pretty balanced at this point. The tanks of the procurer and skiff were reduced and the other what I called the tankless four were improved. At this point they can be easily ganked if the miner makes no effort to fit a tank, and that is fine.
With the removal of bumping, freighter ganking is balanced, with the exception that the mass fleets of Catalysts is too cheap as per the points raised in here, because it makes the maximum amount that you can carry before you become a viable target too low.
DST is balanced, because MWD/Cloak trick, needs gankers to have that initial de-cloaker, they can do this but very few do. People who do not take care and who do not use this trick will get ganked and this is good balance.
BR’s are balanced because they can be got leaving the hubs, though Jita is difficult now.
T1 haulers can be tanked nicely but are a very exposed ganking target.
So overall I think that the ganking game is pretty much well balanced at this point.
What needs looking at is the consequences to push player interaction, as I pointed out the change to RR really caused an issue for AG fleets, because we are now unable to rep anyone who fires on the gankers, that is the number one issue.
Another is that the gankers can sit tethered and we cannot do anything to them. Previously some gankers with a kill right would be in space aligned so we could probe them and kill them, now they sit on structures immune.
A ganker can scoop the loot through a DST using frigates or noob ships for no consequences.
A ganker can freely use NPC stations, if they were not allowed to dock below a certain security level and had to use structures, a whole new counter-play would be possible.
I have detailed my thoughts on this clearly, so can you do better than this as a response.
You make a statement like that, seriously?
Rebalancing on the interaction is needed, there are very few people doing AG, and there is a very good reason for that.
Not to Gerard directly after his little off topic bullshite, but I also decided to sleep on the reply because I had some wine and wanted to be precise in my reply. Does this answer the question.
And what I wrote is what I have posted many times in the recent past on this subject, attentive people will know, but as most gankers only read what they want to read and go off on wild tangents they think that I want to end ganking and shout that all the time, so you know, it gets silly.
Dracvlad: I think ganking is very balanced now! Things are exactly as they should be! But also it would be good for CCP to look at certain ganking mechanics and make changes A, B, and C* in order to fix unintentional loopholes and make it even more balanced!
*changes that would make it virtually impossible to operate as a criminal in high-sec and would effectively eliminate ganking as an activity and play style
Also, I’m still amazed at how the self-proclaimed best PvPer to have ever played the game has no idea how to get around the RR limitation. Blows my mind.
When I was destroying ganker perches I was routinely asked to be main logistics FC and kept all of our fleets alive with just two Guardians and an Exequror …
…
Maybe Destiny should try doing real PvP against real PvPers like BLACKFLAG. before trying to make fun of known and respected fleet admirals, but we all know “he” won’t, heh…
heh…