As someone who “grew” into their Orca it’s a balance between loiter time (not “quite” AFK, but pretty much AFK) and safety combined with an acceptable income rate.
Venture’s are weak, mine slow and don’t really have adequate drone capabilities.
The Endurance is basically a low-sec miner and for the ISK to purchase one you might as well buy a retriever; the issue here is that it’s easily popped (though if you can mine for a good few hours you can rake in about 30-40 million ISK/day, so it’s easily replaceable if not popped in the first week of ownership).
The Mackinaw is basically “the exhumer” at this time, “okay” loiter time and incredible (40k EHP) tank basically means as long as you are sitting at the PC doing something else with the audio on you can usually overheat hardeners and make it out; the issue here is that you can generally only make around 50-60 million ISK in a day and for 330+ million that is some serious investment considering.
Then you have the Orca, at 300k EHP and slightly lower yield the loiter time on it means you can actually study or watch a movie with a few memorized clicks to cycle between 'roids and is even capable of enough offensively at 300-500 DPS to ward off most smaller ships that would pester it.
Hell, I just mine while coding + WFH; pulls in about 58~ million ISK/day and I can walk away to use the loo or cook dinner and know it’ll be there when I come back (especially in a 0.8 system).
If they nerf the Orca, I’ll just switch back to using the Mackinaw; ideally though I would like to see mining mechanics just overall changed vs adjusting the Orca to encourage a more active play-style.
What that looks like… I don’t know, and if CCP adjusts how mining functions negatively you’ll see the rest of the game change with it as the Hi-sec materials are used in pretty much every piece of created content (ships, modules, structures, etc.)
If Orca’s truly are a problem (which I am dubious of considering the initial 1.8-2b ISK investment to get one and their overall daily yield) then just remove the 100% mining role bonus and double all of the exhumer ore hold’s and tack on an additional cycle reduction or additional yield increase to strips to offset the 300m+ investment in a Mack.
The other solution would be halve the structure on the Orca which should put it within gank range for coordinated groups or remove both of it’s low fitting points.
Mining is generally “work”, it’s the least fun aspect to Eve’s crafting system but it’s also one of the few relaxing activities where you can just chill and talk to corp mates or plan industrial chains or work on buy-orders etc. while generating some ISK on the side. It’s a passive activity at heart that is sadly abused like most content in Eve by multi-boxer’s (which IMHO, is a much larger issue that I don’t believe CCP is willing to handle).
Agreed! If one really wants to mine they should get a Mackinaw! Super tough and good yield. Really you can pretty much go semi-afk and still make lots of isk if you have a Mack with little problem! (but shh)
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