Triglavian Recon Squad - Was I just lucky?

Industry Gameplay Center Mining & Extraction
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I’m a returning highsec miner.

I’ve always been super risk-averse. I fly with my main in a porp and three alts, each in procurers. Procurers have high shield tank and moderate hull tank, porp has high hull tank and moderate shield tank.

General setup is to have my procurers sit with ECM drones while they mine. My main sits with Mining Drone IIs and boosts.

Was jumped by a Triglavian recon squad yesterday for the first time, and it was totally unexpected. When they flew in, I just swapped all my ships out to field their combat drone flights. For the procurers, that’s four Warrior IIs and a light ECM drone. For the porp, I can choose between four Warrior IIs and a light ECM drone, or four Valkyrie IIs and a medium ECM drone - I fielded the mediums.

Because I had no idea these were real threats, I just left the drones to do their thing and shield repped with my porp while the miners mined. Porp pulled focus, probably because of the shield logi.

Eventually they got through my porp’s shield and into hull - which, again, is heavily tanked. So that’s when my dumb ass realized something odd was going on, so I got all my combat flights focused on a single recon unit at a time, but spread out the ECM drones across the various NPCs.

Initially three Trigs came in to say hello. After I took down the first one, another two warped in, which I’m assuming was a reinforcement mechanic. But it didn’t really matter. Once I was focusing the damage from all my ships on a single unit at a time, they burned through them pretty easy. No ship loss and only dropped a handful of ECM drones.

Sent my porp back for repairs, then flew back. Salvage looks like it’s gonna cover the porp repair and drone replacement costs. So no biggie, and I’m expecting that next time around if I stat focusing sooner instead of just spreading out my damage like a dumbass, I’ll take less damage next time and probably come out ahead on the salvage to boot.

So it was fun! Livened up my gameplay loop a lot. Looking forward to the next one. :smiley:

However, on researching it today to see what the hell was going on, everyone seems to be writing angry posts about how they’re storming out of HiSec because Trig Recon Squads. Which may explain why I haven’t seen anyone: I generally try to mine in quiet systems with lots of belts, so it’s not unusual to do a session without seeing many people. But it’s still been weird to not see anybody.

And… Yeah, it was a little bit of a shock, but it wasn’t that bad. Is this really sending my fellow carebears out of HiSec? Or did I just get lucky and pull an easy flight of recon drones?

So here’s the question: Did I just happen to be lucky? Like… Is that just on the easy end of the recon squad thing and it’s usually worse? Or am I just getting the benefit of being a risk-averse paranoid f****r?

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Sounds like you were prepared.

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The key here is you were prepared, properly tanked, at your keyboard, responded and adapted quickly. Many (not all) of those who have been bitten by these guys failed to do at least one of those things.

Incidentally, if there is a player Upwell structure in your system that you can access, repairs are going to be free there.

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That… Feels like something I should’ve known by now. For some reason I thought you had to be in the corp owning the structure to get the free repair. Thanks! :stuck_out_tongue:

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The structure owner can set their ACL to prevent players from docking, but if you can dock, you can use the repair service. On your overview, there will be an icon to let you know if you have access. A line means you can’t dock, and arrow means you’re good to go :slight_smile:

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Ah, that’ll be it. At some point in the past I must’ve gone to an out-of-corp structure that wasn’t open to me, so assumed that all out-of-corp structures were like that. Thanks for the update, that would’ve saved me a couple million. :slight_smile:

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How nice to read something about Trig Recons that isn’t a bleat or complaint. Well done Sir - o7

eta: If it’s not too much to ask, could we please have a look at your Porp and Proc fits ?

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Miners left high sec belts after moon mining in high sec become an ordinary thing. It happened before triglavians and was also caused by NPC miners striped high sec belt pretty fast. Players lost competition versus NPC mining fleets, so to say…
Recon fleets are deadly for single miner. Especially in anything less tanked than a procurer. You got 4 toons on grid. Thats made a difference. As long as you keep mining that way and avoid invaded systems you are ok. It was not luck.

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Ahh, makes sense about the moon mining. That was brand spanking new when I left, hadn’t seen the shift yet.

And good to know it’s not luck. Thanks. :slight_smile:

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In addition to the comments here about being prepared. You were a bit lucky, you got a flight of 3, not 5. So you had more time to fix your initial error of not taking them seriously enough.
Hint. 2 Porpoises can rep each other. Then it would have been super easy.

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Your setup is fairly powerful, except the ECM drones…don’t think 3 ECM drones are likely to do much for you, you prolly have at least 70k EHP on each of those and 3 flights of drones, a venture or a retriever does not, which is where the complaints are coming from.

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My fits are a little tight, I have reasonably good fitting skills. They’re also super basic, you can probably find these or something like them on EVE University.

For the drone flights, I’ve listed them with the names I give them in the drone window. Combat drones are swapped out based on whatever damage type the local rats are vulnerable to. If unknown, I go either omni or minmatar. At the time the trigs jumped me, I happend to have warriors, and they turned out to be awesome. It wasn’t planned that way, but it worked.

I like to throw one ECM drone into the mix with my combat flights. I’m not good enough at theorycrafting to state categorically that the hit to DPS is worth it. But anecdotally it feels like it’s worth it, and it felt really impactful against the Trig recon scouts. Your mileage may vary.

Porpoise - Hisec Foreman Tank Fit

  • High Slots
    • Mining Foreman Burst II (Mining Laser Optimization Charge)
    • Mining Foreman Burst II (Mining Laser Field Enhancement Charge)
    • Small Tractor Beam I
    • Medium Remote Shield Booster II
  • Medium Slots
    • Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
    • EM Ward Field II
    • Thermal Dissipation Field II
    • Kinetic Deflection Field II
  • Low Slots
    • Damage Control II
    • Reinforced Bulkheads II
  • Rig Slots
    • Medium Transverse Bulkhead II
    • Medium Transverse Bulkhead II
    • Medium Transverse Bulkhead II
  • Drone Bay
    • Flight 1 - Mining Drones
      • Mining Drone II x5
    • Flight 2 - Salvage Drones
      • Salvage Drone I x5
    • Flight 3 - Light Combat
      • Light Scout Drone II x4
    • Flight 3 - Light ECM
      • Hornet EC-300
    • Flight 4 - Medium Combat
      • Medium Scout Drone II x4
    • Flight 4 - Medium ECM
      • Vespa EC-600
  • Cargo
    • 300x Mining Laser Field Enhancement Charge
    • 300x Mining Laser Optimization Charge

Procurer - Hisec Ore Tank Fit

  • High Slots
    • Modulated Strip Miner II
    • Modulated Strip Miner II
  • Medium Slots
  • Medium Slots
    • Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
    • EM Ward Field II
    • Thermal Dissipation Field II
    • Kinetic Deflection Field II
  • Low Slots
    • Damage Control II
    • Reinforced Bulkheads II
  • Rig Slots
    • Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
    • Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
    • Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
  • Drone Bay
    • Flight 1 - Light Combat
      • Light Scout Drone II x4
    • Flight 1 - Light ECM
      • Hornet EC-300
    • Flight 2 - Light ECM
      • Hornet EC-300 x5
  • Cargo Bay
    • For each kind of ore in local space:
      • Mining Crystal II x3 (two to equip + 1 spare)
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It was 4 ECM drones. Porp and 3x procurers all had one ECM drone out. Probably doesn’t make a difference to your point though. :stuck_out_tongue:

Regardless: It felt impactful. Anecdote isn’t data of course, and I’m not a good enough theorycrafter to be able to back up how the combat felt. So I could be dead wrong.

Against the scouts, once I worked out something weird was going on, I swarmed the combat drones all on a single target, but I spread out the ECM drones to each target a different scout ship.

It seemed helpful against the damage I was receiving - not sure if forcing the disruptors to occasionally reset was all that meaningful. It may have been, or maybe it was just switching off enemy DPS for a bit and the bonus damage doesn’t matter. No idea. Felt like it helped though.

The thing that really felt like it was helping was switching off the ships that were remote repping whatever ship I was drone-swarming. Every now and again one of them would just stop repping, which I assume was an ECM drone getting a lucky roll. When that happened, it felt like the rate at which I burned through the armor improved a lot.

But again: Anecdotes aren’t data. It’s entirely possible that an extra 25% DPS on top of what I was doing would have been the better choice, and that I’m just preferring the ECM drone thing because it gave me the illusion of agency.

Thing is, I enjoyed that feeling of agency. Even if it was an illusion, it was fun to have something extra to manage in combat. I’ll stick with it for now. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yea you would do better focusing on all dps.

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