Again, you would have lost half or less of your fleet if you had given your ships the command to burn out of the bubble in different directions, or had taken your drones out to fight back to the three ships that fought you.
You made mistakes and lost your entire fleet because of that.
Well as you have already stated, if your fleet required more to kill it, they would simply bring more. You seem hung up on the fact that āonly a small fleetā was needed to kill yours, but they brought a small fleet precisely because that was all that was needed.
Your first mistake was to try large-scale multi-mining in a WH. WH denizens are generally experienced, smart, capable, and used to hunting down intruders. So yes, you are correct, you canāt realistically do this. The wormholers will already have your anomaly bookmarked before you get there, they wonāt even need to scan anything down. Youāre visible and stationary at a predictable location for a long time. Youāre juicy and weak. You had no defense and no support.
This is not a tenable situation.
You could have brought tanked Procurers - warp bubbles only last a couple minutes. You could have skipped the Drake and maybe 2 Retrievers, and brought 2 cloaked combat ships and maybe a cloaked ECM ship. (People use WH ore anomalies for bait traps, not for high-ISK mining.) You could have had a drone swarm ready to back up your cloaked defenders and turned the trap around on the attackers. You could have spread your fleet out so they canāt all be caught within a single 20 or 40-km bubble. You could have set up safe-spots and used Higgs anchors and been ready to insta-warp out.
Apparently you didnāt do any of those things, so no, you canāt do āISK/HR optimalā mining at bait-traps in WH space with minimal preparation and poor setups. You got taken out by a small fleet because you set up in a way that invited being taken out by a small fleet.
The cloaked scout did what itās supposed to do. The bubble did what itās supposed to do. Your preparation and setup was the broken factor here. Thatās not the end of the world, it just means you learned a valuable lesson about what doesnāt work, and some tips on what might work.
Then donāt place all your 10+ ships within the range of a single warp bubble.
With prop mod the rets get up to about 350m/s, thatās 30sec to get out of the 20km bubble. The porp is not going anywhere while sieged.
Without props itās at least 60sec. And the Eris has over 1.5x base speed of the rets, so theyād just have to kill one side of the fleet while rets are staring out while the Eris is moving to the other side and rebubble to catch that side.
If I had all drones out (3 max due to SP restriction) thatās 132 dps for 11 ships worth of drones. Thatās not going to kill the Loki, but maybe if Iām lucky Iāll get the Eris if they only have an afterburner and donāt burn out. It still has no affect of the end result of losing the whole fleet
Not realistic to do when Iām in a c2 that has tiny asteroids spread out everywhere and I still want to be in range of the porpoise. I canāt realistically micromanage movement/targeting of 9 rets while also spamming d scan on a separate alt
But you surely have a mining range of at least 15km, which would mean youād only have 5km to travel to get out of a centrally placed 40km wide bubble. Thatās a little over 14 seconds.
Your problem is that 10 individual chars doing the mining would each prop mod away from the bubble centreā¦but as you are controlling a dispersed fleet, you are more than likely to be prop modding half your fleet into the bubble rather than away from it.
This whole argument revolves around the bubble mechanics being the way they are, which isnāt balanced.
Procs = less isk to the point itās not worth it
Swap out the 2 rets = 2 more ships not making isk while also having to be funded by the other rets which again makes it not worth it and may as well do individual drone boats
Drone swarm = maybe I kill the Eris, but Iām still losing to the main dps
Spread fleet out = out of range of porpoise, and not realistic to micromanage movement of that many ships
Higgs anchor = this is the only viable one that I could have done imo, but since I have to prealign each one individually idk if thatās possible while also d scanning with my alt and also micromanaging the actual mining/locking. And if they show up while Iām moving the fleet to a different part of the belt, Iām still boned
Iām not clear how you define āworth itā. You claim to be aiming for 400m ISK an hour. Heck, just 38 days of doing this 2.5 hours a day and youād have more worth than all my chars combined over 2.5 yearsā¦even with my occasional inputs of Walletanium. What grand scheme is this sheer greed aimed at ? Getting on towards 40 billion in little over a month not enough ?
No, seriously, no. Look at your post: you are literally saying that mining in WHs is only āworth itā to you if you can do it with a max-yield, high ISK/hr (āoptimalā) setup.
You say if you cut back the yield by approx. 15-20% with Procurers, itās not āworth itā (even though that gives you way more tank and a full set of combat drones to add to the mining drones). Not sure what your Mining Boost skills are but itās not that hard to get Porpoise boosts to 40km, which means your fleet can easily out-spread a warp bubble.
Your whole approach appears to be āItās only worth it to mine in WH if I can go max-ISK, no defense and minimal preparation. And then itās unfair that my no-compromise, no-inconvenience, no preparation setup can be easily taken out by 3 ships playing much smarter than I did.ā
Well, absolutely, I agree. If you arenāt willing to cut back on max-ISK in order to survive, then you canāt max-mine in WHs. If you arenāt willing to make some tradeoffs and do some preparation work, you canāt max-mine in WHs. If you arenāt willing to learn how bubbles actually work and what the mechanics are, you canāt max-mine in WHs. If you arenāt willing to undergo some extra inconvenience and clicks to spread your fleet out, you canāt max-mine in WHs.
You might have guessed that this was the answer in advance, simply by asking yourself āHey where are all the guides telling me how to multi-box 10 miners in WH space with max-yield, no defense setups?ā.
Thereās simply no way you could have expected to survive this for more time that it took for the first scout to spot you. Youāre trying to blame it on bubble mechanics, but you literally threw those ships into a meatgrinder and then act surprised when you got turned into fresh meat.
This is over 13 ships - 9 rets, 1 porp, 1 drake, 1 alt on POS, 1 covops on K door which gives me 30mil/hr over the 13 which is already pretty ass. Thatās 43hr of pure mining time, no loss, to plex all 13. Realistically closer to 80hr accounting for setup, travel time, idle time when things are too hot, and occasional loss (at least before knowing what I know now about dictors). If I play 4hr/day, Iām already needing to commit 20/30 days to just mining. Accounting for the way dictors work now, Iād either be at a net loss or have to mine the entire month which defeats the purpose of the whole thing
Itās about the relative isk/hr per account. Iām not taking home 40/bil a month after plexing.
Isk is the most op weapon/object in the game. Can buy merc fleets, rent juiced moons and other space, buy skill injectors/accelerators. Not much you canāt accomplish with enough thrown at it
Brother Iām already in the Republic of Congo mining for Lithium making $0.30 an hour while NATO is dropping 10,000lbs bombs on me. I might as well just give it up and go shoot rats in the city for $0.30-$0.40 an hour.
If I went max isk then I would drop my POS alt and K door covops to join the fleet. I have a reasonable amount of lookout/defense and not completely ignorant to where dangers can enter from.
Why would anyone make a guide saying essentially ādonāt bother mining solo in WH, just joint a null meat wall and mineā
Profit is only profit if your losses donāt exceed the profits.
If you are not willing to compromise on your profits by using strategies with a bigger chance of survival, you will lose more than you gain.
That isnāt a problem of the game. The entire problem is caused only by your choices.
The game mechanics involved in your loss are all well documented and all have counterplay options. Options that you did not use out of greed or ignorance.
This is not necessarily a problem, we all make mistakes. And we can all learn from our mistakes, provided that we recognise our mistakes and accept that we could do better, rather than blaming it on others.
You however are adding another mistake to your list if mistakes, which is that you blame the game for your loss. This is not how you can learn to get better at the game.
Bubbles are not what took your fleet down, it was your choices (including your fleetās positioning) and, if you allow, a lack of knowledge. Literally all of us (retained) EvE players went - and still go - through that stage more than once. Thatās why we keep ourselves informed, look up information and use whatever tools are available. The gameās harshness demands it. Thatās also why we love it, beating the odds and outsmarting the conditions (including other players).
SP = activity = ISK does not work as such in EvE, a feature it shares with most MMOs worth playing, if you are not fully aware of the risks. Knowledge is what makes it possible. And even though we have a knowledge repository, the eve uni wiki, weāre missing a step to make that knowledge more accessible: a compendium that gives an overall view of the game in its important aspects, to raise oneās awareness and to teach which are the right questions to ask before venturing out. One thing is very certain: different parts of space require different parts of the knowledge. In that respect wormhole space scores very high, both for pvp and for pve.
Bubbles are a staple in many fights, especially the large encounters. Although you may not like them, and suggest changes, it is most likely they will remain as they are, because they enable destruction - a necessary half of what constitutes the game. Without the ability to pin down, there wouldnāt be kills.
If you want to earn your income by doing the riskier stuff, in riskier parts of space, Iād strongly suggest that you join a group that shares knowledge, and which has access to (and protection in) the more lucrative areas. Learn from them. Donāt solo it, youāll suffer more losses than you care for. My second piece of advice to be thrown out: learn to be a hunter. Itās the best way to learn how to avoid risky behavior. And of course you cannot skip steps, but have to work your way up, and keep yourself informed.
An interdictor does not need to target+lock anything to throw a bubble. He only needs to be in a reasonable position and let the diameter of the bubble do the rest. As soon as he hits the bubble launcher module a bubble deploys, instantaneously. Thatās why they can uncloak and immediately drop a bubble, no targeting delays due to the cloak are in play. Only stealth bombers have a zero targeting delay when uncloaking, in case they want to shoot torps at a target and not just drop a bomb.
If you like to be informed about bubbles, this is a good explanation by CCP Aurora, including how to avoid them on gate camps: Twitch .
There was a time when bubbles in mid-space could drag a ship out of warp as well. Iām not sure that this still works (it always had to be geared towards the precise update intervals during the warp of the target), but those videos still exist on YT too. Itās high level stuff, nothing a casual player will be aware of, unless they read this post 
Then what the hell was stopping me from warping my fleet out? Itās literally what killed my fleet. Swap out the Loki for some cheaper/non covops dps and itās the same result. Indictor mechanics killed my fleet, full stop.
Having a 10 sec deploy time would not change its effectiveness in large scale fights like that. It only balances them in situations like this. Alternatively, make dictors slower, more expensive, or bubbles smaller
No, Iād argue that the most valuable commodity in the game is time. Four hours a day mining is four hours a day not doing PvP. I donāt mind paying to skip the grindā¦then I can do what I really want to do in the game. I could equally argue that my combined 2.6 Trillion worth of contribution to destruction in the game is āinfluenceā of a sort. And as I have a loss to kills rate of only about 2% its not like I have to get PLEX all that often.
How to put this politely ? You lost ships and now you want the thing that is allegedly responsible for your ship loss nerfed ? Itās not going to happen.
If I come around with some stealth bomber buddies, your ships will go down, without targeting and without a single bubble, in one very big bang. The ones that still try to survive will be warp disrupted manually and torpedoed.
You want all that nerfed too ? Or did you think that bubbles were the only way for you to lose your ships ?
Is that solo kills? If so thatās crazy. Or is that you 10:1ing target dummyās that have 0 shot in fighting back?
Also how much of that is miner/freighter/explorer? I donāt get the obsession with kmail ratio for ones that are padded with targets that canāt shoot back.
Needs to be another tracker/metric of how many fair fights youāve actually took part in and won. Flat kmail ratio is meaningless.
Also your goal is pvp and mine is large scale projects so we enjoy different parts of the game, right now itās tuned 100% to your liking.
I enjoy pvp, and I also build capital ships on my own amongst other things as stretched goals - for which I mine (grudgingly, but it needs to be done) and huff anywhere, run reactions and manufacture every single item myself, from the lowliest asteroid and R4 moon goo up to the most sp intense components. And that is on a single account, in nullsec and wh space. It took years to get to that point, and I did not skip steps when setting mid term goals.
I also enjoy flying (and losing) interdictors, lol.
Bombs are ok, at least I have 12sec before boom, so Iāll get out the ones you donāt tackle. Stealth bombers are greatly tuned imo. If you want to tackle more, you gotta run more ships, so thatās fine with me.
Only problem I have is with deploy time of indictors
I understand you have an issue with interdictor bubbles.
I also hope you will eventually understand you did it wrong. If you really want to mine in w-space, join a c5 corp/alliance, or wherever it is they hang out now after the nerf in the last update. At least youād have protection, intel and some guidance there.
