Like the topic says, what are all the ways to increase the strength of the hacking virus? I’m currently zipping around in a Buzzard, and with the Zeugma Integrated Analyzer and Blackglass implant I’ve got my virus strength pushed up to 60. Is there any way to ramp it up further than that? Seems that every hacking module or rig I can find is all about coherence and not strength.
That’s about it, afaik.
Zeugma with Blackglass is overkill anyway, if you know how to play the hacking minigame you can do it all with a cheap T2 and skills.
I could be wrong, but I figure there’s more for coherence simply because you need more defense than offense when hacking
Honestly defense is only needed because strength can’t get up there, hence why it’d be nice to figure out the combination of skills and gear needed to launch strength into one shot territory. Yes, I understand that there needs to be some kind of difficulty, but with combat there’s always a more efficient ship fitting, but exploration it’s 3 tools (ship, scanner, implant) and that’s all you get, you’re now capped out as far as performance goes.
Which gives you many different options as you have:
- scan speed
- scan strength
- scan deviation
- ship speed
- ship agility
- ship warp speed
- other ship stats that may help you survive more
- hacking stats
There are many ways to optimise an exploration frigate depending on your preferences and the dangers you face. Trivialising the hacking process with maximum strength is in my opinion less important as you can fix that with personal skill rather than relatively expensive module and implants. I’d rather fly a 50 million ISK frigate than a 300 million ISK setup that does the exact same thing but makes hacking (which already is trivial) easier.
Also, skip the scanner, there are better options for that mid slot, which also helps you get more site spawns further on your route.
You know if the Sunesis had +5 virus strength, it would be the perfect exploration ship, better than Sisters. Near perfect align with 2 inertia stabs and a nano in the lows. The ability to stuff an oversized 10MN AB. I’d like some more tank, but I can survive without more. But sadly, it’s just short of being perfect because it’s only OK at hacking not good.
Talking about the actual game instead of hypotheticals…
Isn’t scan strength more important than scan deviation? I thought scan deviation is how much your probes are off if you probes didn’t quite get it. So scan strength means you not only get the thing if you’re a bit off, if you’re off by enough you still don’t get it, the deviation should be smaller?
Yes, however every single option out there is all on the items that don’t matter when it comes to actually hacking. Maybe I want to make a frigate that’s a glass cannon hacker, capable of smashing system defenses with ease, especially during these events where my access is limited due to either local threat or time limit on the site. But again, that’s an option that’s unavailable to me as the only way to affect virus strength is the class of ship that you use (+5 or +10), what scanner you utilize (up to +30), and whether or not you use the implant (+20).
Why would anyone want or need more than 60 scan strength? Even the new “harder” hacks that were introduced during the halloween event and re-surfaced in the l3 sites during the Dr Who event are a cakewalk at 60.
Yes, scan strength is more important than deviation. Scan strength can be the difference between being able to scan down a signature or not. Especially for a new player who doesn’t have the skills to scan down harder sigs, extra scan strength can help them scan it.
Deviation only becomes important when you also care about scanning speed.
When looking at scan speed, there are three important stats:
Scan strength means you get to see faster if the sig is something you’re looking for, and results in a warpable sig faster
Scan speed means faster scans
Scan deviation means you get to the real location of the sig better, which can allow you to skip steps zooming in
All three will help you scan down signatures faster.
Scanning signatures is a large amount of thetime you spend as explorer, so it’s rather important to speed it up.
Another thing that takes a lot of time is travelling around, so it’s good to pick a fast ship with improved warp speed and agility.
The least of the concerns is hacking speed, as a player who solves enough of those will eventually be able to solve them in a few seconds while keeping their eyes elsewhere: on dscan and overview, it’s that easy. Burning between the cans takes most of the time in a site.
Yes, but hacking already is trivially easy that it’s really hard to fail at max level with a common T2 module.
And if you lose, you even have a second chance.
All I’m saying is that perhaps you’re focused too much on getting more powerful equipment for the hacking part of exploration, something you don’t need better equipment for as better personal hacking skills can get the same but significantly cheaper results.
In short, get better at hacking and stop relying on crutches like the blackglass to solve the hack for you.
60 can one shot anti-viruses. The restoration nodes can’t be one shotted, but since you can kill all anti-vruses before you uncover them (as opposed to trying to walk around the anti virus) and then finding the restoration node buffing it after you’ve realized you need to kill that) they aren’t too relevant. Heck for me even needing 4 hits to kill them aren’t that troublesome if there are no anti-viruses uncovered yet, so with 60 it’s cakewalk. The virus suppressor becomes slightly annoying rather than devastating, a single kernel rot is enough to make it a non-issue and you don’t need a vector to do it. So anything more than 60 is overkill.
Why does he want it? I have no idea. Maybe he’s in such a rush he just clicks everything, although trying to align faster would save more time than trying to mash through the hacking without looking, s if he’s trying to save time, this is a bad idea. Alternativly, he could just be really bad at the hacking so he does want the extra stength. I know I’m not perfect at everything in the game. I suck at one vs one PVP and when to comes to scanning, without my Magnate or Probe it takes me roughly 30-35 scans to get that stupid Level I wormhole so I can get myself out after someone closed the enterance. The third possibility is he wants some boost so he can reach 60 without needing an implant to free the slot, although given the way he talks about hacking, it sounds like he really wants more than 60 which is silly.
I kind of wish I could get a strength of 50 without implants. But I can make do with a strength of 25 on the Tech Is. I need to upgrade my fit but I’m constantly afraid of getting bubbled in a WH so I never bother.
Really? The Huge containers in the event I was finding multiple nodes sitting in the 80-90 range, beyond the capability of my one shot, and that was while chasing down a straight line. Man wish I knew I could kill all those nodes before I popped them up on that next click. Been a few times where I only managed to scrape through with around 20 coherence left.
Where are you getting these? The only thing that should have that high coherence are firewalls (easy to ignore), restoration nodes (not a problem because you killed at the anti-viruses before you untouched them), and virus suppressors (which are somewhat annoying, but with lesser settups you’d need a vector to deal with but in your case either the vector of the commonly dropped rot makes short work of it). Anti-viruses inherently have low coherence. Can you give three screenshots of hacks?
And that should be fine.
If you could one shot everything why not just bypass the hacking entirely. There should always be a risk of failure. And at 60 strength the risk of not being able to hack something is minimal.
No, because the crossover event is now over. Sounds like you didn’t go diving into the higher level warp convergence filaments. Those huge cans in there had some nasty hacks to get through, and the RNG was not kind.
Those cans had stronger nodes but to compensate the rule of six clusters are far more common. There are boards where you can get to the virus without even seeing a hostile node. In many respects they are far easier to navigate.
I did over 70 of l3 events sites. I have 60 hacking strength. I lost 4 cans through failed hacks.
Strength is fine. Anymore strength and the game would be pointless as it would be impossible to fail
I saw cans labeled “huge” and they have their anti-viruses with a coherence of 60. If there was any stronger cans, they weren’t the “huge” ones.
“Massive” cans in the l3 (mysterious) sites.
They were the same hacks as the low sec halloween event cans. 120 coherence on the virus node. 100 on the main hostile nodes.
But like i said a lot of the additional strength is negated by the fact that they tend to be mostly rule of six heaven
Ok he said “huge” so…
Hmmm, looks like Tech II analyzers without implants would probably fall flat. Unless you managed to get a Kernel Rot, Repair, and Vector (or repair and 2 vectors or 3 vectors…) before you hit your first anti-virus or virus suppressor, you wouldn’t get very far so you’d need to luck out and hope nothing but a firewall is between you and the core. I might be looking at the loss of 1/8 of the cans unless I got an implant and even that probably wouldn’t help much since I wouldn’t go for the uber +20 strength one.
So I guess more than 60 strength could be useful…
While more than 60 strengths could theoretically be useful, I think frostline analyzer with no implants should still cut it if you are careful, so I still think his original super blinged outfit was fine. Ok i don’t use integrated analyzers, I’m just theorycrafting. And for people admonishing him for spending so much, remember it’s easy to save a pod in low and high sec.
I still think having a Scan rangefinding array and an inertia stab would save the OP much more time than trying to optimize his hacks. Remember every second spent aligning is something he’s going to do every site and every system, so even if it doesn’t save a ship, it will shave off a lot of time.
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