EVE General Discussion

I dunno I've seen a fair few Bouncer I clouds left in space with CFC tags.

This is the big problem to me. Slowcat fleets effectively remove pilot error from the equation, allowing a 100-member fleet to rely on the skills of a handful of "good" pilots while the rest can be thoroughly mediocre. Compare that to any other fleet doctrine and it's absurdly overpowered.

Personally, I say CCP should just make it so that carriers can't assign drone control for anything other than fighters and fighter bombers. If you've been around long enough to skill to carriers, you should be competent enough to manage drones on your own.

Its probably worth pointing out that a low sig fleet (read; Arty Lokifleet) would find it fairly easy to counter slowcats, and have multiple times, the issue then becomes the 250 Drakes that they brought with them.

So yeah, solve the problem of blobs in EVE, owait.

I'm not sure that slowcats are as OP as people seem to think. I have put a bit of thought into ways to counter them, or at least neutralize them for a while. These are some of the things i've come up with in like a half hour.

1) Bombing Runs: Staggering a wing of bombers might be a good way to eliminate a certain amount of the damage from the carriers. On paper, every carrier should be able to scoop drones before bombs land, and then redeploy and assist them right back again. However, in reality, if you stagger your bombing runs, that is a lot of recalling and redeploying. I bet a significant number of drones would die, and even the ones that didn't die would not all get reassigned and agressed right away. I believe it will significantly reduce dps output, even if just by making it harder for the carriers.

2) Specific Tanking: Specific tanking? In my PvP? Maybe so. Sentries deal monochrome damage. If you're at bouncer range, and they all drop bouncers, you know exactly what damage type your going to be getting. This could work well for long range fleets, where either they drop the damage type that can hit you, but hit for **** damage, or they switch damage and don't hit you at all. The problem with this could be other ships on the field, specific tanking one damage type may leave you vulnerable to the support fleet, but its something to keep in mind for certain situations

3) Smartbombs: Running a squad of smartbombing battleships could really **** with tightly grouped sentries. Not only would they be forced to recall sentries, but they'd basically have to stay recalled until the smartbombing bs were all dead. Running these with ecm bursts might be a good way to further disrupt the slowcat setup. Dropping a suicide triage carrier as well might even be worth a shot, as it could force support to primary it, or force carriers to drop fighters to deal with it. It wouldn't win the fight, but remember while the slowcats and maybe even the support fleet are dealing with this, you're dropping their support fleet without worrying about them.

4) Damps/Jams/sig radius: If the slowcats are all assigning drones to only a few agressor ships, damps can be used to drop their targeting range to the point where they are unable to agress the main fleet. Jams can also be used, but in this case i think damps actually might be the more efficient way to go about it. Also, fleets with a small sig radius might take significantly less damage from the sentries if they're moving with good tracking, but i havn't tested sig vs sentry, so not really sure on that

5) Split the fleet: Slowcats do live up to their name. They're slow as balls, and it takes a good few seconds for dps to be applied, as all the carriers come out of warp, drop drones, and get them all assigned. If you are trying to defend X sov structure, you might not be able to force them off the field, as they don't have to kill your fleet to win. However if you are in a situation where you are say, shooting SBUs, or enemy FC is being overly agressive, it is possible to get bad slowcat fleets split, and potentially grab carriers more or less on their own. If you have a large fleet, a carrier caught alone could well die before its fleet can warp back to save it.

6) Cynojammers: This is more of a strategic counter than a tactical counter, but it still works. If you suspect a slowcat heavy alliance is eyeing your space, make sure you are prepared to turn on cynojammers in all the relevant systems, make sure you are ready to time and stront your towers properly, get your triage carriers ready, and brawl them on the jammer oldschool style.

7) Capitals: Obviously, if your alliance/coalition can field large numbers of capitals, its always an option. A non-triage carrier at best can rep half the damage of a sieged dread, so if you can field half the dreads of the slowcat fleet, you can potentially brawl them with a significantly smaller dread fleet. The more carriers they lose, the faster you will break their reps, and the less dps they be doing, etcetra etcetra.

Not all these will work for all people at all times, if that was the case, nobody would use slowcats at all. I think the real benefit of slowcats is that they're very good against badly organized hostile groups. If you have a fairly organized defense, you could easily do the first 4 or 5 items on the list at the same time with only a very small handful of dedicated ships. A slowcat fleet trying to kill smartbombers, taking staggered bombs to the face, having their agressors damped to ****, and knowing if they warp off people will be trying to snag their ****, is going to be waaaay less effective.

TLDR: Slowcats are definitly really good, but i think people should try the obvious counters before they say it is OP and needs to be nerfed.

Dimi

The scan resolution bypassing is a good point, at least for carriers. If they patched it to say that carriers had to target a ship to assist non-fighter drones to it, that might work. It would make it harder for carriers to immediately reapply dps if they have to recall their drones, force them to wait a few moments before applying dps at the start of a fight, make it worthwhile to jam the carriers, and basically make the carrier's life a little bit harder.

However I think for support ships, being able to assist drones immediately is a good thing. It makes fights more dynamic, and helps balance the fact that people essentially kill your guns in a fight.

Damnit, I guess it's time to start stacking up. I can't wait until the day I see slowcatfleet 2 form up broadcasts going out.

We don't call them slowcats though, it would be some reference to stomping on things, probably..

Bhaalghorns

All of you have some point.
But bombing / smartbombing is not effective way - why?
Like someone stated - carriers can have thousands drones on board.
So when enemy starts to drop smart bomb battleships - kill them till you have drones, deploy t1 till all BS are dead, and then redeploy new group of T2.
Void bombs? We are talking about Carriers and usually 2xCCC T2 and 1xCCC T1

Destroyers taking out drones? They hit up to 140km - you are not talking moving near them?

Like i sad i don't want eve to be "BRING BIGGER SHIPS" - yes you can bring 150 titans and DD slowcat fleet.

Bombing is effective. Send in 2-3 bombers at a time forcing dps drop as drones either get scooped or die. If you have 10 bombers, you can easily stagger them so 2 are hitting every 30-45s. Lets say it takes a carrier 10s to scoop and relaunch/assign drones. This means you have killed over 33% of their dps if you do a run every 30s.

Also like other people have stated, drones do cost isk. Killing hundreds of them will add up pretty quickly.

Throw in random void and lockbreaker bomb waves to cause confusion - carriers will still most likely pull drones out of habit.

This is a horrible thread.

Dropping 150 carriers worth a total of ~200b isk. It is only fair that a scrub fleet of 300 ships worth a total of 150b isk cannot beat the 200b isk fleet.
The Slowcat fleet may be tough to take down, but the impact of losing a 100man carrier fleet is devastating. Slowcats are slow enough to be welped all in one big go, if not used with care.