Player Features and Ideas Discussion

but if you did that why would people ever mine in the arbi again?

Indeed, but they can already do that now with two DDA's and 5 mediums, with an even bigger tank (my suggestion removes that +25% shield bonus at least). It's 234 dps now, compared to 351 with this change though, so yeah its a big kick up the backside. Perhaps give the drone bay bonus to the procurer and the damage etc to the skiff, so at least then people have to use the expensive version and train it well to be able to get that? Something along these lines

I am cool with the DPS on this being able to compete with combat ships.

That would be the only thing pushing these to be picked for use outside of high sec space.
(The nice tank won't save you, you just take a few more seconds to pop since no concord is charging in to save you)

Drone base DPS is already more defensive / less mobile, since you can't leave grid and keep it unless you take the time to recall first.
That by itself will block this as more than novelty use in roams.

agree that the shield size bonus isnt very needed. it just gives you more time to think about how you got into the sticky situation and try to call for help.

switch that for stronger drones and its really a more defendable ship, which is the role that its supposed to have.
And while seeing a blops gang get torn to shreds makes my heart tremble, it happens.

Also, i'm also fine with these ships having the dps near combat ship levels. How else is it supposed to defend itself if it doesn't have that? imo a procurer/skiff is just a barge that has combat in mind rather than ore hold or output. Even if someone has fitted it with DDA's they are trading off mining amount by quite a bit, which i think is a reasonable trade-off.

And any use in fleets is limited by its small fittings and sluggishness. any serious pirates out there wouldn't choose a skiff simply for its drone bonus, there are other ships that have better bonuses and stats. so yeah, like nick said, its a novelty.

Need more ore cargo, if they were intended to be the solo mining ship.

This is true, but both are geared for use with combat support.

Concord provides this in high sec, obviously.

In sov null, local intel is used as an early warning system. This doesn't make local a boon to the miner, perversely enough, because the same thing warning the PvE pilot also flags your immediate presence to the hunter.
I would rather both sides be in the dark, but I keep my intel channel.

I can stick my second account onto a bottleneck gate in a covops to watch it, work with a few others, and we will know anyone coming into town.

But they won't even know we are there before we aren't there anymore. If that was confusing, let's shorten it to "the hunters will never see us"
But that's a null strategy specifically.

If this is out of range, stick to a Venture. Better to have it loaded with 5k ore than a free noob ship with 1 tritanium in an outpost.

You make a solid point, but in so doing you demonstrate the value of the barges is indeed conditional upon combat support.

I believe this is the case, and working as intended.

That being said, I still would like to see more options for self reliant play styles.

I think there is some need for a barge/exhumer that can operate solo in low and null but I don't think that giving it more DPS is the way to go.

The Procurer and Skiff are the obvious candidates for this.

If I were to design a barge/exhumer for low and null I'd want to shield tank the bat crap out of it, give it strong resistances, have enough ore hold to make the long trip away from the nearest refinery worthwhile, stabilize the warp core and give extra lows for more and even fit a utility high slot to make it cloaky (Procurer - normal cloak, Skiff - covert ops?).

An interesting thought would be to take away the ships' strip miner-capable high slot then add in a total of 8 normal high slots - one or two utility. That would allow the use of 6 or 7 mining lasers. The yield could be bonused to bring it up a bit, but not as high as if you mounted the one strip miner. The idea there would be to make it less desirable to use in high sec space where the livin's easy.

Give it some OK speed, cap to fit an MWD, quick-ish align time (bonus that on skill?) and you might have the beginnings of a pretty nice ninja miner. Being a solo ninja miner, you could also make it so that it can't benefit as much from mining foreman links - again to make it less popular for high sec.

OK, so, what I just proposed isn't very balanced. I was brainstorming. Run with it.

A mining barge or exhumer would never have a chance against someone set for PvP, so to dedicate resources to DPS, beyond the ability to handle NPC's seems silly to me. I would rather be able to get away and/or mess with the attackers with some decent ECM abilities. Allow for enough drone capacity to venture into low and null with mediums and have a couple back ups when you lose some. Handling most light PvP frames (frigates and destroyers) should be possible, but ones you get to medium and large your goal is escape, not a standing fight. The drone DPS would only serve to slow down your attacker - expect to lose those drones as they buy time for your escape and to make your hunter pay as much as possible for the kill.

If I were a real life miner going into dangerous areas, I wouldn't go in trying to gear up to take on a band of baddies, I would go in with gear to help me evade them and slow them down and/or confound their efforts to kill me. I'd be armed enough to handle the little local dangers. The basis of this idea is a battlecruiser with an ore hold.

However, you did get me on the ice point. Well played. My answer back - little ice lasers like mining lasers. 250m3 blocks each cycle. Doing this allows it to be possible for a solo player to kill rocks in low and null sec while making the resulting ship not-optimum for group activities.

To add to the original brainstorm, I would also make it possible to ECCM the ship enough to make unscannable.

Another addition is that I would make the ship as cheap and expendable as possible. To go to the extreme, I wouldn't even bother making a tech 2 version of it.

Interesting discussion guys. I based my OP on observing nullsec mining operations. When mining in a fleet, they take hulks and usually have a BS to provide firepower and support. Smaller groups seem to take mackinaws more often, especially if they don't have a big hauling ship. Skiffs I see now and then, but without big yield or cargo it's a puzzling ship. Nice shield hitpoints, but it's damage output is no better than the other exhumers, and certainly no better for defending an operation, so mack's tend to dominate.

Theres no point giving the procurer/skiff more ore hold, as then it starts to step on the retriever/mack. More yield steps on the covetor/hulk.

If nothing else is added, just giving the skiff a longer targeting range so it can actually lock stuff out at 40+km (further with a sensor booster) would be useful, not forgetting to lower lock speed in the process.

I thought the damage bonus would be the way to go, since I read somewhere a while back that the devs were thinking of giving the procurer/skiff weapon slots... yeah, go figure. So if they were to get more dps, I thought drone dps would be the way to go instead of adding missiles or whatever.

Another idea I thought of was giving up on the procurer/skiff being 'tough' barges, and doing them like this;
* Halve their overall hitpoints
* Change the 5% shield bonus to a 5% agility bonus.
* Increase the procurer's base velocity maximum to 150.
* Move one mid slot to the low slot.

So make it into an agile barge, good for warping out quicker, and with an extra lowslot for a warp core stab, DC etc. Then, down the track a bit, bring out a bigger 'heavy' barge (BC sized) that's slow, tough and has gas harvesting ability, sort of like a larger Venture. Here's some rough numbers:

Excavator Class (heavy barge)

ORE Excavator skill Bonuses:
5% bonus to mining laser yield
5% reduction to gas cloud harvesting duration per level

Role bonus:
100% bonus to mining yield and gas cloud harvesting

Slot layout: 5H, 4M, 2L; 4 turrets
Fittings: 160 PWG, 475 CPU
Maximum targeting range : 40km
Ore hold : 20000m3
Defense (shields / armor / hull) : 6000 / 3750 / 3500
Mobility (max velocity / inertia / mass / align time): 60 / .16 / 100,000,000 / 25
Drones (bay / bandwidth): 125m3 / 125mbit
Scan resolution : 90
Signature radius: 380
Warp speed: 3au/s