EVE New Citizens Q&A

I'm basically a newbie who's very interested in stealth, let's just say that I'm the guy who makes people yell "ROGUE OP NERF PLS" in MMO games.
Now I'm aware that EVE isn't your typical MMO but I was overjoyed when I found out about stealth bombers and have decided to build my character around flying them. Before I do that though, I'd like to ask how well they perform in 1vs1 situations and solo PVP. I of course will be playing with my corp or friends but going solo is something that I do most of the time.

I'm not talking about using bombs in particular but PVPing alone with that class of ship in particular.
I'm not really sure what skills I want to train other than the ones the Nemesis requires.

Here is the fit a fellow corp member drew up for me.

High Slots:

Torpedo Launcher x 3
Covert Ops Cloaking Device
Bomb Launcher

Medium Slots:

Small Capacitor Booster
1mn Microwarpdrive
Warp Disruptor
Target Painter

Low Slots:

Co-Processor
Ballistic Control System


Rigs:

Small Ancillary Current Router I
Small Warhead Calefaction Catalyst I

but I guess I'll have to find another ship archetype for solo PVP, are cloaks only able to be implemented on Black ops ships and bombers?

You can actually stick a cloak on any ship but a freighter. It is cov ops cloak that limits you to recon or covops, or the new sisters of eve ships, which are on the expensive side for pvp, esp for a newbie. The other cloaks will hide you, but you are effectively motionless, which is why the mwd cloak trick is so important to learn. Also, the basic cloaks have a much longer targeting delay, so they are more for fleeing than ambush.

Cov ops cloak allows you to fly at a decent subwarp speed cloaked, and to warp cloaked.

Solo pvp in any ship is going to have some severe limitations in one way or another. You could start soloing right now, in cheap frigates. People have even taken out BCs in a rookie ship. Not that I'm saying you can (now), they had some significant player skills as well as character skills. But what can be more fun that killing someone else with a free ship?

Were I you then I wouldn't focus on the bomber so much.

With very few exceptions PvPrs view the bomber as a ship to use when the moment is right - or in squads of 8* where the damage can be fairly impressive. People don't use tend to use them as their main PvP ship or for general roaming as they're quite constrained in their effectiveness.

Having said that however, FIGL dropped bombs on our gang recently (lovely double bomb run) and I survived 8 scorch bombs hitting my Hyena (small sig radius, good thermal resists, 400mm plate). They pretty much wiped the rest of the (destroyer) gang out though, which illustrates the problem bombers have with sig radius.

tl;dr multiple bombers = more options; solo bombers = pretty damn frustrating although they can have their moments

*more than 8 bombs of the same type and the bombs begin to blow each other up

I'll look into Cloaking T3 cruisers, thank you for the feedback.

You might have some difficulty with these, at least if your looking into covert cloaks. I've heard that the proteus is the only one that has a decent combat covert combat fit. Keep in mind that fitting the covert subsystem will seriously gimp your combat ability. They'll still be a strong ship, but getting a fight may be a little difficult and the ship will be quite expensive for its combat ability.

Either way, if your interested in covert combat ships, and are willing to look into non-solo pvp, you'll probably want to look into a group that does black ops roams. Note that this means that they use black ops battleships for covert bridges to move between systems that are widely spread apart. It does not mean that they use black ops as the primary composition of their fleets.

There are some solo bomber guides online, but bombers are basically limited to engaging solo battleships, some battlecruiser fits, and hunting industrials.

Another option to look into is force recons. They use electronic warfare to put their opponent at a disadvantage during fights. They have low dps and tank, but if they can't be hit, its not much of an issue. Recons are up for a rebalance soon, so keep an eye on them.

Cloakies have one massive advantage over most other things for solo work. You decide when to engage. This is often not the case with other solo options.

Problem is that most of the time the thing to do is stay cloaked when solo.

But they are a lot of fun. I would still recommend flying them. But work on core skills now before getting bombers. You need them for fitting.

They are horrible in 1 v 1 PvP unless you a) are a real pro with uber skills and know what you are doing or b) your target is a complete newbie. Bombers die very quickly, usually in 2 shots from most reasonably tanked PvP ships. Of course there are ways to minimize the damage you can take with damps, disruptors, etc, but honestly they are not that good.... EXCEPT:

A well flown wing of bombers (7 of them) can take down anything, even capital ships, very quickly. They are also versatile in nullsec because they can bomb blobs of ships that are standing still and then cloak/warp almost immediately. However it's rare that a single bomb will kill anything unless it's a frigate with a microwarp drive active. And of course you're not a proper bomber pilot until you've killed yourself with your own bomb at least once :)

Come play with us, we like cloakies too >:)