Wormholes

This guide assumes that you have a basic idea of how escalations work. I am not going to hold your hand through a standard escalation fleet and how it all works. If you don't have this basic level of knowledge, I recommend Jack Miton's guide, which you can find through a google search. It is somewhat outdated and only shows how to do this with an armour fleet, but is still a good resource and can easily be adapted to a shield fleet.

This guide is basically just ways to speed up your site clearing. The absolute best I have managed is 7 minutes, site to site. This includes one seige cycle and then warp time between sites. This was done with 2 people boxing 7 accounts and does not include salvage time (because you can salvage site 1 while you're shooting site 2). This was done with 3 dreadnaughts, so my comments will be aimed at fleets of about this size. Some people simply refuse to believe that 7 minute sites with only 3 dreads is possible. You can either take my word that it is, try it yourself and confirm that it is possible, or just pretend that I said 12 minutes insead of 7. I honestly don't care if you believe me, and I won't be making videos to prove it.

Regardless of your belief or skepticism, these tips are still good and will speed up your sites.

Setup. These are things you do before you get into the site.

1. Armour fleets are better for this.
They just are. You can optimise a shield fleet in some of these ways, but at the end of the day, you need 2 shield Lokis for every 1 armour Loki and shield fleets simply do not have the cap life/stability to do most of these. Fly armour, or accept that you're going to be slower and/or need more pilots for the same effect.

2. Archons or bust.
Thanatos and Nidhoggurs simply don't have the required tank and fittings available. If you try to use these methods with Thany/Nids, they will die and then your fleet will die. Chimeras are acceptable if you insist on running a shield fleet, but then again, see point number 1. You can use Thanny/Nid for escalations but you need to take things much slower because they are squishier.

3. Moros or bust.
If you're going to use Revelations, it needs to be first dread to leverage their higher tank and cap levels as well as their extra low slot to make up for the loss in damage. If it isn't first dread it needs to be a Moros. If it is first dread, it can still be a Moros.

4. Implants and drugs.
Use them. Gunnery Implants are a must, Slaves are nice, cap implants are nice. For drugs, use the Strong stuff. Mindflood and Drop for Dreads and Mindflood for carriers.


5. Refit all the things! (especially Dreads) <- This is underlined for a reason.
All your capital ships should have refits available for more cap, more tank and more damage, you should also have a full set of Bulkheads. If you aren't being shot, you don't need tank. If you aren't being neuted, you don't need cap mods. Dreads entering site should have a repper, a(n optional) damage control and then a full damage fit. If you're first carrier, consider swapping some cap mods for Drone Damage Amplifiers so you don't end up in the annoying situation of having 3 frigates and 2 cruisers left alive while everything else is dead. Just make sure to watch your cap. If the carrier dies, the fleet dies (or you have to bring the second carrier in early, which can be somewhat stressful).

6. Dreadnaught rigs should be 1x Burst Aerator II and 1x Metastasis Adjuster I.
Yes, leave one rig empty. No, don't fit Cap rigs. The thing that makes your site times faster is damage. If you aren't being shot, any slots used for tank modules are wasted. If you aren't low on cap, slots spent on cap mods are wasted. Damage is king, and the faster things die the less damage you have to tank and the faster those neuts go away. The only thing you will be doing for the entire site is shooting. You wont be tanking the whole time and you wont be being neuted the whole time. Refit your lows for those situations where you need to tank or are being neuted. Because of the way stacking penalties work, the rigs will always give the full effect because they provide the largest boosts to Rate of Fire and Tracking. A Hybrid Burst Aerator II on a Moros with 4x Fed Navy Mag Stabs will take you from 15k DPS up to 16k. That's a big difference. Remove Tracking Enhancers from your lows to fit cap mods first. TEs are the weakest modules you have fit, lose em first.

7. Shiny is fine, to a point.
Meta guns should be the first thing you invest in. Followed by faction damage mods, then faction tracking comps. But for the love of god, don't put Officer mods on. Yes, adding 4x Cormack's Magstabs will give you an extra 1000 DPS, but it will also cost you over 24 bil. Stick with faction, you're here to make ISK, not loot pinatas.

8. NO Sensor Boosters.
Mids are for Tracking Computers. You can have a Sensor Booster fit when you get into the site, but once you have locked your first target, take it off. Tracking Computers are better than Tracking Enhancers due to the way stacking works and you want as many of them as you can shoe-horn on. If you have enough Dreads in site that you have to use Sensor Boosters to keep up, you should be thinking about a second fleet, and not Sensor Boosters.

4. Agro control! <- This one is for you Keith!
*disclaimer* this is based on my own personal experience over about 2 years of capital escalations. As far as I know, none of this has been confirmed by any official sources, but it does work and is reproducable. You don't have to believe me, but 2 years escalating, most of that three waves at once and we never lost a single capital ship. *end disclaimer*
Sleepers hate certain things. Drones, EWAR, damage being done to them, remote repairs/cap transfers and sig radii. Based on knowledge of these things, it is possible to mess with their targetting.
a. If you're in a Dread and your tank is breaking, turn your guns off. Less damage means they hate you less and are more likely to switch targets. If you're one of those crazy shield tankers and have a TP fitted, turn that off too. It saves you capacitor and allows you to use your rep for longer under neuts as well.
b. If you're in a Carrier and your tank is breaking, stop remote repping/capping that Loki. Use Triage if you have to.
c. Use drones as chaf. Frigate sized sleepers hate Hobgoblins, cruiser size hate Hammerheads, the battleships hate Ogres. Throw them out to absorb some shots.
d. Bring a brick tanked Scorpion into the site with a full rack of jammers and just jam things for the whole site. You almost don't have to tank anything else if you do this. Reduces damage output because things are jammed and also they almost never shoot anything else. Just make sure your Scorpion doesn't explode.

Things you shouldn't do
1. Logi dreads.
This is a waste of a Dreadnaught. Dread+Carrier+loki is going to be much more effective than Dread+LogiDread+Loki and will result in having less sleepers on the field. If you have enough dreads that you are thinking of doing this so you can warp them all in, skip this step and just warp them all in with the carrier anyway. 3 waves is perfectly safe if you aren't stopping to lick all the windows on the way in.
2. Logi Rorquals.
First, you're shield tanking. Stop that. Second this is an extra pilot tied up doing logi things that simply isn't needed. Yes, you get extra capital reps out of it without triggering more sleepers, but it really isn't needed. It will just slow you down. Take this pilot and put him into a second (or third) Loki and just use a Chimera instead.
3. Bring anything that isn't a capital ship or a Loki into the site
When I was first doing escalations, we would start each site with 6-8 Tengus and a Rorqual. Kill all of the frigs/cruisers/Orthruses and THEN we'd bring in a Chimera, kill those sleepers with the Tengus and start bringing Dreads in one at a time. It was quite safe, we never had more than 8 Sleepers on field at a time, we had a Rorqual and we had 6-8 RR Tengus as well. We still managed to lose ships. Sleepers hit hard and they change targets. Don't bring unnecessary squishy ships into the site (looking at you Huginns/Rapiers).

Let the criticism and nay saying begin!

Don't need to kill the orthrus or any ship that doesn't point. Also, it's really easy to swap aggro between dreads by having one dread use a TP or a jammer.


Boohoo'ing because you don't have the friends or the money to do cap escalations?

Well what I was trying to say is that you can refit your dreads with ewar in the mids to manage aggro, it works relatively quickly for swapping aggro off a dread which is taking too much damage.

Flying a Nag I wonder what the Rev is supposed to do.

Also, I personally are having issues locking fast enough with only two sripted sebos. Most of the time 4-5 NPCs are being targeted while the first one is just starting to be shot.

We actually told people with Revs *No, you had months already to train for a dread, why do you still fly a rev?*, which is the major issue. Moros and Nags apply roughly the same damage to a Guardian @50k, the Rev though just blows.

Well, if you're going to be total elitists, you should be telling your Naglfar pilots to swap as well. The Moros is hideously out of balance and tops the applied damage against sleepers by a decent amount (something like 30% at most ranges that matter for this).

I wonder, has anyone else used the other dreads for this? How many of you can fly more than one dread? Are you all just looking at things like that graph and deciding that the Revelation is useless?

In this situation the Revelation is suggested as an option for first dread because of it's tank and capacitor. Having flown Moros as well as Revelation, I prefer the Revelation for first dreadnaught. It tanks harder and has a longer cap life under neuts. Second and onwards dreads can be pure damage fit Moroses, and wreck things while only rarely being targetted themselves, and never by three full waves like the Revelation can. First dread is going to take a pounding and I like to know that my Dread can survive more than the sleepers breaking wind in its general direction.

Probably the Moros can do almost as well, but the Revelation feels tougher when you fly it. Also, if you're only bringing one wave at a time, then yeah Moros or bust (you'll notice that point 3 in the OP was this). The Revelation is there if you need something to sit in the site and get shot at and not explode.

I've never tried a nid but thanny aslong as you fit it half sensibly and have fully bonused armor links is fine tank wise for first carrier the bigger consideration is capacitor (and energy RR range) - if your the main focus for neuts you need to be 100% on the ball with cap management.

Can also manipulate sleeper targets via sig reduction even with capitals as I found out by accident when I had a char in a carrier with halos in lol.

Scroll up, I'm not explaining it a third (fourth?) time. I swear its like people forget how to read when they see the word Revelation without an imediate comment on how much it sucks.



One, I can fly all the dreads. I have Vs for the Revelation though, as I found it much more useful for wormhole jewing.
Two, if you get jumped in a site it's because the attackers think they can kill you. Regardless of what you have on field, you're going to have a bad day unless your attackers are very stupid.

Confirming we are this great at PVE.