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Well the thing would be that people already drop FAX on nodes and going PANIC with a bunch of skiffs or procurers around you means you force the enemy to bring a predictable and weak as all hell set of ships to handle it. Battle barges still do a startling amount of DPS in numbers and the FAX can rep like a monster right up until it has to hit the "no fun allowed" button.

It really wouldn't be remotely healthy for that aspect of the game.


Ed: No entosis for PANIC confirmed in tweetfleet. Woopwoop

Clearly you mean "almost the dps of a super". Because we all know that 2,000 is "almost" 16,000. It is also more than the 3000 dps of a carrier. And we all know filling your low slots with drone amps and using ogres works oh so well in pvp combat. They apply just as well as fighters right?

The same way that a Triage Rorqual replaces the FAX. A Minokawa will put a triage fit rorqual to shame with a single repper.

Just as the mining yield is 10 hulks. No, it doesn't get the effective yield of 45,000 m3 per minute. It gets a theoretical 18k. If we're lucky, this will be an effective yield of close to 9k, or double a hulk, because drones are not turrets.

I say hopefully, because it would be bad if that 18,000 number is based on using an unrealistic fit like two T2 and one T1 drone mining augmentor rigs. In addition to being an extra billion in uninsurable fitting cost, it guts your cpu by nearly 200 and cripples your tank. Removing them, if they were included, gives us a theoretical 13,410. Which leaves us hoping to pull 6k, barely edging out a hulk in practice. We are also yet to see the cost of drones, which I expect to periodically lose to rats, or how they actually enter the market.

Nice to hear, I would have been very surprised if that made it into the final version.



I might bother to mark your words if you had some substantive numbers to back them up. So far what we've got is a ship that can fit to rep well, or deal damage well, but not as well as either of the capitals that are specialized for the role and not without entering a siege cycle where it's local tank is worse than either of the ships it will supposedly be used instead of.

I'll see about throwing together some math on this subject tonight, but I'd be very surprised if these concerns are at all justified. It seems like you just sort of glanced at the bonuses and CCP's quick blurb and immediately PANIC'd without thinking...



It's possible we'll see people hot-dropping with gank Rorquals, but its DPS relies on quite slow drones which even a half-decently fit PvE ship can swat, and it aligns in about a minute, can't cloak while warping, and can be tackled by a single Interceptor more or less indefinitely.

If you dropped this thing on even a full-gank fit ratting Carrier the Carrier would go "oh look, lunch!" release tackle fighters, light a cyno, and proceed to chew through the Rorqual's drones while waiting for backup.

A sin doesn't have to siege for full DPS, it can MJD any time it feels in trouble and cloaked it moves much faster.

A ratting Carrier with an absolutely paper tank and no active reps has at least 300k EHP. That's a good 5 minutes for a single Rorqual to chew through it, and the Carrier doesn't even have to kill the drones it just has to chase them off to reduce incoming DPS, and capital RR on Drones will do jack and squat.

If the Carrier actually has an active tank fit then 1k DPS won't even come close to breaking it, so you're talking about someone dropping multiple Rorquals.

That'll fly just about once per group before whoever got dropped will have a group of capitals loitering a few systems over waiting to pop your loot pinata of a hot-drop, and unlock BLOPS you can't warp off and can't cloak up, making these things hilariously easy to catch and kill.

Plus while Black Ops ships are relatively expensive they're rarely fitted with expensive modules, making the loss comparable or slightly in the BLOPs ship's favor given the cost of insurance and Capital modules, and Blops can be easily purchases in Jita. A new Rorqual is much harder to buy and probably has to be built buy the group that wants to use it, a process that is logistically annoying at the least, and takes about two weeks, give or take.

Basically my personal stance on the concept of the Rorqual hot-drop is "great, sounds hilarious". I don't think this is going to replace or overshadow actual combat captials or Black Ops ships, and I don't think it's going to be nearly as prevalent or problematic as you seem to think.

Sorry, I mean can't in the sense of "the Rorqual takes around a full minute to align out and it can't warp cloaked" meaning it's easy to catch one, and a prober can nail it before it can cloak if they're good and smart. Besides, you can point and tackle a Rorqual pretty easily. Certainly more easily than a cloaky hotdrop fleet.

What that means is that you're basically dropping in anywhere between 2 and 4 times the value of a Black Ops fleet per-hull (Rorquals are up to 3b per hull according to Eve Central) for a small increase in jump range and a decent increase in Tank, but using ships that are vulnerable to capital drops and harder to evac than any cloaky you could conceivably bring.

So yeah, again, if people wanna hot drop these things I think that's a fantastic and hilarious idea and I wholeheartedly encourage the practice!

It still has to deal with Jump Fatigue, at least to an extent, and I'm mostly talking about the situation of being counter-dropped while it either doesn't have jump cap or is still in fatigue (or is tackled). A BLOPS fleet that is tackled or otherwise interdicted, whether it's made up entirely of BLOPS ships or not, will be basically impossible to track and pin down once off-grid even for an experienced prober unless someone screws up the extraction (not impossible, but unlikely enough that I think we can write it off for the purposes of this discussion).

As for the cost of a Rorqual I don't think you'll realistically have time to drop it on a BLOPS drop gone wrong, and you're overestimating the insurance payout.

I pulled the current Rorqual Platinum Insurance Cost and Payout off of CREST (wooo Eve APIs!) and it comes to a cost of 664,678,502.4 ISK and a payout of 2,215,595,008 ISK. At the current market price of 3B that's a net loss on the hull of about 1.5B, and even if you're building the things yourselves that's still a loss of a full 1B after job install and material costs plus the cost of capital modules (and the Industrial Core if you want to use it as an emergency reps drop).

I'm not saying it won't happen, and like I said I kind of hope it does, but I don't think it's something that's going to become the new meta.

Will there be other ways other than the industrial core to increase the yield? IE modules that affect the drones? (before anyone mentions the rigs yes i know they are there....and they are ****....carry on) It would be interesting to see pilots having options other than anchoring themselves in one position

what about mining boosts and those belts that are 1300km wide?

some of the roids are 100km apart which means we will have to boost a miner and they warp to it.
on the drone miners, especially the rorqual, we siege and strip a roid, then wait 5 minutes to move to a new roid to siege again.

any chance to shrink those fields since we dont have system wide boosts anymore?

This sounds more like an interesting challenge to be overcome than something that should be removed because of its lack of convenience.

Those who are good at planning and coordination reap the rewards of these belts, those who aren't find them frustrating and mine elsewhere. Thus we have yet another thing to differentiate systems are areas of space.