Crime & Punishment

Thought of the day:
Timers are an important thing to understand. This used to be a fantastically complex topic. Now it is pretty simple, but still relevant.

Duel timers and log off timers are pretty self explanatory.

However, the piece you need to know is about the 1 minute timer that prevents you from redockng in a station or jumping through a gate after the use of any aggressive module.

That 1 minute timer is very important. Here are a few scenarios to illustrate:

1) You are flying along in a badger and you land on a gate next to a proteus who is a war target. He starts to lock you. You know he can melt your badger in a matter of seconds. If you hop through the gate, he will hop with you and easily catch you on the other side. What do you do to survive?

Answer 1) you try to warp to a station and dock. Of you could just orbit the gate and let him decide what he wants to do (dangerous if he has buddies). If he shoots you, you just jump through the gate and the 1 minute timer will prevent him from following. If he doesn't, you can just dock up when you get to station.

He cannot kill you unless you let him.


2) You see a guy out front of station baiting for fights. You get a friend in a tanky bait ship to engage him. As soon as he shoots, he is locked outside for 1 minute. Once your buddy sees him red-box, undock your biggest baddest DPS platform and melt him down... because he can't dock.

3) You are maneuvering your small fleet against a small enemy fleet. You know they're coming for you, so you push one ship to their side of a gate before they get there, and have him orbit the gate at 500. The rest of your party stays on the other side of the gate.

When the enemy fleet lands next to your one forward ship, he keeps orbiting the gate until he has several red-boxed on himself. Then, he jumps through the gate. If the fleet is unwise, they will attempt to follow and allow themselves to get split in the face of your fleet (the ones who shot will be stuck on the other side of the gate, the ones who jump will get to face your fleet without backup)... which won't end well if you have it together.

4) You are traveling through lowsec and a small ship tries to engage you on a gate. You realize that the gate guns will immediately start lighting him up and that he cannot jump through the gate because of the 1 minute timer. You can just warp scramble him and try to maneuver to not take damage while the gate guns break him.

5) If it's a small gate camp that catches you, you can try to burn back to gate. If you make it, only the ones that didn't shoot can follow. Most gate camps don't have a lot of tackles. If the tackles can't follow, maybe the DPS boats can't catch you. If the DPS can't follow and the tackle can... it's probably small and you might be able to ball it (especially with gate gun help) and keep moving. Understanding how to use timers to split gangs is important.

Even if you just land on a camp, if can be valuable to wait until some part engages before you jump... at least you won't have to fight that one ship.

How so? It's just a suspect timer now as far as I can tell. Am I missing something?

It has been a long time since I used any.

To go further you do not gain a Suspect time when providing remote assistance to somebody who has ALL the EXACT same LE's as you. The easiest way to do this is to actively agress the same targets with your remote assistance ship that the target of your assistance is also actively engaging/engaged by

Example
Pilot A and B agresses Pilot C who is suspect baiting on the Rens undock
Pilot C loses his suspect timer and decides to go balls deep and takes them 2v1
Pilot A and B engage Pilot C
Pilot B begins to provide remote assistance to Pilot A and vice versa because they are RR domi's
Nobody is suspect so long as this continues

Where this begins to get really tricky is wardecs
I don't have the time or inclination to share how to abuse this mechanic for wardecs but lets just say its arguably the most complex mechanic I've encountered in eve although the above example gets quite difficult to pull off with multiple pilots on both sides and most people just go suspect because it's too hard to avoid

Subject to change without notice or patch notes as with all things involving wardec and suspect baiting :shakes fist at CCP:

Thought of the day:

Ok, so this thread is working even if the volume of students isn't as great as I had hoped.

Yesterday, I nearly lost a Merlin (escaped in structure after slipping a scrambler) and today I fought a mid range punisher that was really quite well flown. Both pilots flew well enough to beat most of the opponents I've beaten and both were novices.

I was impressed.



Now, after learning how to maneuver and getting an understanding of what to do against a beatable opponent, chapter 2 is learning emergent pvp.

See, if you are in a Merlin and a tengu agrees to fight you, you aren't going to be able to win. So you need to dock up and get a ship that's small enough for him to engage and large enough to close the kill. Working ships, his perception, and timers to make the kill actually happen is a complex activity that I'm going to call "emergent pvp".

To learn this, make a bunch of ships of multiple tiers (frig to battleship) that each have a purpose (a scenario where they are effective).
Then start picking fights, declaring war, and fighting in engagements where you don't know what the opponent will do.


For the corp wanting to conduct training, first teach maneuver. Then when you do duels, do them on station or on a gate and have no rules (make it ok to dock and swap ships). This is how real fights progress... this forces contenders to face when the can't close a kill, look too strong, or have another issue that prevents actually winning.

Once you know how how to win and you understand maneuver, then you have to learn the emergent side of the game. Go steal out of cans, duel spam, and war dec your way to glory.

Random story: this weekend I was in a FW zone in a Crucifier (kitey MWD turret disruptor fit). I landed on a novice 'plex gate and D-Scan showed a Kestrel in the 'plex. I accidentally hit "activate gate" instead of "orbit" (I was waiting for reinforcements) and my immediate thought was "Well, I'm humped."

I land, the Kestrel is about 5k off of me, and I overheat my MWD and immediately burn away from him. My MWD is only active for a second before I get scrammed but it was enough. I manage to drift out of scram range for just a moment and immediately started spamming warp.

I got out with 3% structure and said a quick thank you prayer to RNGesus.

Moral of the story: Overheat! If that kestrel had overheated his scram, or if I hadn't overheated my MWD, I almost certainly wouldn't have gotten away.

I have used a similar tactic with sentry boats. Land, deploy sentries, and orbit one of them. It keeps me in roughly the same place and able to quickly scoop my drones, but it also keeps me moving so it's harder to apply damage to me.

I looked at the math behind this years ago but I can't be arsed to dig it up. Basically, it works, but I don't have qualitative figures to back me up, just experience.

Can I add one of my own?

Never underestimate T1 EWar ships. Many of them have EWar bonuses (particularly, range bonuses) that their T2 counterparts lack.

Want to build the ultimate damp sniper? Stick with a Celestis.

Need an ECM platform with 100km of optimal? Hop in that Scorpion.

Dying to muck up someone's tracking at ranges that would make a Naga jealous? Better get a Cruicifier.

T1 EWar: Range Tank Edition.

This is a valid tactic. I used to fly a scorpion solo sometimes in wars when I didn't expect a full blob because I knew I could easily disengage just about anyone.

I eventually lost it in low to a large number of frigates (many of whom I managed to jam) in an ill conceived fight in low sec somewhere.

Service cancelled due to lack of interest. I will stop monitoring "numbnuts pub" next time I log in.

I'll be learning to pve in null if anyone needs me. I still have a clone in Umokka area, and am happy to work with anyone.

If you want to learn, email or chat me.