Science & Industry

I will be interested in how they work out the new ore bays. If they are legitimately talking about giving the Retriever a "can-sized bay", then Orcas will become almost obsolete since Barges will have to return to the station once ever 45 minutes.

Each barge will have a place where it will be best used within a given situation. That's a buff to those barges that were never used outside of their respective niches and not really a nerf to the hulk.

Apparently most of you posting did not read very carefully what they are doing with training. You will be able to use any mining barge at level 1 training. I can assume they will do the same for exhumers. So you can pick from 3 different ships that have different pros and cons in which they mine. Training will no longer determine what you can or can not fly. It will now just determine how effective your ship is.

1. High Tank, Low yield. Low Capacity.
2. Medium Tank, Medium Yield, High Capacity.
3. Low Tank, High Yield, Medium Capacity.

It has been stated many times that HULKS will always be the highest yielding mining vessel, and wont get any buffs to their yield. Basically Hulks go untouched, staying as the master of high yield mining. The other two hauls are getting a buff so they become viable and not just training fillers. It's really that simple.

not to near hulk but to an acceptable margin ie to a point where their other bonuses make up for the lower yield

It's interesting to see so many people here going 'OMG the hulk needs to always be the best at everything!'

There is almost no other ship in the game* which has the same end-game status as the Hulk at the moment. No-one claims that the Hyperion is the absolute best Gallente battleship and the Dominix and Megathron aren't allowed to have advantages over it - but a quick check shows that the skill requirements and costs for the three available Gallente battleships and Ore exhumers follow pretty much exactly the same pattern. (Primary skill requirement of I, II and III, roughly 2x increase in price between top and bottom) A brief glance through the market shows that most classes of ships work like this, in fact.

So for those Hulk pilots who are worried that it will no longer be the undisputed top-dog of mining ships: that appears to be the whole point of the changes. It was never supposed to be that in the first place.

* The Rifter as the (ex-)king of T1 frigates is one likely exception here - and coincidentally in the recent frigate redesign it was untouched while all the other included ships got buffed.

The new afk ship will most likely be a retriever. The biggest cargo which will allow for the most holding space and it (currently) is only 8 million from what i am seeing so who would really bother to gank it? Sit in a belt and afk while you fill up a can sized cargo sounds amazing for people who like to do that.

I of course am talking about high sec where the gankers are cata's but if you are still flying a hulk in hi sec i give you props i retired my hulk awhile back and just moved to level 4 missions and salvaging. The thought of a ship costing 1/30th of my ship only requiring a weeks worth of training to kill my hulk ive trained so long and hard for is just stupid and ridiculous in my opinion. Not sure why they thought giving miners such a small tank on the largest Exhumer made sense but they did. This of course is just one mans opinion.

Since this is MD, let me throw you some stats at you.

IPH simulation, assuming perfect orca boost/dedicated hauler. Mining only veld.

Hulk 2xMLUs 29,726,378.35 isk per hour.

Hulk tanked, no MLUs 25,019,858.66 per hour.

Covetor with 2 MLUs 25,848,206.13 per hour.


With the new CPU rigs, the only difference between a covetor and a hulk is the crappy +15% exhumer bonus. That +15% costs you currently 240millon isk.

On .5 sec one catalyst can kill a full yield hulk. 2 catalysts can kill a tanked hulk. So flying a yield hulk currently making 29millon isk per hour on highsec will cost you almost 280millon isk, and will die to 10 millon isk. While on the other hand tanking the hulk lowers your yield to that of a yield covetor... while still dying to a 20millon isk gank.

Given this, why would anyone fly a hulk now? And just why the $%^#$% do ppl insist on calling the hulk the "king of yield"? That is just beyond me.

Unless you are a stubborn miner you should be flying a full yield covetor, and keeping 10 or 20 clone fits ready to launch from the station as soon as one of you miners dies.


My point with all of this is, exhumers lvl V and Hulks are pointless now. After this "fix" they will be even more pointless. Well, maybe not the skills exhumers to V since macks will benefit, but hulks will be terrible.

the problem is that with all the whiners crying over their hulks getting blown up when they should be flying covetors instead translated into CCP "fixing" miners so they don’t die, instead of fixing it so it’s not as expensive to die.

The question is, if after this "rebalance" the only difference between the hulk and the covetor will still be the exhumer +% yield. Because if that’s the only difference, what’s the point on the hulk? The solo miner will be the mackinaw, great, but the fleet miner will still be the covetor! And as soon as these changes go live, believe me "they" won’t let you undock a hulk, let alone stay with one on a belt.

The only way i see around this is making something crazy, like giving the hulk 5 strip miner hard points, but enough CPU to either fit a basic tank and 3 strips, or 5 strips and no tank. Now THATS a fleet miner.

That way you can actually justify flying hulks because there’s an actual reward for your risk. a change like this would ofc leave a lot of stupid highsec miners crying over their 5 strip hulk getting destroyed on a .5 belt, but they would have no one to blame but themselves. Even now the only place i can see lots of hulks mining is on hidden belts on null, and even there currently it’s still safer to fly covetors, why? Well because a 5 man SB gang can butt **** any mining op in less than 2 minutes.

Bottom line?

t2 barges are way too expensive. The rationale of "it’s the best mining barge so it should be expensive" doesn’t go well with how small the advantage they have over T1 and just how expensive the thing is.

Huh? It takes you 45 minutes to fill a can? Have you fitted civilian mining lasers in error?

I take it that I'm the only one that read the dev blog as: Hulk = no changes, others = buffed.

honestly, I didn't imagine to discuss about these changes in terms of "is it a buff? a nerf? you no happy? you dumb? what's wrong with you? ....."

hard to believe that stuff like those GreedSeed said are not considerd as pure golden truth as they really are and we have to debate about how the hulk is the allmighty hull among all the hundreds we can fly in eve, that it will always be and that it's the only one having such bonuses and........ bullshit.
Truth is that hulk is the most unbalanced one perhaps, and I'm not trying to convince anyone. It's an evident and blatant fact. Find me another ship you must train 2 months just to sit in it, that cost about 300M, mine a ridicule 10-15% more than a 25M one and falls under the fire of 2-3 catalysts without almost no chance of escaping such a ridicule attack! But yeah, here ridicules are those "who log in to mine", not those ganking barges in highsec LoL

Anyway, we miners can buy covetors from inferno on and be grateful to CCP for giving us all that time to train for a barge falling under the fire of 1 single destroyer (1 week in eve anyone can fly it). And see that revamping barges for them is rising the level of the noob ships because the hulk "is too far from a retriever"!!
Yes, we should be marry and dance on tables like drunk hobbits, no doubt.

Nonetheless, let me push you the definition of "nerf":

so, personally I wouldn't take 2-3 more pages of discussion to find an agreement on the fact that "buffing all the other barges and leaving hulk almost unchanged" is exactly and literally the definition of "nerfing hulks".

Can you wise ones accept it?