EVE General Discussion

because you can already fit one but you don't want to sacrifice that ~max yield~ so you want it to already come on your hulk so that you don't have to be burdened with making such a difficult choice like "do I want to keep my ship"

considering that you can huddle up 200 mackinaws on a single ice rock which never depletes, well

A long TLDR tale detailing why a change (not necessarily this change) was needed

Premise

As everyone on Market Discussion knows (and screenshots on my website) I am a minerals trader. I am also a large amounts of BPOs holder including being able to manufacture fully fitted and rigged Orcas from scratch, fully fitted and rigged exhumers and so on (I can provide screenshots of all what I say).
I also own Tornado (not Talos), Thrasher and Catalyst (and Cormorant but that ship is bad for ganking) BPOs including all their mods and rigs.
I am heavily interested into the highest minerals prices for my trading and the maximum number of kills for my manufacturing.

BUT

Due to my auditor meta profession I have to experience all what I can about the game.
Living what you talk about is much more solid than using EFT theorycraft.


The event

So, when ice went above 1100 I decided to give ice mining a try. I already had a couple of ancient max yeld and cargo Macks I used up to 1 year ago when I needed isotopes for fuel.
I made an Orca with gun mined minerals (mining cycle + shield + armor links).

Willing to give Ruby Porto benefit of doubt I took one of his "all V skills plus +CPU blah blah" fittings. I painfully trained a pilot to comply with all the required skills (new player unfriendly, CCP does not like it).
I had to replace a PG implant (Minmatar fits tend to be greedy with PG) with a CPU implant.
I did not need the PG any more so it was not really a loss to me, but I suppose a new player would not have money for multiple +4 / +5 implants clones to swap so it'd be a pain to them.

End result: the mythical 22K EHP Mack apparently miners have to use or are "stupid pigs", everything both cargo and yield sacrificed for tank.

Now, I suspected the ship would blow hard but I got really surprised discovering it'd:

- only held 6 blocks. Not a surprise but I have to manually interrupt mining in half cycle and be careful with the timing else you only get 4 blocks and just wasted minutes for nothing.
- mined slightly above 6 blocks in the time the other ships mined their full amount of 10. That's a drop of about 35% in yield.

This alone makes feel the pilot wasted training weeks for nothing and with such a loss in performance the other ships WILL out-do it so hard that they will repay their lower survivability in few days.

But this is just a piece of the puzzle.


Being in an ice system means 70-80 in local even not in prime time.

Now comes the second part of my former post talking about how CCP has to put a brake to overly emergent / zealot players.

Over 2 months, during a regular day the ice system sported an average of 2 suicide gankers (players not alts, they all use 2-4 alts each) and an average of 14 ship deaths.
That's ok, weeds off the careless noobs and makes my mineral trading and manufacturing richer.


But then come the industrialized carpet bombing, which is CCP nerfed time and again so it's not like it's a surprise they would nerf this as well.
Bat Country guy comes in. Unlike casual gankers he staggered alts to have close to zero downtime. He used 1 Probe and 1 cov ops as scan + warp ins, he used 1-2 catalyst or 1 Amarr BC (don't recall the name) or 1 Tornado.

No other gankers could do anything, he "soloed" 78 kills in one day. This is a big step up. He killed so hard that everyone including Orcas + fleets had to move away.
As "Mara Rinn compliant" miner I added the various alts to contact list.
Now this is just 1 guy wreaking all this havoc, is it OK for CCP? Seems it's not.

But it's not over yet.

Seeing the mass slaugther I docked the max yield Macks and only left out the Ruby Porto's one + Orca.
Since I don't trust ANY exhumer to surivive a Bat Country guy, I also employed additional tricks including being aligned in a particular way that saved my butt several times.

In some way the guy scanned that overtanked Mack (I suppose he used the cov ops) and seeing the juicy T2 mods he decided to gank it.

Lo and behold he warped in *3* Tornadoes, 2 off alts that he did not use yet (so even dutifully adding the other alts as contacts was moot) and managed to shoot 1 salvo heavily hitting the ship before I warped out.
End result, I got a damaged ship and he lost 1 of his.

Now, is this what every miner is supposed to endure?
Absolute crap yield, have endless contact lists on all alts, stay on toes and aligned like an hawk and even then they just bring in 3 Tornadoes (he clearly did not do it for the income)?


I am NOT surprised to see CCP taking action, once again Goons pushed their "emergent gameplay" till CCP intervened.

I put it along the insurance nerf, FW LP hotfix, boomerang nerf. Doing is fine, overdoing on a prolonged, advertised grand scale is not.

I sincerely hope that CCP isn't dense enough to balance exhumers, which are supposed to be the top-of-the-line mining ships, not ships meant for new players, around the idea that (misguided) new players are flying them

please show me the "tank" on your exhumer

no, the civilian shield booster you have does not constitute a tank

[Hulk]

Damage Control II
Micro Auxiliary Power Core I

Medium F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Limited Adaptive Invulnerability Field I
Limited Adaptive Invulnerability Field I

Modulated Strip Miner II, Veldspar Mining Crystal II
Modulated Strip Miner II, Veldspar Mining Crystal II
Modulated Strip Miner II, Veldspar Mining Crystal II

Medium Ancillary Current Router I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I

Yes, I know it's not "perfect".

Forgot drones. 5x Vespa EC-600

here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/16196592/Hulk%20-%20catalyst%20tanked.jpg

they'd need 3 catalysts to kill you in an 0.5 and that's without any gang bonuses, fit a shield resist link on an orca and you'll get close to 50k against blasters, while still having more "uniform" EHP than what you have on that fit, and you're not really going to do much better against thrashers in either case

the stacking penalties are only screwing you over when you're fitting that many invulns

"oh look catalysts are landing" *overheats mid rack, turns on hardeners, launches ECM drones, prepares to smug in local when they flub*

also that "3 catalysts" figure assumes that it's 3 t2 fit catalysts with void and perfect gunnery skills, which isn't likely, especially if they need that many catalysts in 0.5

- Needs 6% CPU implant if I want to use cheaper T2 MSE.
- Only 27k EHP (Hulk with one MLU, survey scanner and overheated invuls can beat that)

you can't fit a T2 MSE on that setup anyway since CPU and PG hardwirings use the same slot, and this fit completely uses both, and that's with a genolution set (cheap) and a +1% PG hardwiring (even cheaper)

also, a meta 4 MSE is 1.5M in Jita - if the 500k isk difference matters to you, well, you're flying a 300M ISK ship

and you're quoting overall EHP, not EHP against blasters - hint, it's an even 50% kinetic/50% thermal damage distribution with void and fairly similar with CN Antimatter