Wormholes

Shameless plug here, I have been meaning to get round to posting this recipe since I produced this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDQ8pU0OBb0 . I thoroughly enjoyed http://downthepipe-wh.com/ podcast last night and took note of what Two Step said about PVE in wormhole space becoming predictable and boring, we recently thought the same thing and decided to spend some time having fun with red giant effects to try something different! As I point out in the video this isn’t an original concept but it does take some planning and thinking through so I don’t know of many people who have tried it. I'd really love to see what other people have done to experiment with wormhole effects in PVE!

Enjoy, and may all your care bear dreams come true!

Serves 7+ players, or one very serious multiboxer.

Ingredients

A base of C6 red giant. Nothing less will suffice, and any lower class will ruin your efforts.
6+ Smart bombing battleships. The more you add the more 'oomph' you have. The Abaddon variety is best, flavoured with high EM resists and True Sansha smart bombs. You will need 60 seconds of capacitor, although cap charges will do if you don’t have the skills.
1 traditional triage Archon (well used) and loaded with plenty of dashing’s of strontium.
1 Legion Links of the all Level V quality. Don't hold back on the vintage of your links, they will help spice up this dish enormously.
1 Well trained Zepyr & Zepyr pilot.
An additional 1 dreadnoughts and 1 more carrier and dreadnought as required, any brand will do and won’t affect the outcome.
1 or more noctis, tenderised with 1600mm plate.
1 Webbifying Loki or Rapier.

Method

Firstly prepare your anomaly by creating bookmarks. Initially you need to create one far far away from the first wave of sleepers. Preferably three hundred kilometres or more. Then you need to warp one of your dreadnoughts to said bookmark and away again, thus creating the initial sleeper guardian spawn.

Secondly, position your Zephyr at the precise centre (this is important) of the sleeper guardian group, this is your warp in.

Thirdly, make sure links are running and your fleet is correctly aligned. Fleet warp your triage Archon, Rapier/Loki and battleships to zero on your Zepyr pilot. He must warp away before they land or meet his fate. On landing all battleships must instantly light their smart bombs and keep running them until all sleeper guardians are exploded. Make use of cap charges as required. The Archon must triage and lock up all battleships. The battleship that is primaried by the sleepers will require all reps and cap transfer to remain effective. Failure to triage will result in a difficult situation. Battleships will ideally be equipped with a webbifying device that should be utilized to prevent sleeper escape from the ball of fire.

Warp-preventing sleepers from the initial spawn must now be dispatched with lazors (refit on the carrier), take care not to trigger the second wave of the site.

Lastly, utilise one or more noctis to salvage all wrecks and warp away, pile all your ISK into a big mountain in the corner of your corp hangar and roll around in it, preferably while cackling like a mad man. Then FOR THE LOVE OF ISK GO AND PVP WITH IT.

This was a one off holiday, we don't live in a Red Giant.

I was dying for a T3 blob to land on us while the smart-bombs were running. We most likely would have been overwhelmed, but the panic it would have caused enemy guardian pilots would have been most amusing.

Why is not going to work on anything less than a c6?

Yeah if you watch the video you see the sleepers get to around 13-14k form the battleships - so we cut if fine. The True Sansha smart bombs have a 15k range in a C6, only 13.9k in a C5. There is some overlap so you want a bit of buffer. If they get out of range of the smart-bombs it gets really messy. You have to refit, possibly bring a dread in etc etc.

You could do it in a C5 for sure, but this is real min/max pveing. Consider also in a C5 you not only have less range but less DPS as well, so I wouldn't feel comfortable with less than 10 battleships, and consequently the loot payout gets smaller per player. Still fun tho if you want to try it out.

The beauty of smart bombing the escalations is that you can do it in one triage cycle - all the guardians are dead in under one minute. If the Abaddons re-fit like pros and the noctis's salvage really quick you can be in and out in just a little over a triage cycle (no need to re-enter triage unless something goes wrong). If you have the sites pre-bookmarked and pre-escalated you can clear many in a relatively short space of time.

Agreed it's a very interesting approach. But there's only about, what, 6 of these systems in existence? I'll guess 10 on the high because I don't want to look it up right now. Still a fun way to try things out.

Svo.

Cool stuff. Kicking the sand around the box nicely.

Well lets just say this is how it ended when we tried without triage

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=15307468

And yeah, these BS ain't cheap fit but it only made a small dent in our profits. Sometimes you have to suffer in the name of science!

That's interesting. It seems to me that an abaddon, (personally I wouldn't fit the second plate since it already has enough ehp), with legion links, tanks enough off of two legion boosted non-triage meta cap reps to survive 2 waves of sleepless guardians + the smartbomb damage. Even if that's not enough, you can do 3 cap reps + 1 energy transfer and that should be more than sufficient to keep it alive.

The only real need to triage might be if you are doing a quad escalation all at once.

Granted I haven't done this, I'm just looking at numbers in EFT and comparing it to values of tank in EFT for ships I actively use in WH PVE scenarios. The abaddon fit I'm looking at (which is the same as yours, except I drop the second plate and ANP for a-type kin and exp hardeners) tanks more off of two meta cap reps w/ legion links than my moros does (which I use in dual-escalating sites). (Like 1500dps more).

Not sure why you died. Eitherway it seems to me that most optimal way to do this sites would be to have a set of 5 caps, 3 carriers, 2 dreads, and warp 4 of them to 300km of a site to spawn the waves, and setup that site with a zephyr as you use the caps to spawn all 4 escalation waves in all the sites in the system, and as you get warpins for each of the sites via the zephyr, just clear all the escalation waves at once using the carrier in triage--which should be able to rep the abaddons properly with 2 cap RR, and should have enough tank to last ~1 minute even under full dps and neuting. Then just do what you said and salvage during the rest of the triage cycle and use the abaddons to clear the scramming frigs or w/e.

Have you tried doing all 4 escalation waves at once?

EDIT: And to the above poster-- I can't imagine it was due to the carrier being unable to lock in time. I actively use a non-triaged archon, and it locks my loki easily in time (which obviously has a smaller sig and larger lock time). You probably don't even get to half armor, 200k ehp is more than sufficient. Trying to use something with 80k ehp is where it gets pretty sketchy.

Alas, EFT does still not factor in human reaction time, and that's what makes this game great. I think that was the first site we did so were were a little nervous warping 8-bil of ships into possible doom if it all went wrong.

That's why I love EVE, even after all the dozens of factors to consider in this experiment like this, you can still never precisely predict human reaction time and *OH ***** scenarios.

I'm not the numbers guy, (Ace was) but my gut feeling is that the alpha from 28 Sleeper BS + the 'alpha' form the smart bombs hitting all at once when landing would mean that the Archon would really have to be on the ball. I think that 28 sleeper neuts would flatten the Abaddons cap completely even with a capital transfer on it so yeah B or A-type passive resists might be necessary, but then you are piling a whole heap of ISK on the field!

I would LOVE to see the footage of someone pulling this off tho! Seeing 28 BS 'splode at once would be nice.

Ah, I figured that you would be able to keep the EM hardeners on with the combination of cap energy transfers and popping cap boosters at the right moment.

Also, what do you mean about nobody ever getting hit by sleeper missiles?