EVE General Discussion

let's not be silly.
ganking happens, that's a fact.

the reality though, is what's more inconvenient. losing isk because you're mining less stuff because you're flying something suboptimal for mining? or losing isk because you're replacing disposable throw away ships?

now unless some one is literally stalking you and blowing you up every time you undock, the latter is less of an inconvenience, generally.

T3s for everyone!

ProTip: You can safely assume that any ganker will be flying a Catalyst with anti-matter blasters, because 99% of gankers are completely devoid of imagination.

This means you can ignore EM & explosive resist and focus entirely on kinetic & thermal resist. Even assuming their debatable claims of 700DPS are true, what this really means is about 400 in kinetic & 300 in thermal for roughly ten seconds (assuming you're in 0.8 or above), so at most they'll do 4000 kinetic and 3000 thermal damage... but that's before resists. Getting your kinetic & thermal resists into the 75% range is actually pretty darn easy, which means after resists kick in you're looking at about 1000 kinetic and 750 thermal into your shields.

Next figure a decently tanked Mackinaw is going to have 5000+ shield HP alone and so we're looking at three suicide Catalysts just to break through the shields. Then your armor comes into play, which will probably soak another suicide Catalyst and after that you've got your DC2 giving you 60% resist in your hull (which is another two suicide Catalysts right there). So right there you're looking at at least five coordinated gank Catalysts to bring down a decently tanked Mackinaw. I'm sure other people out there have fits that can feed even more wannabes to CONCORD as well.

The final step though, for me at least, is a full flight of Vespa EC-600s. While they only have 1.5 of ECM (and can't be boosted past that, sadly), your Catalyst ganker only has a sensor strength of 11. While each drone only has about a 12% chance of jamming, with five up them you've got about a 60% of jamming them outright, which lowers their DPS to zero and turns them into Hors d'CONCORD (the jam will last longer than it takes for CONCORD to Zeus them out of existence).

That extra bit of randomness is also something gankers can't stomach at all, as they generally only gank if their little DPS spreadsheets promise them a 100% chance of success before they even undock.

So can such a ship still be ganked? Of course it can. Someone with a dozen ships could certainly take it down. But this isn't Hulkaggedon anymore, and this new generation of ganker has not shown anything near the level of organization that the Goons did back in the day.

Final part: Although a Retriever can't pack anywhere near the same level of tank as a Mackinaw (let alone a Skiff), it can still pack in enough to make it so that the number of Catalysts required to take it down would actually cost more than the Retriever itself. So in that respect a tanked Retriever is winning even when they lose and maye be the superior choice when it comes to gank resistance.

This has come up before. ECM doesn't take effect until the end of the jam cycle (i.e. 20 seconds later.) So ECM drones aren't useful.