Innovations in hole rolling

The Higgs rig has certainly been a nonevent in the battleship arena for us. There is almost no valid reason to toss a Higgs rig on a battleship. To my mind, people mistake the risk factors of rolling a wormhole.

I lost a rolling panther last month, to a personal fuckup related to a phone call, a corp admin/corp roles event distracting me, and having been at the task of probing myself out of a K346 hole for 2.5 hours while being chased by BRAVE. No matter, I've still got 4 more of these paperweights clogging up my inventory. The risk of a rolling BLOPs is it's shininess, because it addresses all the real risk factors.

The real risk factor of rolling is being spotted, either by a scout lurking the hole, or on d-scan.  That's it. End of story.

Nothing can prevent you being heard jjumping a hole by someone cloaked on the hole.

A Panther addresses at least part of this by being cloaked for the majority of it's run back to the hole. A Higgs battleship exacerbates this by being on d-scan a long time, swinging in the breeze, moving very slowly. A web on you, and you're fucked.

The next risk factor is being caught with double-tap after you jump home. A Panther also help address this risk factor by being able to cloak-MWD and move at 1200m/s under cloak, once you jump home. You can also cloak-MJD and escape, perhaps. Higgs BS, not so much.

However, Higgs cruisers are becoming a big thing. We are (or should be) all aware of the rolling HICtor mechanics, with double-bubble or indeed up to hexabubble HIC fits used to drop the outbound mass and maximise the inbound mass during rolling so that you properly collapse the hole. Higgs rigs allow cruisers, such as the Maller, to simulate this but also to pack enough mass that they become efficient hole rollers by themselves.

For example, you can quite easily get a Higgs Maller to around 124Kt in mass with a 100MN prop mod and a Higgs rig. This is just shy of the 150Kt of a BS under propulsion module. Without the prop mod the Higgs Maller is 28-30Kt depending on whether you plate it or not. Thus, you can do around 150kt total mass damage with a cold-hot pass or if you go hot-hot 250kt, so with 8 cruisers you'll get the mass of the hole crushed. With shitty enough disposable alts on hand,  in a cruiser that costs around 12M ISK, you can get to a position where you can just throw these fuckers through hostile holes and not give a shit if they die in a fire.

The ultimate is of course the Fagroller T3, which is a cloaky nullified T3 with an oversized prop mod and a Higgs rig. They cost about 450M ISK and do the same mass damage as a Higgs Maller and you can probe your way out of dodge if you fuck up.You are cloaked, nullified...what more do you want?

Of course, there's nothing wrong with rolling in vanilla T1 battleships. They are plenty fine and efficient as they are, they are just a bit riskier. The question is of course whether you can afford the extra risk, or maybe want the rare fight that rolling brings, or whether losing a ship ever would cause you to quit EVE and Q.Q on the forums.