Batterizas!

The changes to Capacitor Batteries which came in recently were certainly effective. Granted, this was the third or fourth crack of the whip by CCP, but for once CCP Fozzie et al. looked at the feedback thread, which for once wasn't full of spergertards wheeze-gloating bullshit, and it all came together in a joy of effective rebalancing.

Now you can spend 450M on a Tengu with a cap battery and a DG XL booster and get 1600 DPS worth of practically neut-proof PVP godliness. Or you can go 1.5B and get 1900 DPS tank, add boosts and pills and implants and get 2500 DPS+.

With the Svipul you can get what I call Terminal Cancer, which has a Republic Fleet medium cap battery and a medium shield booster, cap stable. Links, pills and LG Crystal implants is 711 DPS tank  You can get a Hurricane Fleet down to 5% hull before a lucky wrecking shot alphas through your hull. I lacked all the fruit, and I still nearly won.

The cap battery Sac is now a beast. T2 fit MAAR/MARII and LCBII it's 816 DPS tank and with a medium scoped nosferatu running, cap stable at 29% and that's with two T2 nanobot accelerator rigs. If you want less tank and more capacitor spare, go 2 x T2 Aux Nano pumps and it's 734 DPS tank @ 63% cap stable. For 326M that's good craic - almost Deimos level bullshit.

Battery fits are also very much viable with Marauders. You can make a bassically capacitor-passive Vargur fit with 2 x Thukker LCB's  and 3 x A-type medium nos, which realistically is all you need to PVP with as long as you can primary the neuts off the field and aren't getting hotdropped by 2 carriers. Links, pills, HG Crystals, 6100 DPS tank cap stable at 38% with effective 33% neut resists. Booyah.

With the new Asklepion implants, a LCB Kronos is now very much a thing. In fact, the new Asklepion implants are so OP it's kinda ridiculous.

Truly, the days of the cap battery being a garbage module are well and truly over.

Competence

There's some interesting games afoot in Verge Vendor with monopolies being sought in the provision of 0% tax or low-transaction market Citadels.

Basically, Archetype. alliance, being a typical rentboy highsec wardec corp, has decced the owners of citadels (Astrahus and Fortizar) around Dodixie, to force their competition out of the niche in freeport low-tax hubs. This has seen some quite disorganised carebear alliances come under attack.

One such group of disorganised yet somehow space-rich ingenues is Resonance Alliance, who has a Fortizar in Botane. It got RFed recently, prompting one of the members to begin batphoning for help in defending the 1620 GMT timer. I saw him bleating ineffectually in a public channel and started mustering some help, mostly because I like dropping a dozen catalysts on neutral logi in highsec.

It quickly became apparent this guy had zero idea. He wanted to keep it a Freeport even during the fight over the timer. This meant that, for instance, the Archetype. neutral logi could have docked at the Fortizar in question and taken advantage of the heat and remote repair facilities. Or, if they were really smart, docked a freighter full of gank catalysts and undocked right into the defence fleet at zero and ganked shit.

"Dude. You have to treat this like a serious situation. Treat it like you are, you know, actually at war. Fucking lock that shit down, right now, even for 2 hours, just in case. You have to block off all the douchey highsec faggotry that they can and will pull, to get an edge over you." I said.

"But people have stuff inside and won't be able to access it."

"Who gives a fuck? Your Fortizar is worth about 40 billion, and all their shit will get transferred to some other station if it blows up, and someone might miss a few minutes of marketing bullshit. Are you seriously not going to lock your Fortizar down during an attack, just because some randoms might be inconvenienced?"

In the end, Archetype. used their spais, alts and scouts to see the horribly disorganised hordes of noobs jumps before they got on field, and obviously didn't attack it yesterday evening. But I have no doubt they will be back, and I have no doubt they will succeed if only because if you have such little competence that you can't even treat a war dec like a war, you really don't deserve to keep your Fortizar.

That said, there's some good ganking of neutral logi around Dodixie to be had, no doubt about that. Maybe something for someone who can organise their shit just enough to get a bunch of catalysts and a combat prober into position.

The Eastern Front 2016

Whilst killing Desertcrypt Gengod's Occator alt, I had traversed J105700, an unremarkable C1 with 21 online towers which comprised a giant refinery farm owned by some Polish industrial corporation.

It seems my killing of Crypt interrupted his nefarious plans to assemble Scimitars and nagas to assault said C1, where in true nerd fashion he had calculated their monthly fuel bill at 8B ISk. In the Toby Macguire "Show me the money!" forensic accounting schtick, if you can afford 8B ISK/mo in fuel, you must therefore be making at least 8B ISK/mo in profit if not substantially more. Therefore, because people are lazy, and there was a CSAA and 34 CHA's and 16 SMA's and...etc...Crypt figured out that there was serious Pinata.

So the Eastern Front was opened up this weekend, with the two juiciest POSs RFed on Friday. This involved 20 Nagas, VNI's and Oracles and, after some not too subtle coaxing from myself and Jack haamilton, 27 tractor units in Trashcat Doctrine, to speed up and smooth the RFing.

The sieging and the camping contnued till tonight, where Trashcats again came to the fore. Sadly, some people were bad tractor daddies, and some losses were experienced.

However, the loot pinata was suitably juuge.

Some gudfites were apparently had, before the looting fleet dealt with reputedly "a whole planet's worth of PI".

The Polish are apparently quite angry that their farm hole is being plowed. More content on the Eastern Front is expected.

Looting Fail, Scamming Success

A couple of days ago, some guys from the SSS / TITF coalition found their way into a C3 off Gusandall and found an offline POS. They of course farmed the SMA for dank loots.

One of them, however, got into a module popping frenzy and accidentally popped the SMA wreck, and all its juicy, juicy contents. We LOLed on comms about this, even though the other guy involved in the loot pinata was fairly steamed up about it.

Anyway, time passes and the owner of said SMA probes his way out to lowsec and sees the perps in local. A conversation is struck up, wherein the guy swears on the grave of his cat or something that he put fuel in the POS this morning, CCPHax, etc etc.

Slick says he'll sell the loot back at a steep discount, because splitting it up is just causing too much friction between himself and Air Thruster. A price of 2.5 billion ISK is agreed upon. The guy docks up, and a trade window is opened, and Slick starts filling the trade window with crap, and says Air Thruster's wallet needs to flash, because Air Thruster doesn't trust Slick to split the money since Slick has the loot. So the guy transfers the money to Air Thruster, and Slick closes out of the trade window.

The Humble T2 Small Warp Dissy

I make a habit of packing a T2 Warp Disruption Field with my scout ships. There comes a time when, lets say, you have baited an ishtar off a wormhole using a Nereus. Just for argument's sakes. And you've got him tackled nine ways to sunday but you don't have a dictor. So you can anchor the bubble and punt him inside it, kill him, and get the pod.

It's cruel if you use T1 bubbles, see. They have such a long anchoring time.

Batteclinic, I miss you not.

Besides changing their site layout and making it a cuntiferous abortion to use, Battleclinic had its heyday as a repository of pre-API  and pre-CREST verified killmails.

It also had a juge following as a place to swap, rate and discuss fittings. I spent some time there, indeed, and had some well-rated Apocrypha era fits, all now RIP. These days, your alliance and corp will store their fits in the corp library, on alliance forums, or via third party apps like Fleet-up. These are for Doctrines, and there's a reason for Doctrines, but this is of no use to the soloer or a noob corp starting out and finding their way out there amongst the stars and boat violencing.

I think that Battleclinic was a good resource for fits that anyone could access and, if noobs came to the game and found out about Battleclinic, they could at least get a heads up. But, like any social media platform, you got a democracy of idiots, and cultish followings and a culture that developed.

One side effect of Battleclinic was its treatment of rigs, by the culture of reviewers and retards and cliques of douchefuck commenters. According to Battleclinic, rigs had 3 possible purposes:
- more tank
- more spank
- GTFO for nano

This culture kind of survives even to this day, amidst the doctrines which are developed and the way things are discussed and passed around by the old hands at the game, who are what would nowadays be known as the Influencers. Influencers are probably stil keeping on fitting tank rigs as a rule, when the game has to some extent moved on a bit since then.

Consider the hyperspatial rigs. They give your tackle ships a crucial few seconds less on d-scan as they warp in to local. Or a few seconds less travel time from wormhole or gate to the Haven or Hub to tackle the shiny ratting boat. They give your tackle ships more survivability if the logi moves that extra few AU/s faster, and your battleships kind of absolutely need it to get to the battle before it's decided.

It's not to say that, in the right role, the old tank, spank and GTFO rig choices aren't still valid. Especially for Doctrines in alliances, you have a logi wing and so on, you stick to the tried and true. But certainly, the breadth of rig choices available now as opposed to 2008-09 or earlier, really means that shit needs to get explored better to get a new edge on the foe.

Hyperspatials are common with the guys I play with in lowsec. This has been forcing me to ask, for al my old fits I find lying around, can I maybe do something a bit funkier with a few different rigs?

GODDAMIT LUNCH

First I missed this shit. But that's fair enough, 5:38 a.m. LOLnope.

But you fucking for for lunch....and....then shit happens.

So, no, the goddamn move to lowsec isn't working out as I hoped :(

Overtanking vs Blobbing

Consider the humble active tanked PVP Tengu. It can tank ike a truck, especially now there's cap batteries which reflect the majority of neuting. So you can go baws deep and get yourself tackled 50km off a wormhole and scrabble back to it under neuting pressure and a fair amount of DPS.

But the thing about these sorts of hero tanked ships is, unless you're pretty sure the enemy doesn't have logi, the equation isn't "is my tank > their DPS" it's "is my blob bigger than theirs?" and "is my DPS > their tank?"

if you don't have that worked out, then you are screwing yourself out of 1.2B ISK for no real point.

Still....that was a Cataclysmic C3. In the Pulsar he was trying to crawl back into, there's not a lot we could have done to dunk the Tengu without more neuts. RIP 250,000 damages taken.

Skiff Massacre

The humble hyperspatial rig is a key ingredient in the murder of Skiffs. chuck a couple on your everything, it makes skiff murder so much easier.

12.6B (mostly pods) dunked.

Limited playing opportunities

Ugh, 2 weeks in the scrub and 2 weeks off. Great roster. Not easy to keep up with EVE happenings, and not much opportunity to play, let alone blog.