The marina rules are changing

You go away in the bush for two weeks and suddenly it's Epicurius Ataraxia all up in your shit, arging that either it's pointless to nerf yachts, or they are fine as they are, or....what the fuck i don't even. Read for yourself, comment, add your voice to the crowd.

It seems that the line has been drawn by, drum roll, yet another aspie fuckburger with too many alt accounts (+/- ISBoxer, it don't matter by now) playing a game of spaceburgers attention deficit disorder against a larger collection of basement dweebs by using lets say 4 Yachting toons and a prober (they say 8, but who knows?) to instaroll TDSIN's statics, trapping them out one by one and forcing the rest to cower in POS or get back in at inopportune times while Aspie McFuckbat is asleep (next step, Maxdel will come back and do the same, except every Russian will be sharing toons like a Chechyen prostitute child-bride of Islam or whatever the fuck).

So, apparently, this might be a bit much for the gentlemanly cabal of wormholes, and the Powers That Ought To Be have yanked Goonbex's chain and demanded something be done to fix the exploitative and broken state of the hole rolling meta, viz. the fucking Yachts.

I doubt that CCP has the stomach for the Omega Option, which is of course, to remove the Yacht and replace it with a giant floating space turd that makes everyone else's fucking HUD get smeared with stinky brown skidmarks. I mean, no one who's been on the end of a horde of rolling yachts (do you call it a Lacoste? a Ralph Lauren? what's the collective noun?) would notice the difference between a shit-smeared game experience and the rolling meta right now. But CCP won't do that.

So we are left with nerfing them. The only way to really nerf them is to either remove nullification from the hull, rendering them a bauble (like most other EVE gifts), or crunch the power grid so they can't fit a 100MN. Everything else is just a grab bag of dickass.

Seriously, when the Chinese lost that competition, their wormhole community didn't know the benefit they got. Well played you commie motherfuckers, well played. We got Yachts, you got North Korea.

Tiercide your tiercide with more tiercide

Well, my plans to play EVE this week fell in a well and drowned. So it's 2 more weeks out in the desert earning money. 

Trawling the F&I thread or whatever it is called now, there's a huge amount of tiercide inbound in March. My TL;DR of this is, basically, you'll have to wait till your Pyfa or EFT updates to figure out if anything works anymore. 

Whilst tiercide is overall a good thing, with the philosophy being to streamline the modules from arcane legacy names and an obtuse and uselessly designed metalevel system into the Attribute-Bonused system (Scoped, Compact, etc), the pace of change has gone from glacial to a rush of climate change glacial meltwater. 

This has some risks. Mostly the risks are to game feel (like mouthfeel for your mental model of how ships behave) and fittings and fits. 

Hit in the Feels

The biggest hit to the feel of the game is going to be the DCU / Hull Resist change. Technically it's a nerf to DCU's but only insofar as their hull resist bonus isn't as great as it used to be, but it comes with innate 33% resists for everything. Aside from Freighters and freighter gankers suffering from this (most autopiloting freighters don't have DCU's active; now 33% resists and wrecks that can't be popped), the effect for this will be that the ubiquitous use of DCU's is probably on the way out.

Nearly all of my fits, shield or otherwise, include a DCU because, a) 12.5% shield resists, b) armour resists, c) 60% hull resists are vital for buffer fits. Some nano ships, some frigates, you will avoid the DCU because it's kinda not worth it, but certainly prior to this a DCU was required for active armour and all frontline armour ships with logi because hull HP lets you gap down into hull in between rep cycles without insta-popping.

A native 33% resist, if you have low numbers of lowslots, may be enough to let you escalate your fit with AAR's (eg, AAR Crucifiers, Slicers, Incursus) and free up that DCU slot for more DPS modules. 30 CPU is basically swap a DCU for a Magstab. 

Likewise, shield ships may find that they can do without that DCU if you have, say T2 Minnie resist profile on a Vagabond, etc. Extra nanofiber or Gyro might be worth it, big time, and you still get a moderate hull buffer. 

Point and Pointability

The warp scrambler and disruptor changes are interesting, for two reasons. 

Firstly, the streamlining of the faction modules from being a grab-bag of randomly assigned bullshit, into a coherent and logical progression. This now means that some expensive pro fits with RF dissies will suffer the extra CPU requirement. This isn't bad, per se, because it was ridiculous in a way that the lowest CPU cost for a disruptor also came with the longest range. 

Secondly, the scram power is going up, which negates warp core stabs to some degree. Yay for honorable murdering of defenceless industrials! Certainly the Epithals with 5 stabs won't do so well anymore, and neither will the relic Herons with 2 or 3 stabs. Faction Warfare farmers are going to have some issues as well. 

However, scram ranges are lower overall, which is going to change the feels on frigate combat significantly. 

The ECCM Confab

Honestly, the merging of Sebo's and ECCM's is a great idea. This will do much to provide a neutralising factor for Falcons and ECM drones, will tidy up 120 database items and modules which were basically redundant (backup arrays, wut?) and provide a bit of an interesting dynamic in gate camp combat. 

Meanwhile, in ECM land, did you check the power of the ECM Burst AKA Burst Jammer? That's a bit more potent. T2 will be much more expensive to run (58 vs 48 or 38 for the Enduring - a significant difference), harder to fit and much more potent. Thus tiercide in the ECM's has really thrown the doors wide open, creating a real choice for the Falcon pilot - stronger but less cap stable, or more cap stability but less potency. 

T2 Invictus!

So, yeah, T2 is in almost all cases now going to be best. As it should be. 

Cap Battery Meh

Another go at the cap batteries seems a little unimpressive. For a fraction of the fitting costs you can fit a capacitor booster, and gain shitloads of capacitor to inject whenever you need. Sure, you might miss the capacitor resistance to neuting, but it's not really of much use off a Bhaalgorn or maybe a carrier anyway. 

IMO, the battery should give a substantial boost to the base capacitor, and the neut resist function should be moved into the Capacitor Flux Coil, which is a generally useless module no one ever uses because it shits on your capacitor and recharge rates. It would be nice to bulk up your neut resists via dropping a low slot item (usually DPS), and that would be a nice fillip to the meta. 

Heavy Stasis Grapplers

I am interested in the application of these, because this is clearly an attempt to make Battleships somewhat immune to the "get at 500m and orbit" malarkey frigates pull all the time. The synergy of nominal 90% webs and light drones vs frigates is also worth noting. 

The falloff mechanic is interesting, too, allowing a battleship to at least tangentially slow down a kiting cruiser or frigate at >10km. Even a moderate webbing factor applied to a cruiser may help some battleships land more telling blows. Others, with poor optimals or terrible tracking guns (I'm looking at you, blaster Rokhs, Apocalypses, Hyperions) won't really notice much. 

But I am yet to see them in action and get a feel for it. Overall, it's a good module to go with brawlers, and a good defensive module to go with MJD's. Even the threat of a BS having the grappler aboard will cause cruisers and battlecruisers to have a bit of a think as they come in to scram range. 

Bushed

Well, that was 3 weeks without EVE, spent up in the desert drilling for gold. Now I  have to manage my life for a week before doing it all again (ie; pay bills) before doing it again.

One bill I forgot to pay was the office rental bill in Shenda, locking down all the corpmates assets. Whoops.

#amateurhour

Somebody call Rolex...

It seems wormholes have become a boat-shoe wearer's paradise, what with the penchant for Yachting.

As much as I loved the idea of an interdiction nullified cloaky-flying instawarping gunless vanity boat when the Victorieux came out (hint: I didn't), when people figured out you could stuff a 100MN on the fucking thing and use it as a low-brow low-skill low-rent gay as fuck noob-accessible fucking Fagroller clone...well, let's just say that I was no longer willing to sponsor the yacht races using space-Rolexes and whatever the fuck gay-ass space barbies clothing shit.

What the actual.

So - who is expecting a nerf to these cancerous shitlord ass-barges? And who thinks this is all Working As (CCP Fozzie / CCP Larrikin / CCP Assmunch) Intended and will stay un-nerfed?

RIP, gallant POS

So, we could not save Old Values' POS in J22-whatever. This, as foreshadowed, was as much down to poor planning as it was poor execution, and being outmanned by Wingspan.

It is hard to motivate to turn up to an event where the enemy runs the Covert ops Cloaking Device II as their primary weapon system and denies fights they can't win at 14:1 odds. I mean, beyond the visceral enjoyment of playing bubble games and watching these idiots decloak-cascade on each other and warp in uncloaked to their safespots. That's good craic.

Nevertheless, you have to respect a group's autism and devotion to the cause of doing incredibly boring shit for 6 days to not kill a carrier. I mean, I've been there, done that, and stopped doing it because i've been playing this game longer than most of these guys have had pubes, so it's boring to me. Buuut....if you have barely crawled out of your mommy's uterus lining and just discovered that you can fly a Yacht and can (in a very basic, simian-brain way) obey simple commands, you can contribute to hole control long enough to confound the defence fleet.

We weren't assisted by almost all of the defenders deciding to go to bed instead of defend their shit, but in the end, it's their loss. Plus if Wingpants sticks around in that hole, they'll be providing plenty of content. So a win for EVE, I suppose.

Preparation is Key

So, I have become involved in a POS defence vs Wingspan. They are sieging out a 4 meatbod corp of Germans who are rather newb at the whole thing. So really all that Wingspan has going for it is numbers and a keenness to spend hours and hours of their evenings plinking away inefficiently at structures.

This really drives home the fact that you need to prepare ahead of time for these eventualities. Whilst it is fun to buy and own all the toys and stuff your hangars full of ships, if you don't have your defence strategy as equally well-stocked, you may as well SD your ships now, and save an alliance like Wingspan the effort.

The key is preparation.

Besides having a well prepared POS (you know, one that deters mostly all attacks anyway) you have to be prepared for the siege. This means having spare POS guns for when your original set are incapped, as you can anchor them and online them even at a reinforced POS.

The problem is you can't store them in your CHA. You instead need a strategic reserve of iterons or whatever, loaded with POS guns and ammo, sitting in your SMA, ready to go. That way you can extract the hauler from the SMA, launch and anchor the guns, and voila, instant new POS defence.

Get on it, small corp people, or you too will suffer much strife.

Aridia bound

So, got back from the holidays, and been slumming it as usual.

Myself and some ex-BUGRY guys are going to try something new or different while in between gigs - basing off a hisec island in the depths of Aridia, and spelunking into wormholes from there. Lowsec and lowsec-connected wormholes are a bit less lame than the usual B274 camping cowardfucks, and lowsy pirate dudes can be fun from time to time. Plus there's decent money to be made doing 5/10's and shit.

We'll see how it goes. It's going to be less hassle than fuelling a POS, that's for certain.