Greedy Goblin

Monday, September 30, 2013

Thrashed

The sky is blue, the grass is green and the highsec gankers use Catalysts. No one would question this statement. A max-skilled Cata throws out 683 DPS without implants. No cheap ship can match it. The Catalyst has a weakness though, the blasters it uses are bound to Kinetic-Thermal damage. Fierro Delety knew it too and produced this clever fit:

[Mackinaw, Fierro]
Mining Laser Upgrade II
Mining Laser Upgrade II
Mining Laser Upgrade II

Upgraded Kinetic Deflection Amplifier I
Pithum C-Type Kinetic Deflection Amplifier
Pithum A-Type Thermic Dissipation Amplifier
Survey Scanner II

Modulated Strip Miner II, Veldspar Mining Crystal I
Modulated Strip Miner II, Veldspar Mining Crystal I

Medium Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer I
Medium Processor Overclocking Unit I

Don't let the "Pithum" part make you cry "OMG bling, supers log in", these are pretty cheap modules as the demand for them is low (shield supers fearing of being neuted). While sporting full yield fit, the shield resists of the ship are 81% Thermic, 86% Kinetic, which reduces the DPS of the Catalyst to 112. Ouch.

A dedicated ganker cannot suffer this.
Equipped with meta4 "scout" guns, Republic Fleet EMP S and bad skills, I had whopping 370 DPS on the fitting screen. However that nasty-fit Mackinaw had only 25% EM resistance, assuming perfect skills, making my effective DPS 278, which is terrible until you consider that it's 2.5x more than the perfect skilled Catalyst due to the resist hole of the ship. So Fierro Delety died.

How to perform a Thrasher/Cata dual gank? The most important is to keep gap between the ships. It's best done basing one jump away from the target, jumping in. The Thrasher warps to the target instantly, the Catalyst shall hold cloak for 10-15 more seconds before warping after it. Both of them shall have scram. The Thrasher lands, locks, orbits, scrams and shoots. Switch to the Cata. Land, lock, orbit but hold fire until the shields are down or you see the messages "Concord warp scrambles Trasher". No point shooting Void ammo into the shields. After the shield is down or Concord is here for the Trasher, shoot. Do not wait until the Thrasher is destroyed, or the same Concord squad will instapop you. Destroy the armor and the hull and pod the miner who thought he is clever by tanking against Therm/Kin. One more tip: if you get T2 guns, don't use T2 ammo because it is Kinetic/Explosive instead of EM.



An important step in the life of We Gank Because We Care: the first ganker who is not me reached the acceptance limit and invited to the corp. We are recruiting, of course.

Another day, another anti-tears:


Finally a funny moron:

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your aim supposedly was to teach miner to fly tanked ships. When you found one, you just simply ganked him anyway. What's the point? If you use that logic, why bother to teach anyone since everything can be ganked (and people don't care a out kb efficiency as you do).

Gevlon said...

"tanked" is an economic term. A Mackinaw costs 200M even with empty pod (average pod is above 100M). Tanked against 2 Catalysts (2*10M) is far from being enough.

Lucas Kell said...

By that logic the ONLY ship to use in high sec is a Procurer.
Since any non skiff/proc can be ganked by 3x T2s.
When you bring T1s into the equations (costing 2m) it gets silly.
Heres a list of the approximate cost of the ships, and the number of T2 and T1 catas you would be able to stay KB green with.
Hulk 220m (22 T2, 110 T1)
Mack 180m (18 T2, 90 T1)
Skif 138m (13 T2, 69 T1)
Cove 40m (4 T2, 20 T1)
Retr 34m (3 T2, 17 T1)
Proc 16m (1 T1, 8 T1)

A proc will need a good tank in a 0.5, since it only takes about 6 T1s to drop a basic tanked proc in a 0.5, which keeps them KB green. So the only ship that can be flown to avoid ganking completely is a tank fit procurer with an empty pod.

I'll be posting a new post on my blog this evening with the alternate train of thought to this, for the smart, efficient miner. Yield tanking!

Gevlon said...

@Lucas: you underestimate the cost of the gank. It's not just the Cata. It's also your time and your account. Every + catalyst means one more account to PLEX and an account that doesn't farm you in the background for example by ice mining. If you just count 5 mins for a gank, and only 30M/hour, the gank costs 2.5M/account just in time.

Also add that a gank means no gank in 15 mins. Do you really believe that anyone commanding a 8-box fleet will make it GCC on a Procurer while he could hit untanked Orcas?

Lucas Kell said...

You can;t really take the opportunity cost though. The chances of a ganker, who loves to gank, instead spending their time grinding isk is slim. A lot of gankers only gank, they simply gank for profit as well as for fun. Take miniluv, they gank freighters for billions in profit, then spend it all on ships to gank more. Opportunity cost can only be counted if there's proof that opportunity would be realised given the chance. With gankers, there is not.

And sure, a group of gankers (multiboxed or simply a group, with a group of individual being more likely) sure, they will pick an orca over a procurer. Of course they are going to pick the option that leaves them more KB green. That's like the old saying about escaping a lion. You don;t have to outrun the lion, you just have to outrun the guy running with you.
Either way though, if you want to survive a gank, you need a procurer. You state you want to teach people to tank, but you gank tanked ships. So what you should really be saying is you want to teach people to select the procurer.

Anonymous said...

@anonymous - if he was tanked well, he wouldn't have gotten ganked.

My understanding is he was impressed at the creativity, but still forgot to plug his EM hole

Ra_Jackson said...

Preaching to miners that they should tank and then just come with a Thrasher is still cypocritical. I like your effort to get around his resists, but then don't preach the tanking prayer. In the end it's just a game, and anything is gankable. You should add that to your tanking guide.
Next time you find a fully tanked Mack with resists and a DC, you undock two Tornadoes?

Hivemind said...

That seems a very arbitrary line to draw - "Nobody using an 8 box fleet will gank a T1 barge" you say, but you're certainly willing to use at least 3 4ths of your fleet for that purpose (scout/warpin, ganker and looter) and to accept that "15 minutes of not ganking" to kill T1 targets when you have enough firepower to take out the more cost-effective T2s. Given your killboard I doubt it would take longer than 15 minutes to find an untanked or insufficiently tanked Hulk or Mackinaw compared to just popping a Retriever, yet you kill more of them than you do Exhumers.

Ultimately your message seems more and more to be "Miners should automatically understand the lengths I personally am/am not willing to go to for a gank and choose ships/fittings appropriately", which is a lot less altruistic or rational than what you claim.

Finally, I don't know about watchlisting but setting scout alts for known gankers to negative standings (along with the gankers themselves) is hardly a bad idea and again I'm surprised to see someone who claims their goal is to educate miners casually dismissing it. IIRC the reason your scout alt normally flies a Procurer is because it doesn't look out of place moving through an asteroid belt while you passively shipscan potential targets? Attaching a standing tag to that scout alt means that they'll stick out when attempting that, which can warn a miner that they're being set up for a gank and give them time to get out before the gankers arrive on grid. The fact the player who suggested this didn't have the foresight to take advantage of it doesn't change that it's a good idea.

Gevlon said...

@Hivemind: show a Retriever that I dual ganked!

I solo gank them, alternating between the gankers. This way I can gank in every 9 minutes instead of 17 (GCC+warp+gank)

Lucas Kell said...

@Gevlon:
"show a Retriever that I dual ganked!"
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=19753412

I win EVE!

Von Keigai said...

Gevlon's aim is to teach people to tank against all possible rational attackers, not just Catalysts.

Thrashers are better gankers than you'd guess from reading this post. The max Cat output is 728 DPS; an equivalently trained and implanted Thrasher is 567 when shooting T2 (mostly explosive damage), or 520 shooting T1 (can select mainly EM or mainly thermal). Thrashers can exploit a hole in any resist other than Kinetic.

To properly tank any ship versus gank you cannot neglect any of the four resists.

Hivemind said...

@ Gevlon

I didn't say that you used both your gankers to kill retrievers, I said you used 3 of your 4 pilot gank team - one ganker, plus your scout alt and your loot alt.

My point remains, your argument in the earlier comment was "gankers won't do X because it's inefficient" and yet you're taking the less-efficient option every time you gank retrievers - a 40 million ISK Retriever every 9 minutes is 4.44m ISK/minute, a 180 million ISK Mackinaw every 17 is 10.6m ISK/minute.

Gevlon said...

@Hivemind: you forget the pods. I found 80M average pod in T1 and 130M in T2, so 2 rets are 2*(80+40)=240, one T2 is 200+130 = 330, not that big difference.

@Lucas: that was some serious facepalm moment: I noted wrong name, hit the ret next to the Hulk.

Lucas Kell said...

Here we go. As promised, my approach to tanking while mining:
http://indecisivenoob.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/alternative-approach-yield-tank.html

Lucas Kell said...

@Gevlon :D I hate those moments.

I think what Hivemind is trying to point out is that you don't always choose the most expensive kill. You kill retrievers when you are likely to find badly tanked Exhumers if you looked about during your GCC. The pods are luck based since you can tell what pilot will have a good pod and what one will be empty.

Hivemind said...

@Gevlon

70 million is > 25% extra ISK per round of ganking, plus we're both leaving out the most efficient option, focusing on T2 ships that can be ganked with a solo Catalyst; that'd net you 175% extra ISK. On the other hand I presume that you prefer not to regularly invest the time needed to locate targets that vulnerable when there are plenty of other ships you can kill less efficiently and you dual-gank Retrievers because you prefer to gank more frequently, albeit less efficiently.

My point remains that you're saying that players only need to tank their ships to a certain level because gankers want to be efficient (and coincidentally the maximum they need to tank against is equal to the level of inefficiency you'll tolerate), even as you're trading off a huge amount of efficiency in favour of easier target finding and/or more frequent kills.

Anonymous said...

Still mining untanked in hi sec. No sign of goblin, or any other ganker. Your calculations never take into account the probability of getting ganked. The probability is so low, that it is still more profitable to mine in a yield-optimised, untanked barge.

I would prefer if it was otherwise, but you are not killing enough ships to make a dent. You either need a lot more gankers, or a more time-efficient way of killing barges, if you want to make a significant impact.