How to Fly a Dual-Rep Harpy

RIP the obligatory Damage Control, may you live forever in memory.

For those of you living under a rock, all hulls now receive a base 33% hull resist across the board, with damage controls now offering only a 40% boost. Combined, fitting a damage control still gives you a 59.8% overall resist, pretty close to the normal 60%.

Since then, we've seen a number of threads on Reddit from fitting warriors talking about why it still makes sense to fit a damage control on your ships. And generally, I agree with the comments they made. At the moment, damage controls still don't suffer stacking penalties, which means those shield and armor resist bonuses are in addition to and don't result in penalties for other resist modules.

That's a great benefit, of course, and it does provide a lot of value. But the simple fact is that ships that fit the damage control have a slightly smaller tank, while ships that do not fit a DC now had a slightly larger tank. This change is perfect for my dual-rep Harpy. it's time for a "How to fly" article!

The Helpful Fleet Member: Being a Scout

There have been a lot of good guides about serving as a scout in a fleet. Typically, I'd just refer people to some of the older ones (like here, here, or here). However, all of those are fairly old, and probably due for a re-up. With many older bloggers having left the game, I'll give it a go.

I recently joined a new alliance, and with it, I've been thrown into a different culture. Repercussus is filled with pilots who generally know what they're doing, and TISHU added to that the swagger to throw around the big toys regularly and with extreme skill. In both groups, it's easy to forget about the skill involved in every little piece of making a fleet successful.

More importnatly, it's also easy to forget that some of the things bittervets take for granted are actually difficult skills to learn.  One of those is serving as a scout in a fleet.  I was recently on a fleet where our scout was struggling to position himself effectively for a warp-in on the enemy fleet. We were on grid for perhaps five or six minutes as he worked up a suitable warp-in... far too long for tactical purposes.

This was his first time fulfilling the role, and he deserves credit - not scorn - for trying to learn a new role. And to the credit of our FC and fleet members, they were all patient and respectful as he worked through the struggle.

So, here we go.  How do you scout in Eve Online?

Eve 101: Eve Scams

At one point in nearly all of our Eve lives, we’ve be the victim of a scam.  That’s okay; it happens to everyone at least one.  For my part, it was a 1.5 bil margin trading scam that I was ready to drop another 1.5 bil on, if I had it.  Fortunately, when I asked to borrow some isk from someone, he pointed out what was happening and I was able to cut my losses (thanks again, sevyn nine!).

But it happens to everyone.  Scams are everywhere in Eve.  And new players, especially those coming from other games with GMs who actively police and monitor the gameworld, are particularly susceptible to falling for them.

Scam victims fall into two categories, the stupid and the unaware.  The first category… well, there’s not much you can do.  You can bombard them with information about all the different scams they might come across, but if they won’t listen, there’s no way to make them listen.  In the end, we all stand alone with our decisions, and all that.

But the majority of players fall into that second category… the unaware.  Some would call you naïve.  I prefer to think of you as optimistic and good-natured.  Those are good traits in the real world, but not in Eve.  We tell ourselves, “No one would really spend all that time to get my isk… it’s not that much and it’s not worth it to them.  Only, they would.  It’s not paranoia if everyone is, in fact, out to get you.

Eve 101: How to Join a Corporation

Joining a player corporation in Eve is the best way to deepen your engagement with the game and become a long-term player.  It gives you access to a community of players, learning opportunities, and forms of content unavailable to the solo player.  When you join a player corporation, you gain access to another source of content.

But joining a corporation isn’t as easy as everyone makes it out to be.  Joining isn’t automatic, and usually involves a rigorous interview and consideration process.  Eve corporations aren’t like guilds in WoW.  Being part of an Eve corporation put you in a position to do serious damage to that corporation if you choose to, and Eve’s sandbox environment means corporations have no recourse to rogue members.  Every major corporation has had its share of spies, awoxers, thieves, and traitors over time, and has adapted to weed out those undesirables from the recruitment process.

For any alliance that owns assets in space or provides discounted or free ships, fittings, or contracts, it’s better to pass on a candidate than let in a spy.  In fact, it’s better to pass on three candidates than let one spy in.  That said, honest, genuine interest shines through.

It’s Awful Lonely In Here…

I recently posted an article about what new players should know before starting their life in New Eden.  It generated a lot of responses from the community, a lot of which were extremely positive.  I can’t call it universal acclaim because of my warning that newbies shouldn’t try to play Eve solo when starting out.

A lot of solo players took umbrage at that.  The most complete reaction came from Eve Hermit, who wrote a counterpoint about the virtue of solo play.  It’s a quick read and makes several defenses of solo play, all of which support the general idea that it’s quite possible to play the game solo and be very happy with it.

And this is all absolutely valid, and completely true.  Solo play is a great thing in Eve (it’s also the best form of PvP).

Yet… diving into Eve with an intention of playing solo from the start is not an optimal way to approach the game for the first time.

What Newbies Need to Know About Eve

After reading a lot of the comments on Reddit and seeing a lot of new players come into the game, I wanted to share a few insights that will help set new players’ expectations and set them on a path to success very quickly.

I’ll give full-disclosure here.  I want you to stay long-term.  I want you to love this game as much as I do.  That’s my only agenda here.  It’s a pretty mild agenda, in fact.  Ultimately, your experience with the game will determine if you stay.  But starting the game with a compatible frame of mind will definitely help.

So I aim to provide.

#1: You Will Lose Ships

You’ll lose ships in high-sec (ganks, as we call them, when you had no interest in PvPing and were in the safest area of space).  You’ll lose ships in PvP.  You’ll do your best and you’ll lose ships.  Sometimes, you’ll go up against people who have a half-dozen implants and fleet boosts, all of which make them very, very hard to kill.  Any player can be killed in any ship anywhere, provided that his attackers are willing to sacrifice enough ships and want to kill him badly enough.

Eve 101: This Is Eve

This post is coming out a long while after the release of the This Is Eve trailer.  Sure, I posted my initial reaction, but I wanted to see how things develop a bit before moving beyond the, “Fuck, yeah!” moment we all experience when that pipebomb succeeds, and again when the bombing run hits its target perfectly.

I also wanted to see how it resonated with viewers a bit before deciding which direction to take this post.  Namely, whether the discussion would extend beyond, “That’s awesome,” into “Where do I sign up?”

But, we’ve been seeing a lot of new account creation.  First off, welcome.  This blog is about getting new players into PvP by making it a little less nebulous and making them a little more familiar with the concepts.  There are a lot of things new players need to learn for themselves (manual piloting, how important that extra 50 m/s of speed really is for the way you fly, the specific way you have to fly to maintain transversal to survive against multiple targets or larger targets), the types of things for which “seeing it done” just isn’t good enough.  For that, you need to be in space.

But there are a lot of other things about the game that you can learn right away.  A lot of those are about framing your expectations and understanding the reality of a game, not just the marketing hype or ideal parts.

A few bloggers have been writing about how the “This Is Eve” trailer isn’t Eve… it’s just the best parts.  Yes, it’s the best parts, but it’s also an absolutely accurate depiction of Eve.  The passion, the thrill, the exhilaration, that’s all 100% true.  And there is a whole lot of preparation that builds up to those thrilling moments.  For every one of those battles, those scenarios, there were hours of buying ship modules, fitting those ships to suit your taste, flying around to find the fight, and setting up the battle itself – not to mention all of the experience and training that teaches all the pilots involved to know what to do.

But it’s this very preparation that makes it all worthwhile.  I used to play multiplayer Counterstrike, a game with absolutely zero preparation required.  The death matches were, individually, meaningless, since I knew I could just wait until the next match to fight again.  I didn’t have to do anything special, just sit there and wait.  I wasn’t invested in Counterstrike.  It was bubblegum I could chew or spit out at leisure.

Eve is Thanksgiving dinner back in 1621.  You have to hunt your own food and cook it (fitting ships, moving them to your alliance’s staging system), you need to message your neighbors to attend (fleet form-up and sorting, travel), you need to carefully orchestrate the dishes in sequence (the tactical maneuvers during operation itself, including scouting), and you need to eat politely so as not to offend the natives (the battle itself).  And that’s all after sailing half-way around the world with like-minded people (joining a corp, deploying).  It’s complicated.

And that’s what makes it so intensely satisfying.  Eve players feel genuine dopamine rushes during battles.  My heart still beats fast when I’m in a 1v1… and it’s the same whether I’m in a 6-mil-isk Incursus or an 800-mil-isk battle Tengu.  That feeling doesn’t scale; it starts with a rush and doesn’t let up.

But it doesn’t happen with me for other games.  The slow-build is a direct cause of that rush, the sense that everything you planned for or waited for is coming to fruition.  That’s what causes the Bomber’s Bar to cheer deafeningly on comms when they hit their target, or what causes Rooks and Kings to be so delighted at their pipebomb.

And pipebombing and bombing runs, along with BLOPS gangs, are the LEAST engaging of PvP, in my opinion!  It only gets better.

So don’t let anyone discourage you by saying, “That’s not Eve…”  It is.  It absolutely is.  Losing ships HURTS, and it’s exactly this pain that makes your success so much sweeter.  You can’t have a game with no lows, and only highs; if you don’t have the risk of painful, frustrating losses, you also deny yourself the delights of abject success.

Eve is a game that enables both.  And that is praiseworthy.  Don’t quit the game because of a loss.  The more it hurts, the more you should recognize how rare it is for a game to instill that sort of investment among its players.  Eve players are passionate maniacs.  You can’t have passion without something to be passionate ABOUT.

Eve isn’t WoW.  Eve MATTERS in a very real sense to its players.  We take Internet Spaceships very seriously.  We cherish them because they represent time, effort, sometimes money, and always a lot of love.  And to care about a game that much is a truly rare thing.

Eve is the passion that the players feel amid their greatest achievements and dismal failures.  It inspires people to alarm-clock early morning ops.  It inspires people like Rixx Javix to create beautiful art.  It inspires bloggers like me to spend our time thinking and writing about Eve in the spare time when we can’t play.

This is Eve.

Come play with us.

Attaining Moderate Wealth

I do read the posts in the Brave Newbies subreddit, even though I feel a little strange posting in it as a non-member.  It’s a great place to find out what different kinds of players thinks about.  A comment made about my How to Fly a Dramiel post suggested that seeding markets and making isk in null is a lot harder than I make it out to be.

I know I’m not space-rich.  For that reason, I’ve never considered writing a “how I made my isk” article.  But, the topic was raised, and I wanted to go through how I made my isk, if only to show that it’s very possible to be comfortable, even without being ground-breaking or particularly smart.  If I can do it, anyone can.

How to Fly a Dramiel

There are a variety of ways to fit each ship in New Eden, and a lot of them are bad.  In this guide, I’ll show you the most popular way of flying the Dramiel, some of the pitfalls, and some of the considerations you should keep in mind.

What leads me to choose a particular ship for one of these guides?  It’s simple: I see a lot of people flying ridiculous fits that die ignobly.  Just because it’s a pirate frig doesn’t mean it’s good at everything.  Like my How to Fly a Curse and How to Fly a Cynabal guides, there are exceptions to what I put here.  But the vast majority of players will want to start with a more traditional fit before branching off to a fit meant for a very specific situation.

Also, please keep in mind that the setups I’m proposing are for solo or small gang usage.  You should never fly a Dramiel in a large fleet environment.  It’s stupid, and you will die. 

So, let’s jump into it.

Starting an Alt: Initial Skill Plan

Having started our PvP alt and begun training the first few skills needed to plug +4 implants in, you now have some decisions to make.  After all, by this point your skill queue is starting to wind down, and you need to start training the meat of your character.

To recap my assumptions for the previous article, I’m assuming:

• That you are using four +4 implants as soon as possible after training Cybernetics (everything but Social Adaptation).
• That this character is not your first character.
• That you bought a PLEX to fund your new character’s skill book needs.  Ensuring that you don’t transfer isk between your main and your alt will open up a lot of awoxing, scamming, and espionage opportunities that wouldn’t be possible if your API shows sharing of isk between characters.
• That you took my advice and have a firm goal in mind for this character.
• That this character is intended as a PvP character.

Starting an Alt: Bringing a New Life Into This Cruel World

Over the course of one’s career in New Eden, it’s not unusual for a player to realize that one character simply isn’t enough.  Perhaps you want to awox someone.  Perhaps you simply want park a character in one location for some reason (cyno, trader, hauler, logistics, mission running, faction warfare, etc.).  Perhaps you just want to have another PvP or PvE character to help fund your game experience or cause mayhem.

It’s been about two years since I started a new character, the alt for my wife.  In that time, a lot has changed in New Eden.  It occurred to me that I couldn’t be a blogger dedicated to helping players learn about PvP and related topics if I didn’t discuss the strategy behind creating a new character.  In two days, I’ll have completed the final skill to perfect my wife’s character’s role, and that account won’t have any characters training anything.

So the “Starting an Alt” series of posts will chronicle my experiences creating a new PvP character from scratch.  Note the title; I’m starting an alt character dedicated to PvP, not a player’s first character, or an industry or trading alt.  Your main may come from any discipline within Eve, so I’ll try to write it with an eye to explaining my reasoning for each step of the process.

100: A Review of the First 100 Posts

My last article was post number 100 of this blog.  100 posts in 8 months.  An average of 2.4 days between posts. Nice round numbers are a great time to look back on what went well, what went poorly, and – of course, generate lots of wonderful lists and summaries.

Committing to write a blog that provides new content every couple days takes a lot of work.  While we all have plenty to talk about in corp chat or on TS while we play, recalling the small revelations and lessons for a broad audience takes a little getting used to.  At times, it’s easy to feel completely tapped out, particularly since I don’t fall back on relinking fits I find on the Internet or rehashing losses of the day.

Fear, the Great Motivator

In my last article, I talked about how fear can paralyze your decision-making process, and suggested a procedural approach to coping with unfamiliar and fearful situations.  But fear serves critical purposes, such as encouraging innovation and intelligent flying.

It’s important to distinguish between at least two different kinds of fear, panic and paranoia.  Panic is sudden fear that interrupts your decision-making process, such as what I discussed in the last post.  But paranoia is a type of fear born of the knowledge of all the things that conspire to obliterate you in Eve.

In the real world, paranoia is the belief that everyone is out to get you.  I suppose paranoia doesn’t really exist in Eve, since everyone IS out to get you.  But the common element – suspicion of everything – still holds true, so I’ll use the term fairly.

Fear, the Great Paralytic

Space is a big place, and in Eve, every session affords you plenty of threats you should genuinely fear.  Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that this is ultimately a game.  Maybe you’re jumping that low/high gate for the first time wondering what you’ll find.  Maybe you’re participating in your first tidi grind and worried that you’ll face soul-crushing lag and lose all control of your ship.  Maybe it’s your first time hitting that “jump to xxx” button in your new carrier.

Fear is natural.  Fear is useful.  But fear can also turn to terror and leave you unable to make rational decisions.

Everyone who has ever entered low or null has faced the familiar scenario.  You load grid in your Drake only to find a dozen ships orbiting the gate with drones out.  If you’re in null-sec, they’ll even have a Sabre to trap the pods of any unfortunate victims.  Maybe one of those interceptors is starting to get pretty close to decloaking you.

Null-Sec 101: Finding and Catching Targets (Solo-PvP Edition)

Null-sec 101 is a series of articles meant to teach new players about null-sec, with a focus on PvP and daily life.

In low-sec, it’s not uncommon to enter a system and see fifteen or twenty people in local, usually from a mix of corporations and alliances.  If you’re in a faction warfare system, you have the advantage of seeing FW sites in your overview, which you can use to narrow down your list of potential targets and their likely locations.  Once you have that info, you can decide whether you want to engage.  Most likely, FW pilots will see you hit the acceleration gate and warp off before you can reach them.  Sometimes, you get lucky.

In a non-FW system, you’ll likely need to probe down your targets, warp to them, and hope they aren’t checking their dscan for probes.  If you land on them, you can proceed to engage.

But finding targets in sov null-sec is less forgiving.  Most systems are empty, and when you do find targets, you stick out like a sore thumb in local: you are likely the only one who doesn’t have positive standing towards them.  In most alliances, your presence and ship type will be reported in their intel channels, too, and pilots in neighboring systems will be looking for you to appear.  They’ll dock up or POS up when you enter, and only return to their ratting or mining after you leave.

How to Fly a Curse

The Curse is a force multiplier, capable of taking on many ships simultaneously and coming out ahead, due to its multiple ewar bonuses.

But, it’s a highly advanced ship to fly, make no mistake.  Rather than a typical “get at optimal, apply damage” ship, the Curse pilot has to watch several things at once, have multiple targets locked, and apply different ewar modules based on each ship’s threat level.  Flying it successfully means understanding a great many mechanics, and recalling the various strengths and weakness of multiple enemies on the fly.

Suffice to say, you should have very good navigation, drone, ewar, armor, and fitting skills trained in order to fly a Curse effectively.  But pilot skill also plays a much larger part in success/failure than with most other ships.

Have I whetted your appetite yet?  Let’s begin.

Look at the Ship

A quick look at the Curse reveals deceptively powerful ewar bonuses.

Amarr Cruiser Skill Bonus: 7.5% bonus to tracking disruptor effectiveness per level and 10% bonus to drone hitpoints and damage per level.
Recon Ships Skill Bonus: 40% bonus to energy neutralizer and energy vampire range and 20% bonus to energy neutralizer and energy vampire range transfer amount.

At first, you may look at these bonuses and be underwhelmed.  After all, the Curse doesn’t benefit from a jamming bonus like the Rook, or a Web bonus like the Rapier.  But these bonuses are frequently underused and highly effective.

Of the most obvious benefits is the drone bonus, which will provide the bulk of your DPS. With a 150m3 drone bay, you can easily fit two flights of mediums, a small flight, and an ECM flight, or go straight for heavies and lights.  In either case, you can do some serious damage with these drones.

The tracking disruptor bonus is a game-changer, though.  With it, a single tracking disruptor can reduce enemy optimal+falloff or tracking by 60% - this can effectively eliminate a turret ship’s ability to do damage entirely.  What does this mean?  A Vagabond would no longer be able to kite.  A Talos or Brutix can’t track.  A DPS ship is effectively removed from the fight.  And you can multiply that by the number of disruptors you have.

Finally, while the transfer amount bonus for neutralizers and vampires doesn’t seem that impressive – operating at 200% of normal when fully skilled – the range bonus is incredibly dangerous.  With the Recon skill trained to IV (typical for most pilots), you can apply your neuts at 260% of range, more than one and a half times further than usual.  That allows you to get another cycle before your enemy is within range.

What does this mean?  Multiple interceptors can be capped out by the time they reach scram range.  Any active-tanked ship will be crippled.  Perhaps most importantly, our target will lose his prop module deep in your point range.

Suffice to say, you can destroy an uneducated enemy.  Forget EFT ehp calculations… your enemy has only as many hp as he sees on the fitting screen when docked.

Fitting Your Curse

Assuming a solo or small-gang use, here’s a fairly typical fit that provides maximum value.

[Curse, Solo Curse]

Damage Control II

1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Drone Damage Amplifier II 

Experimental 10MN Microwarpdrive I

Small Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 400

Balmer Series Tracking Disruptor I, Optimal Range Disruption Script

Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor I

Balmer Series Tracking Disruptor I, Optimal Range Disruption Script

Warp Disruptor II

Medium Unstable Power Fluctuator I

Small Focused Pulse Laser II, Conflagration S

Medium Unstable Power Fluctuator I

Small Focused Pulse Laser II, Conflagration S

Medium Unstable Power Fluctuator I

Medium Trimark Armor Pump I

Medium Ancillary Current Router I

Hammerhead II x5

Valkyrie II x5

Warrior II x5

Hornet EC-300 x5 

Let’s speak about the most obvious characteristic of this fit: you have two tank modules – a 1600mm plate and a DCII.  That’s it.  A highly-skilled pilot gets perhaps 25k ehp.  That means getting caught flat-footed will very quickly be deadly.  Avoid gate camps at all costs; a cloaked scout is highly recommended.  Your plate makes you very slow to burn back to the gate, and you don’t have the tank to survive the trip.

But for that lost ehp and speed, you gain a monster.  You can pump out 404 dps up close, and 338 out to your drone control range.  Given that your targets will tend to have low resists by the time you finish them off, that dps is multiplied significantly.  An example: if your target has 50% shield resists with hardeners on, your 404 dps will effectively double once your neuts shut them off.  Keep that in mind.

The mids are where much of the action is.  First, of course, you’ll have a web and a disruptor.  Why not a scram?  Quite simply, you’ll want to overload that WDII to extend your point range to prevent your target from escaping once those neuts and tracking disruptors land.  A scram won’t help very much, since your neuts will prevent your target from using an MWD anyways.  A Web is there more for tackling and for preventing extremely fast frigates from escaping too far before being capped out.

But the TDs, as I mentioned, will each take one dps ship out of the fight.  Fly with range scripts loaded.  If you’re in a 1v1 situation, applying both will ensure your enemy’s maximum falloff range is 16% of his original range.  That’s devastating.  Once your enemy gets in close (if he does), you’ll want to switch to tracking speed scripts.  At 16% of tracking speed, even small guns will have a hard time hitting you.

Running your neuts will eat a lot of your cap, so use the cap booster for a quick injection of energy.  Do not forget about your cap booster; it makes all the difference, as you’ll likely be capped out after two cycles of all three neuts.  Fit the largest cap charge you can; the reload round-time is only 10 seconds, and reloading a single large charge is more efficient on a cap per second basis than reloading multiple smaller ones.

And finally, your bread-and-butter… the neuts.  Running three medium neuts will entirely cap out T1 cruisers and below in a single cycle, and nearly any battlecruiser in two cycles.  Be sure to stagger the activation of your neuts.  You want to ensure your target doesn’t have enough cap to ever activate their prop module or shield booster/armor repper.  If you hit them all at once, you’ll have a 12-second period when your target is recharging cap, a large enough period to let him activate something to keep him alive.

I’ve included two small pulse lasers primarily for taking out enemy drones.  Any weapon system works fine, but I use lasers to help add dps to the EM hole of neuted T1 ships.  With everything you need to think about when flying a Curse, damage type isn’t something you want to worry about.

The rigs can be changed, but you’ll need an ACR even with AWU V (incidentally, AWU doesn’t provide much value, since this fit has only two small guns; the powergrid savings is negligible).  Feel free to fit whatever else helps your fight.

If you fly with an Engineering 603 implant, you can upgrade to a T2 1600 plate, which adds some ehp, at the expense of more speed.

For drones, there are really two ways to go… a flight of heavies and one of lights, or mediums (with extras), lights, and jammers.  I opt for the second because it gives you another option: a chance to escape if you get blobbed, as happens often during roams.  Heavies are slow and prone to being shot, even by TD’d ships.  Plus, if you have a target dead-to-rights, the extra dps isn’t necessary to really finish him off; your medium drones will do fine enough.

Your align time is very slow, so I recommend aligning out immediately upon engaging your target.  You need to realign very carefully and deliberately to avoid succumbing to the speed/align weakness.

You’ll note a lot of meta-4 modules in lieu of T2 modules: tracking disruptors, neuts, MWD, web.  The meta-4 and T2 versions of each of these are identical in bonuses and performance, but the meta-4 options provide better overheating options.  I tend to overheat a single neut (on the edge of my fitting), my MWD, and my point, but you can also overheat TDs in special cases.  It’s best to squeeze out the maximum value from those modules, and meta-4 gives you the edge on a T2-flying opponent.

Target Selection

With a heavily tracking disruptor-focused ship, you should naturally avoid any heavily-tanked targets that shoot missiles.  Tengus you find in areas of space with rats who do omni damage are often omni-tanked, and some of those will be cap-sipping fits that use rigs to fill resistance holes.  If you’re in Guristas space, though, feel free to engage, but bring Amarr drones to do EM damage.  Generally speaking, pilots who fight Guristas have an unfilled EM hole that leaves them with 13k ehp against EM damage.  Drakes and Cyclones have an EM hold that is often filled with active hardeners.  Feel free to take them on, but keep at range in case you need to escape quickly or they have help arrive.

Nearly any turret-based ship is fair game.  Their guns can’t track when you’re applying your ewar correctly, and they’re easy kills.  Medium and large guns will be particularly ineffective.  Ships with small guns may still track, but they won’t last long enough to be a serious threat.

Drone boats are tricky.  If you are facing a drone boat, keep your range and apply your web to enemy drones as you kill them one-by-one.  If possible, get your enemy to commit his drones first.  You can then web them and use your small drones to kill them.  If you attack first, you’ll need to watch for enemy drones.  You’ll need to recall your own drones before launching a light flight to counter his drones.  Once they’re down, your can set to work on your target.  Watch for ECM drones, which your target may loose as a last resort.

Flying the Ship

Really, the question about who you should attack rests not with “who”, but “how many”.  You can easily attack 3-4 targets and win with this ship.  If your target gang includes one kiter and two tacklers, you should put your TDs on the kiter, and put all your neuts on the more dangerous tackler.  Remember to stagger your neuts.  Do not, under any circumstances, split them; you’ll only render them ineffective.  With a Curse, if you succeed in neuting your target, he’ll crack like an egg; fail and you’ll die quickly.  For an example of what I mean, check out my write-up on an engagement in which I screwed up.

Be sure to keep your range from battleships, which may carry smart bombs, and dictate your engagement range against other ships.  Facing a brawler?  Don’t let him get right on you, since he may be able to apply his DPS even when tracking disrupted.  Versus a kiter, try to close range.  As you do, swap your scripts from range to tracking speed.

A word about those scripts… expect to take a little damage when you swap your scripts, usually one volley’s worth.  Against a single opponent, you won’t face much trouble.  Against multiple ones, though, that damage will add up.

When flying as part of a small gang, you’ll want to completely change your strategy.  Rather than engaging directly, hang on the periphery of the fight.  Your tracking disruptors have a 62km optimal range – use it.  If something comes in close to you, neut it, web it, and kill it with your own drones.  Those TDs will help your fleet members take down the enemy in safety and comfort, and your other ewar will keep you safe.  Make sure you don’t drift too far or close as the fight progresses.  Just because a single enemy is slinking towards you doesn’t mean you need to pull additonal range.  If you can kill it, or if it’s your current fleet’s primary, you shouldn’t be afraid to engage your drones and neuts.

If you do find a solo target, enjoy the experience.  Most of your fights will likely happen against larger gangs.  That’s what makes flying a Curse so dangerous; it’s a known killer, so people bring superior numbers.  When that happens, you either have to have multiple equations running in your mind at once, or you die.

Summary

The Curse is a force-multiplier, and can defeat multiple ships.  But that doesn’t mean it can easily defeat multiple ships.  More than perhaps any other ship, pilot skill and focus contributes the most to success.  I strongly recommend waiting to fly it until either A) you’re comfortable in a fight against multiple opponents, or B) you have isk to burn and a true desire to improve your skills.  As of this writing, Curses are selling for 110 mil, which isn’t bad, but it’s still a 150-mil loss if you do something stupid.

Flying an Arbitrator doesn’t really compare as far as practice for a Curse… the Arbitrator is much softer and weaker, to the point that the tactics described don’t work.  The Arbitrator is exclusively a fleet ship with defensive neuts; the Curse is a solo and outnumbered ship with offensive neuts.  I would caution you from thinking your Arbitrator skills will directly translate to Curse skills.

Give it a try.  You may start to learn why the Curse is my second-favorite recon ship, behind the Rapier.

How to Fly a Cynabal

There is perhaps no greater symbol of solo PvP than the Cynabal, a giant space slug put out by the Angel Cartel that excels at taking down prey far larger than itself.  It’s a very expensive ship to put on the line – properly fit it can cost nearly as much as a Black Ops Battleship.

This guide will attempt to provide you with a starting point for flying these legends.  As you shouldn’t think about flying this ship unless you have excellent speed, fitting, and shield tanking skills, the numbers I indicate assume such.

Step One: Look at the Ship

This space slug has some significant bonuses that tell you how you should fly it.

Special Ability: 25% bonus to Medium Projectile Turret rate of fire.
Minmatar Cruiser Skill Bonus: 10% bonus to medium projectile damage per level.
Gallente Cruiser Skill Bonus: 10% bonus to medium projectile falloff per level.

From this information alone, you can tell that the Cynabal is a damage dealer at range.  With 4 turrets, but the damage capability of 7.5, it also sips ammunition.  With Minmatar Cruiser V and Gallente Cruiser V, your optimal + falloff is 34 km with 425mm guns.

The slot layout is 5 / 5 / 5 with three rig slots and 50m3 of drone space.  Coupled with good speed is a low mass, meaning that microwarpdrives and afterburners will have more of an effect on speed than an average cruiser.  The capacitor is smaller than needed.

Fitting Your Cynabal

This combination of good damage at range and good speed means the Cynabal is meant as a kiter.

[Cynabal, 425mm Guns]

Damage Control II

Tracking Enhancer I

Gyrostabilizer II

Gyrostabilizer II

Gyrostabilizer II

10MN Afterburner II

Republic Fleet Warp Disruptor

Experimental 10MN Microwarpdrive I

Large Shield Extender II

Large Shield Extender II

Medium Unstable Power Fluctuator I

425mm AutoCannon II, Barrage M

425mm AutoCannon II, Barrage M

425mm AutoCannon II, Barrage M

425mm AutoCannon II, Barrage M

Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I

Medium Core Defense Field Extender I

Medium Core Defense Field Extender I

First, the low slots.  A single tracking enhancer will let you fight within the 26-33 km range with 425s, which puts you outside of heavy neutralizer range.  If you’re neutralized, your prop mods will turn off and you’ll be a sitting duck.  The three gyros maximize the gank-factor, and a DCII rounds out your fit.  You should only fly without a DCII on a sub-cap in very specialized situations (ie. bombers).

Some people prefer a Nanofiber Internal Structure II instead of one of the gyros to gain a little speed.  This is perfectly acceptable, but keep in mind it’ll take longer to take down a target, which will make it harder to hit hostile staging systems, where enemy reinforcements are very close.

Moving to the mids, we have 2 LSEIIs.  This fit is passive-tanked.  If range-control is your defense, it means you’ll likely be running a prop module constantly.  This makes the possibility of an active tank much less favorable.  Your defense lies in speed, staying out of your enemy’s engagement range, and a buffer tank.

To that end, you’ll note both a meta-4 MWD and a T2 afterburner. Feel free to upgrade the AB to a faction or officer fit as your budget allows, but ALWAYS DUAL-PROP.  In a Cynabal, you’re unlikely to be fighting only a single enemy.  Many times, you’ll have probes dropped on you, and find yourself tackled.  Using an overheated afterburner can get you speed similar to a battlecruiser under MWD, and it can mean the difference between survival and a wreck.  Don’t bother upgrading the MWD… meta 4 overheats better than a T2 version does, and faction MWDs only affect capacitor.  You shouldn’t be engaged for long enough to cap out anyways.  This is a hit-and-run ship.

This leaves one space for a point.  Never fly with a warp scrambler.  Let me repeat that.  Never fly with a warp scrambler.  To understand why, let me ask you this question: why are you flying a fast ship with bonuses to projectile range within 9 km of any enemy?  This is a kiting ship.  In a kiting ship, being in close equals death.  You should never be close enough to use that scram.  I recommend a faction point for its standard 30 km range.  With loki boosts or overheated, you’re even farther out.  Your guns get about 35 km before the end of falloff – use every bit of it.  If you can stay out of enemy point range and heavy neut range, you can take on many ships far larger than you, and that’s just fun.

Moving to the high slots, I see no reason to fly with anything but 425s (I may update this after the patch, when artillery is getting some love).  The range fits perfectly into your beyond-point engagement goal, and they do serious damage.  Fly with Barrage M in your guns, and switch to Hail M in case you want to move in close to finish off an opponent or implement a riskier, but faster gank.  Optimal + falloff for Hail M is about 20 km… still very effective, particularly against armor-fit ships that tend to fit scrams.

For the fifth high slot, I fit a neut (meta-4 instead of T2, because of overheating and fitting reasons).  If you stay outside of engagement range of larger ships, all you need to worry about is an interceptor, Dramiel, or Daredevil.  In those cases when something small gets in close, neut him out as you pull range with your AB.  When his AB goes off, you’ll pull range quickly, and your drones and 425s can destroy him.  If he moves away fast enough to avoid your guns, at least he’ll pull out of scram range and you can escape.  None of that is possible without a neut.

You need to plug that EM gap with one rig.  Since tank isn’t this ship’s strong point, you can fit shield tank, or you can swap one of them for a speed rig.  I wouldn’t recommend changing both; if an engagement turns south and something gets in close, you want to be able to survive some punishment until you can pull range again.

For drones, you can fly with a flight of Hobgoblins and a flight of EC-300s, or you can just go all-gank with Hammerheads.   I tend to fly with Hammerheads for added DPS.  They make short work of a neuted tackler.

Fit this way, your Cynabal can gain and maintain range, allowing you to melt anything short- or medium-range fit.  Its native align time is 3.5 seconds.  Even under MWD, it aligns in 5.4 seconds.  If the fight turns south, you can GTFO quickly.

Target Selection

Flying a Cynabal is about target selection.  Like the Dramiel, a Cynabal excels at taking out targets larger than itself.  Be careful when fighting missile ships drone boats, or against ewar ships.  Curses and Pilgrims (which can neut you out from a significant distance), Arazus and Lacheses (which can scram you from 20-26 km), and Rapiers and Huginns (which are usually dual-web fitted and can reach 40 km or more).  If you land right on top of them, get in close – don’t run, as you won’t make it far enough to escape.

When engaging gangs, be sure to kill the tacklers first.  Typically, gangs include specialized ships.  If you kill all the tacklers, you can warp off freely if you get into trouble.  But don’t let this assumption guide your flying… continue keeping range on them just as if they all had points.

Get in the habit of hitting your dscan often.  You can do some serious damage, but you can’t kill tanked targets faster than help can arrive from the next system over.  Particularly after the Retribution and Odyssey expansions, T1 ships can do significant damage as well.  A lot of them can do even more.

Don’t fly a Cynabal in a small gang vs. small gang situation until you’re very comfortable with it (read: having 100+ successful engagements solo vs gangs).  The more ships on the field, the more likely that you’ll end up in scram range of something, and chances are that your Cynabal is more valuable than most of your fleet-mates’ ships. 

Flying the Ship

When beginning an engagement, always warp at range.  Landing a 0 on an enemy doesn’t fit into your engagement style.  There’s a possibility you may not be in point range when you land, but that’s better than losing your ship.

A word about orbiting.  It’s very dangerous to simply orbit at a range in a kiting ship.  You don’t have a web – and you’re not in web range anyways, right?), so your opponent could be traveling at 1,400 m/s.  At this speed, he can slingshot at you – waiting until you’re at a point in your orbit traveling away from his intended direction, then overload his MWD and burn in the opposite direction to pull enough range to escape.

It’s much better to fly manually, but doing so without getting to close is tricky.  I wish there was a way to orbit perpendicular to the elliptic (essentially traveling above and below) to keep range, but that doesn’t work.  Practice manual flying on a jetcan in high-sec – or on the Singularity server – first.  Keep a close eye on your opponent’s transversal velocity and base velocity.  You’re looking for sudden changes that might indicate he’s trying to pull away or draw you close.

Most battleships will have smartbombs, so use your own drones to kill his drones first.  Pay attention to what he drops, and the size of his drone bay.  If someone pops drones on you, kill them first.  For anything with blasters, this may be their only damage at 26-30 km.

Your MWD is for closing range on an enemy.  Once you get a feel for how he’s fit, turn off your MWD and switch to your afterburner.  Don’t leave it on, especially against battleships.  The sig radius bloom an MWD causes can make it much easier for his guns to hit you.  Not to mention, it eats your cap significantly.

Summary

The Cynabal is a unique ship, as it’s intended to fight larger prey.  It doesn’t have a cheaper gateway ship you can use to practice an identical type of flying, though a Vagabond and Stabber Fleet Issue can emulate various aspects of it.  Since the Retribution expansion, many more ships have drones, which makes flying a Cynabal more complicated.  You have to be very comfortable with the strengths – and limitations – of flying this ship.

The Cynabal is a ship that can benefit from dual-boxing either a scout or a Loki booster.  Boosts to point range can allow you to fight right out to the edge of your falloff, making the fight as risk-free as PvP is in Eve.  You need strong nerves and a good dscan, but this ship is the height of solo PvP.  Treat it like it… you need to prove your ability to fly this ship, or you’ll end up with an expensive loss.  But if you fly it well, you’ll be a terror that even a small gang can’t take down.

Ship Fitting 101: The Dangers of EFT

The Eve Fitting Tool (EFT) is a great way to identify whether a fitting you want to use will actually work, and tweak that fitting to your purposes.  That said, you need to keep in mind certain limitations of the summary window to the right of your fitting.  For example, EFT consistently over-estimates the amount of damage you can take.

Look at any kill mail, and plug that fitting into EFT.  For the sake of argument, let’s use the “All Level V” skill option.  The kill mail probably reflects about 1/3 the damage EFT says you should take.  That’s because EFT lists “effective hp”, which modifies your damage by your ship’s shield and armor resistances.  The only damage that matters is the kind that shows up in your Eve client in little red numbers in the center of your screen.  It doesn’t matter if you have 53,000 ehp… if you’re taking 500 damage, that’s 500 damage off your shields or armor.

Also, keep in mind that EFT's summary about your tank makes no reference to repair modules… you need to calculate the total effect of an active tank yourself.  And that 500 shield every 5 seconds will do you much more good if you’re facing a single opponent than it will if you’re facing many.

But another area EFT fails at is DPS.  The DPS numbers you see are within optimal range.  Tell me… how many opponents are going to fight a Gallente ship point-blank and let you get your full DPS on them?  If you fly a Minmatar ship, you’re probably fighting in falloff range (if you’re doing it right), which cuts your DPS down to between ¾ and ½.

It’s tempting to think that a Hurricane gets 717 dps with drones, and think you can go toe-to-toe with anything out there.  But about 100 dps of that is drone damage, which is delayed and subject to being destroyed, and the rest is subject to falloff penalties.  Your real DPS may be around 400-450.

And we haven’t even gotten to tracking yet.  If your guns can’t track a target, you won’t apply any damage whatsoever.  If your missiles can’t track, the damage they apply will be seriously reduced.

But that’s a subject for another post.  Just don’t go thinking that EFT’s stats are gospel truth.  If you do, you’ll be in for a harsh reality.

Lessons: The Fights You Don't Take

With a Sabre, I feel pretty confident rolling through null-sec.  It’s probably the second-safest ship you could travel with, behind cloaky ships.  You can usually kill any solo or small gangs that can catch you.  All you need to worry about is another Sabre – not as much for what the Sabre can do as for what friends he may have nearby. But in those cases, you can always burn back to the gate and escape.

Last night, I was returning from an alliance operation in my double-bubble Sabre.  And I saw nothing but a few ratters that immediately warped to a POS up when I entered system.  Except for one guy, an Insidious Empire bloke.  And he was in a Sabre.

Normally, I’ll take a Sabre-on-Sabre fight.  My skills are very good, and I trust in my ability to tactically overheat and fly head-to-head.  But I was in a double-bubble Sabre.

To fit two bubblers, you need to make some fitting compromises.  The double variety tends to be used in gangs and fleets more frequently, since the ability to bubble both sides of a gate isn’t as crucial when flying solo.  In addition to losing a gun, it also drops a Damage Control.

I had every reason to believe this guy was flying a single-bubble variant, so I passed on the fight.  I was faster than him and he clearly had an MWD as well – proving my theory that I out-skilled him.  That, and his eagerness to engage me (a fleet nearby, perhaps?) left me confident in my decision to avoid the fight.

But you can’t help but second-guess yourself on occasion.  It’s the type of fight I really enjoy – equal ships, in which the final result comes down to pilot skill.  Even if I lose, I have a perfect example of how to fly the ship better in my opponent.

I passed because I suspected my opponent had a better fit.  He came out to hunt folks; I was returning from an op that required a specialized fit for my Sabre.

Sometimes, knowing when NOT to fight is the smarter move.  Like in poker, winning players don’t win big, they lose small.

Null-Sec 101: Surviving Bubbles

Null-sec 101 is a series of articles meant to teach new players about null-sec, with a focus on PvP and daily life.

The most basic – and often most ignored – aspect of survival in null-sec is being able to successfully navigate it.  Most people who spent their entire Eve lives in high-sec, or even low-sec, may think it’s simply a matter of traveling from gate to gate in a fast frigate, running from anything that they can’t handle.  But bubbles change the dynamic in null-sec.

There are two things you need to know about them.  First, if you’re inside one, you can’t warp until you escape its range.  If someone puts a bubble up around a gate as you jump in, you either need to burn back to the gate and jump through again, or burn out of the bubble before warping.

Second, if they are positioned close to and in line with your destination, they can drag you off-course when you exit warp.  What do I mean?  Let’s say you’re warping from Gate A to Gate B.  Evil Pirate has put a bubble 100km away from Gate B in the direction of Gate A.  If you warp to Gate B at 0 from Gate A, you’ll actually stop right inside the bubble – 100km away from the safety of the other side of the gate (called a stop bubble).  The same mechanic works if you position the bubble in line with Gate A, but on the other side of Gate B (drag bubble).

Expect your enemy to use bubbles.  Most fleets have at least one interdictor, and often many mobile bubbles in the cargo holds of otherwise innocent-looking DPS ships.  In many cases, they’ll even drop cargo containers near the front of the bubble to decloak any ships caught.  Covops cloaks won’t save you.

So, how do you avoid them?  How do you survive solo travel in null-sec?

First, you need to choose the right ship.  Any gate can have a gate camp with a bubbler on the other side.  In these cases, your ship has to be able to survive the 11km or so you’ll have to travel to burn back to the gate and jump through.  Most gate camp fleets have a couple dedicated tacklers.  At least one or two of them will point you on the bubbled side, and won’t be able to jump through with you when you reach the gate again.  You’ll likely be followed through by the remainder – usually one or two additional tacklers. If your ship is fit in such a way that you can kill this tackler, you can survive.

But the best way to survive bubbles is to avoid them altogether.  For that, you need to be smart.  When you travel, if you see any neutrals/reds in system, do not warp directly from gate to gate.  During your first trip through a system, you’ll have no choice but to warp to a celestial first – a planet, a moon, an asteroid belt, a cosmic signature, even the sun if you have no other choice (the sun is a common warp-to, so many PvPers will default to looking for a ship at the sun).  When you warp to these, don’t warp at 0 or 100 km… warp at some range in between.  When you’re in warp, make a safe bookmark in the middle of nowhere (open People and Places, click on “Add Bookmark”).

That brings me to the next point… bookmarks are your friend.  Any time I deploy anywhere in New Eden, the purpose of my first solo roam is to make scout points off all the gates I may be traveling through.  I never warp directly to a gate, I always warp to my bookmarks.  During my first trip, I’ll warp to every gate at 100, then burn off in a random direction – in line with no celestials – until I’m about 250-300 off the gate, and bookmark that scout spot.  That way, I can warp to it at 100km from any direction and still be at a distance to warp to the gate.  These scout points let me land on grid, but safely away from any gate camps or bubbles.

I cannot stress scout bookmarks enough.  Just yesterday, I was roaming through a null-sec wormhole to drone space in my armor-fit Stabber Fleet Issue (double web, point).  In system were 5 neuts.  Luckily, I had been there before, and had a scout point off my out-gate.  I warped to the bookmark and avoided four Daredevils.  I probably could have taken at least one or two with my 220mm ACs and double webs, but I didn’t know what else was on the other side of the gate (the hostiles lived in that space), so I avoided the engagement.  I wouldn’t have had the option if I’d have warped right to the gate.

Bouncing off celestials and using bookmarks can avoid most bubbles, but not all of them.  Some constellation and regional gates are far out of line with the rest of the solar system, and can’t be “warped around”.  In these cases, there’s one last option: burning capacitor.

This trick is easy.  When you engage your warp drive, your capacitor immediately drops by the amount needed to complete the warp – even if you have to accelerate before warping.  If you then cancel your warp before entering warp, that cap energy is still gone.  By warping and stopping multiple times, you can bleed out your capacitor until you no longer have enough to warp all the way to the distant gate.  On this last warp, let it kick you into warp, then hit stop (Ctrl + space).  Your warp won’t get you all the way there, but with some practice, you can get within dscan range (14 AU) so you can see what’s on the gate.

I have one overview tab I use exclusively for scanner probes and warp bubbles.  I normally scna for ships first, then switch to my bubble/probe overview and scan for those.  If it’s clear, I’ll finish my warp and jump through.  Many times, I’ve used this cap-burning trick to get within range to scan and detect a bubbled gate camp, and avoid it.

If you see a neutral in system, always assume he’s in a Sabre, or is sitting on a bubble in-line with both your gate and the nearest planet.  No neutral is safe.  If you get used to these tricks, you can successfully navigate past any bubbles without being the next fish caught in the net.

It seems cumbersome and slow at first, but remember: this is not high-sec.  CONCORD will not save you, and there are no gate guns.  You’re on your own here.  Fly like it.