Photo from flickr user Chaotic Good01
An invisible man can rule the world. Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go.
-- The Invisible Man, 1933
I did a bit of logistical reshuffling last night, moving some supplies around and building my Cloaky Venture, as mentioned in an earlier post. The fit mostly matches the Johnny Pew suggestion from his video. It cost about 2.5 Million for this.
[Venture, Low Sec Salvage]
Warp Core Stabilizer I
Medium Shield Extender I
Adaptive Invulnerability Field I
Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I
Salvager I
Salvager I
Prototype Cloaking Device I
Small Salvage Tackle I
Small Salvage Tackle I
Small Salvage Tackle I
Salvage Drone I x2
A Venture has +2 warp corp stability built right in, and the addition of a another stabilizer means it will take a least 4 point of disruption to stop you. The shield mods in the mid slots bring me up to about 1500 HP, weak by most standards, but enough to survive a couple of volleys, by which time you should be running away anyway. No weapons, because we couldn't deter anyone even if we tried!
The main purpose of this fit is to be invisible when needed and to pick up valuable salvage. The only stuff worth putting time into are "Elite" wrecks I think what I need to do is create "perch" bookmarks near gates in systems that see a lot of PvP combat, such a Heydelies. I hover there, invisible, using d-scan to see what ships and wrecks are at those gates. Eventually the gangs will leave, probably taking loot from the ships they killed, but NOT salvaging the wrecks. When they're gone I swoop in and salvage. It sounds like I'll be waiting a while, so an alternative might be to just keep roaming around low-sec looking for wrecks near gates and in faction warfare plexes. D-Scan will tell me if there are Elite wrecks in system.
Last night was a trial run and there were no elite wrecks available. I decided to enter a medium plex that was currently empty, and it was darned interesting. After I arrived and cloaked up, two war targets arrived and it felt pretty cool that they couldn't see me. Shortly after that an allied fleet composed mainly of Ventures(?!) arrived and blew them up! They left and I got to put my plan into action; I turned off the cloak and looted the wrecks. I didn't find anything good, but I was glad to be able to put the ship through its paces.
More Gallente militia arrived, including a corp mate of mine who knew I was there and the timer counted down to 0 without further incident. I decloaked with 8 seconds left, collect 8750 loyalty points and warped out.
I want to see how quickly the cloak turns on: if I'm roaming and run into a gate camp, can I turn on the cloak before they can target me?
Meta Game - why am I doing this? Am I winning Eve?
When I posted this fit in my corp forum and asked for suggestions I got a good question back -- why am I doing this? Do I want ISK, or just for fun? They suggested that getting ISK was easier if I ran plexes to earn LP and sell items purchased with LP, or hunted Clone Soldier rats for their tags (discussed earlier). Fun? Well, fun is fun and if you don't mind putting time into something that earns less than other activities, that's OK too.I think the answer is "for the fun of it", and learning to use modules I haven't used and seeing how it changes the "feel" of the game. ISK? Well, the thing is I have more ISK than I can sensibly use. I can buy ships that I'm not qualified to fly, or fit properly, but I still have the urge to get more ISK. Why? I think I want to see that I'm profitably using the expensive stuff I've bought. That would validate my decisions, showing I'd chosen the right items to buy, used them properly and got more money as a result. That may change later, but I guess it feels like the wallet balance is my "score" in the game. My balance has been dropping a lot lately, but the value of my assets is huge, about 50% more than my cash.
I am going to try to broaden my horizons a bit and measure my success as doing new and more difficult things in the game, not just watching the ISK count. Heck, I could throw in $20, the price of a cheap dinner out and have a big pile of cash (over 500M ISK); that wouldn't impress anyone or increase my fun in the game. I should plan on getting in more ships and doing more activities in the game. And I'm doing the most basic thing I can for the corp; I should make sure I'm learning what I need to do in order to do other, more useful things too. When I listen on fleet chat it's scary how much they all seem to know about other ships, and their ability to make instant decisions on fights is very impressive. That's going to take a while to learn.
But it's all been fun so far!
About cloaking. It depends on reaction times.
ReplyDeleteIn a ship capable of warping cloaked you just give the warp command and cloak up.
A hostile would need a ship capable of locking you up very fast. Less as a second.
In a ship not capable of warping cloaked there is still a trick to get into warp and minimizing the time someone has to target you by using a MWD and Tech2 cloak.
After a gate jump you are cloaked. Start aligning to your target and immediately activate your cloak and mwd (you cannot activate your MWD when cloaked except for the first second because the server only handles commands once a second), then deactivate your MWD (it will still finish the cycle).
Just as your MWD cycle ends, decloak and give the warp command.
Cloaking will reduce your max speed to 25%.
Your MWD increases your max speed by 500%. So at the end of the MWD cycle you will be going over 75% of your uncloaked max speed and will instantly enter warp if you give the warp command and are aligned.
You want to activate your cloak first and MWD second because activating your MWD increases your sig radius by 500% which reduces lock times for hostiles.
I've watched videos about this trick and look forward to putting it into practice. I have the Cloaking level 3 skill, but I wanted to put in some practice time with the cheaper cloak before risking the more expensive one. It would suck to get killed, due to some noob error on my part, with the better cloak on the ship. This fit costs about 2.5M and getting 25K Loyalty Points means it has paid for itself 10 times over already.
DeleteThe MWD-Cloak trick works well. If you don't have the MWD, don't rely on cloaking because someone in a fast ship could fly at you and decloak you. I wouldn't bother with the WCS. People you run into are either going to be fitting one warp disruptor (1 point) or one warp scrambler (2 points) under most circumstances. If they are specifically hunting Ventures or FW Plexers they will have 2 scrams for 4 points total. As you can see, your Warp Core Stabilizer does not change the outcome either way. What it does do is make you take longer to lock targets and decrease your targeting range. This will keep you on field for longer, reducing your chances of survival. You should put a damage control in your low spot to hopefully keep you alive in case someone shoots at you while you are aligning out. Otherwise a nano for more speed. Anything really would be better than a WCS, which literally serves no purpose whatsoever and only penalizes you. A faction scram does have 3 points of disruption but they are extremely expensive and rare. I would not worry about them. If someone is will to invest that much in one and really wants to kill you he will find a way to kill you regardless.
ReplyDeleteThanks Kelleris, that makes a lot of sense. I frequently run into groups of ships, though, and I thought having the WCS would mean that at least two of them would need to scram me. I'll try it without the WCS when I get a chance. So far I haven't spent as much in this fit as I'd like.
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