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EVE Evolved: Incursion guide -- Fleet setup and tanking
In last week's EVE Evolved, I gave my first impressions of EVE Online's newest group PvE activity based on a cautious first night spent at an incursion in Obray. The Sansha incursions have been running for over a week now, and players have come up with some clearly effective strategies for clearing the sites. Many groups are now tackling the incursions in relative safety, and yet every incursion still sees several ill-prepared fleets decimated at the hands of Sansha's ships. Incursions throw some difficult challenges at players, with focus fire melting vulnerable targets, energy neutralisers and ECM disabling your support ships, and bomber frigates wreaking havoc on large hulls. In some encounters, Sansha's Nation will even use deployable remote repair platforms and other structures to its advantage and will call in random reinforcement waves if your group is too slow. With the right fleet composition and strategy, however, all of those challenges can be overcome with ease. It seems that what players need most right now is a solid guide to tackling incursions. Over the next few editions of the EVE Evolved column, I'll be smashing my way through EVE's incursions to compile a comprehensive guide from the ground up. In this week's first part of the guide, we get the ball rolling with vital information on incursion fleet composition and tanking strategies. This part of the guide is aimed mainly at those interested in Vanguard-level sites, but the fleet setup and tanking strategies described are fundamental to all encounter sizes. In this week's EVE Evolved, I tackle the fundamentals of incursion fleet design and tanking, which should be enough to help your group jump right into 10-man Vanguard encounters.
New CoX patch takes some of the punch out of Energy Melee
We knew this one would be controversial. There's a new patch hitting the CoX live servers today. Along with some welcome fixes for the buff icon issues players have been complaining about, as well as a collection of other changes including fixes to suicidal pets and NPCs, there are changes to Energy Melee in its various versions that have had the forums abuzz with debate. The changes were to 'better balance' the powerset, while keeping Energy Melee as the king of single target burst damage.The changes that have most players up in arms are the nerf to the stun dealt by Total Focus and an animation change to Energy Transfer, changes that hit the Tank, Brute and Stalker classes. The new animation, while more visually impressive than the old, is slower; an Energy Transfer used to take one second, and now takes 2.67 seconds. (For those that don't know, Energy Transfer is a damaging attack that also has a good chance to stun.) Despite the usual high levels of communication from the developers, some players are unhappy and consider this a crippling nerf; however, nobody seems to be particularly surprised that some form of nerfing has taken place. Energy Melee really was that good.
