fleet-pvp
Latest
EVE dev blog covers Rubicon ship rebalancing
EVE Online's 20th expansion, Rubicon, goes live on November 19th. Rubicon brings many changes to EVE including mobile structures, new faction ships, controllable customs offices, and a completely overhauled warping system. And of course, Rubicon includes adjustments big and small to a wide variety of the ships already flying in New Eden. CCP today posted a summary dev blog outlining the changes due with Rubicon for each ship type. Interceptors are receiving role bonuses that make them immune to warp bubbles, electronic attack ships are seeing range increases and general upgrades, interdictors are getting increased survivability and higher damage output, and marauders are receiving a complete functionality revision that splits the ship type into two distinct roles. Check out the full post for details. And if you haven't already, have a look at Brendan's EVE Evolved from yesterday so you'll be ready for these and other big Rubicon changes.
EVE Evolved: Getting ready for Rubicon
EVE Online's Rubicon expansion goes live in just two days on Tuesday, November 19th, introducing four brand-new personal deployable structures and revamping PvP across the board with a seemingly innocuous warp acceleration fix. The expansion represents the first step in new Senior Producer Andie Nordgren's plan to bring true player-run deep-space colonisation to EVE Online. The new Mobile Depot that can be placed anywhere in space is possibly the most sandboxy feature since the introduction of player-owned starbases back in 2004. Players have been coming up with plans for the device since its first announcement, but I think we'll see its true potential revealed in the coming weeks and months. If you've been saving up your Sisters of EVE loyalty points to get your hands on the faction's new exploration ships, be prepared to buy and build the blueprints as soon as the server comes up. These will be the first pirate faction ship blueprints that are available in high-security space, and a recent devblog confirmed that players have been collecting Sisters of EVE loyalty points like crazy lately in anticipation of the expansion, but those who get the built ships to market first will make an absolute killing. For the rest of us, getting ready for the expansion means planning where to set up a Mobile Depot for some quick profit-making enterprise or building a few small PvP ships to put the new warp speed mechanics to the test. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at some of the best places to set up a Mobile Depot, re-consider the lure of low-security space, and propose adapting your PvP fleets to take advantage of the warp acceleration changes.
EVE Evolved: The Siphon Unit in Rubicon
EVE Online will soon let players steal valuable resources from each other, and not everyone is happy with it. The upcoming Rubicon expansion will add a new Siphon Unit structure that can literally siphon off materials from a starbase's moon harvesters and simple reactors. Preliminary details on the structure were released in a new devblog this week, sparking debate over whether the new item will be a useful tool for disrupting entrenched nullsec alliances. Many expected the siphon to be a minor annoyance to starbase owners, with the presence of a siphon being easily discovered and a limit of one siphon per starbase established. In reality, one siphon unit can rob a starbase of 60% of the output from a moon harvester or 12.5% from a simple reactor, and there's no limit to how many can be stacked on an individual starbase. It'll take only two of these to completely shut down a single moon-mining operation, and the owner will get no warning whatsoever that it's happening. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at how the Siphon Unit will work, its stats, various ways to protect your starbase from it, and what the long-term implications may be for EVE.
EVE Evolved: Odyssey 1.1 and PvP balance
It's been just under three months since EVE Online's exploration-focused Odyssey expansion went live, bringing in a new hacking minigame and significantly buffing the underused tier 1 and tier 2 battleships. With a complete rebalancing all of the tech 1 sub-capital ships now complete, CCP has turned its attention to some of the oldest tech 2 ships in the game: Heavy Assault Ships and Command Ships. Developers have been testing out changes to these ships on the test server and hitting up players for feedback since Odyssey went live, and the results are finally ready to deploy. Odyssey 1.1 will go live in two days time on September 3rd and contains some pretty big changes that are sure to shake up the PvP landscape. Medium-sized long-range weapons have been buffed beyond all recognition, and a buff to active tanking may soon make it viable in PvP. Heavy Assault Ships and Command Ships have been beefed up, the Dominix is getting a small nerf following its absolute dominance in the Alliance Tournament, and the Nosferatu energy vampire module may be about to make a return to PvP setups. In this week's EVE Evolved, I analyse the upcoming Odyssey 1.1 patch and what the new ship balance changes mean for the average player.
EVE Evolved: A guide to roles in fleet PvP
It seems as if every time the topic of PvP comes up in an EVE Online news post or article, a few people will chime in with stories of their horrible experiences with it. This seems almost baffling to me, as I would say EVE offers the best PvP experience in the entire MMO genre. It soon becomes apparent that we aren't playing the same game and that their experience is one of helpless newbies being ganked by evil blobs of bad guys. If that describes your first few days in the depths of space, you may well have missed out on some incredible fights. For me, PvP in EVE means fleet warfare; it's all about co-ordinated groups of players hunting around the map for other fleets they can probably defeat while avoiding all the larger fish that will swallow them whole. The players on PvP ops are always itching for action, but a good fleet commander will carefully weigh enemy fleets and be sure to engage only when he thinks he has the upper hand. Figuring out ways to fight above your weight or look weaker than you are play an important role in the PvP metagame, turning EVE into a kind of intergalactic game of poker played by fleet commanders using their pilots as betting chips. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at all the different roles that make a successful fleet and what you'll need to fill that role.
