Moments ago I was replying to post over at the EVE Online Forum asking if it was possible to learn PVP in Big ships like Battleships and Battlecruisers. You probably …
In the past I’ve talked about Misdirection and how important it is take advantage of your opponents mistakes. In this article I want to talk about a trick you can …
Most of my EVE Career has been spent fighting outnumbered. First as a PVPer in an Industrial Alliance fighting off a large Pirate Alliance, then as a small group of …
▶ In the above video you can see a real world example of EVE Online Elite Level PVP… Imagine there is a 100 strong herd of BattleCruisers passing by your …
Moments ago I was replying to post over at the EVE Online Forum asking if it was possible to learn PVP in Big ships like Battleships and Battlecruisers.
You probably know that my typical advice to those wanting to learn is to start with Frigates. The stuff you learn in them will help you with every ship in the game and they are cheap so you can afford lots of “lessons.”
This guy however has a few billion ISK to spare and doesn’t care for frigates, so I told him how to solo PVP with Battleships fairly cheaply using tank as the disengage tactic.
The Ability to Disengage is CRUCIAL to solo PVP. Chances are you will be blobbed in most fights and you need to be able to escape when it’s unfavorable.
Frigates do this with speed, dual propulsion, kiting, and by isolating very well. But for most big ships that’s not an option because unless you’re in a Macherial, you’ll likely be one of the slowest ships of the field.
That’s where tanking comes in…
There are two basic tanking strategies:
BufferTank – This is where you increase your ships EHP (Effective Hit Points) to very large numbers (typically 100,000 to 300,000). Doing this makes it very slow for anyone to kill you, which gives you time to de-aggro and jump or dock to escape.
Active Tank – An active tank uses either a Shield Booster or Armor Repairer to repair damage, hopefully more damage than you are receiving. This requires more effort, management, skill, and experience to do well, but it can be a VERY good way to go.
Alone these strategies do well in many types of encounters, however to be able to disengage you MUST fight on a Gate or Station!
To be successful in Solo PVP you need to always expect to be blobbed (you will be right 90% of the time). Therefor you must plan for it and have a counter.
The one used here is docking or jumping through a gate after the Aggro Timer has expired.
What is the Aggro Timer? It’s a hidden timer in the game that starts counting 1 minute every time you commit an aggressive act on another player. This includes warp scrambling, webbing, ewar, shooting, drones, etc. Each time you aggro your timer is reset to 1 minute. During that minute you cannot jump or dock.
So the trick here is knowing when to “De-Aggro” (stop aggressing) in order to have time to allow the timer to expire and escape. You really need to think about this ahead of time and throughout the fight because it is your most important decision.
Ideally a fight would go down like this…
You warp to a gate with 3 Battlecruisers in your Buffer Tanked Abaddon (200,000+ EHP) and begin engaging them. They think they can win because they have 3 times as many ships as you and shoot back. Moments later you destroy one BC and move to the next.
BUT then Directional Scan shows incoming. It looks like 8 more BC’s are on the way. You immediately stop aggroing and orbit the gate at 500m (to avoid being bumped).
The hostile fleet lands and you spam jump as your Armor begins to melt… 90%, 80%, 50%, 30% then you finally jump and escape on the other side because they focused everything on one side instead of covering both sides.
The key here is knowing when to disengage, which takes some practice and planning.
Go out and give this a try and see how you like it, it can be very fun and in many cases the fact that fights happen slower than with frigates means you will have more time to make decisions.
Which is why I’ve been focusing on Scanning Videos more recently. However in the past videos, some of my example footage wasn’t as clear and easy to understand as I wanted it to be, so I wanted to do another quick example for you to make sure you got it.
In this video I show you how I scan out a Drake and Maelstrom in a Anomaly at high speed and warp in on them. You will learn how you can do this quickly as well. (I highly recommend my other scanning videos too, just search for “scanning”)
In the past I’ve talked about Misdirection and how important it is take advantage of your opponents mistakes.
In this article I want to talk about a trick you can use to encourage your opponent to over extend himself and make mistakes you can exploit.
When your opponent believes he’s winning, he’s more likely to take more risks and further commit himself to a fight.
Let’s look at two example scenarios…
First:
You and your small gang are attacking a Drake in Null Sec Space. His tank is rock steady and you’re making almost no progress, so you decide to disengage because he has just killed one of your Cruisers.
Bait Tankin’ Scenario:
You and your small gang are attacking a Drake in Null Sec. His tank is dropping steadily and he’s right at 20% Shield, you’ve lost one of your cruisers, but you know most drakes go down very fast once they pass peak shield recharge (about 30% shield), so you stick it out and tell your gang to “OVERLOAD!”
Unfortunately, his shield holds steady and he continues to drop your gang, one ship at a time. Only as you are tackled and dying do you see the Shield Boosting effect on his ship and realize it was all a trap.
This is just the beginning. Another example is an opponent or gang that is scared to engage you. They fire at you from range but never come in close and commit. If your tank holds steady they will never engage.
However, should you be in a Brutix and they see you in low Armor, they are likely to run in close to try to finish you off. When they do, you secure your tackle and turn on your Dual Armor Repairs.
This Is Misdirection
…And it’s one aspect of EVE that very few games have to this degree. Things like this raise PVP from just “lock target and shoot” to a full on battle of minds.
Because so many fights are “Voluntary” in EVE you MUST learn misdirection to get people to fight you.
If you fly a Thrasher, almost no frigates will fight you, because they know they will likely lose.
If you fly a Moa with small blasters and a web + scram, a lot more frigates will fight you and most of them will die.
If you want to radically improve your PVP, get more fights, and win them, you need to start thinking of how you can use misdirection.
I spend A LOT of time roaming Null Sec space. That means I come across ratters all the time and most of those tend to be in Cosmic Anomalies and not Asteroid Belts.
In the past I would do an anomaly scan, then start with the most valuable anomalies and work my way down. Basically making vague guesses at where they were.
This strategy rarely worked and it was very slow and annoying.
Then I realized that you could actually see the anomalies on the Solar System Map. This changed everything!
Because if I can first find the anomaly runners ship on directional, I can use the direction and angle relative to my position and a celestial object to figure out where they are.
This could be said in very complex geometric terms and all that but in the end it’s just:
“OK, he’s showing as above planet 6 on directional”
“Which anomalies are above planet 6?”
“There he is!”
Using this method I am able to find anomaly runners just as fast or even faster than belt ratters.
Watch the video below to see this method in action…
Most of my EVE Career has been spent fighting outnumbered. First as a PVPer in an Industrial Alliance fighting off a large Pirate Alliance, then as a small group of PVPers living in IT (BOB) Space outnumbered 100 to 1 most the time, and finally against Test and Goons 10k members.
To survive against massive numbers like this you have to find ways to leverage what you have. One fun way to do that is with “Ambush Tactics.”
At it’s most simple this is something like we would do when Test would camp our Station with 20-50 pilots. Usually we only had 5-10 players online so we had to be creative.
The solution was Bombs! We would get one of our guys to undock and get them aggroed, then we would use some creative bookmarks to do a bombing run while they were all aggroed.
We would let the bombs loose, our bait would dock, and then we would watch as the enemy fleet melted to our bombs.
You can see some footage I took of this in my video Timebomb
You can take this a step further by luring a enemy fleet into a trap.
Think about it, if you’re a blob chasing an easy kill (a non cloaky Tengu or something) and it makes a obvious warp to a planet, would you have your fleet follow it?
Of course!
Now what if that Tengu actually warped to a Safe Spot 300km off the warp in to the planet and there was a Mobile Warp Disruptor Bubble anchored at Zero?
The Tengu bait would land safely off bubble while the entire enemy fleet would land in the bubble (even if they warp to 100).
Now what if there were 8 Bombers sitting there ready to bomb? And they released bombs the moment the first enemy came out of warp?
BOOOOOM!!! is what will happen!
You would have forced a very large fleet of “fish” into a tight little barrel and then blown it up with dynamite. Much better than shooting fish in a barrel!
In this example, the larger your enemies fleet, the better, because more ships mean more kills for you.
This is just one of the many ways you can fight out numbered and still embarrass large blobs!
Abbadon21 says: Glad you like it, I am going to do some of that very soon after I finish my current project.
Tokyo says: This is good stuff - I've subscribed to the pro guides already although tbh BC/BS are more my thing. ...
Abbadon21 says: Yes is would still be good but you will be successful less often because your "Alpha" strike is lower.
However for...
wartzilla says: What if you were a complete noob, you had a Thrasher, but you couldn't fit T2 components even if you...
Gullwing says: Don't kill the Frigs (at least not all the time) = Rat Farming:
If you kill an entire spawn then it...
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Moments ago I was replying to post over at the EVE Online Forum asking if it was possible to learn PVP in Big ships like Battleships and Battlecruisers.
In the past I’ve talked about Misdirection and how important it is take advantage of your opponents mistakes.
I spend A LOT of time roaming Null Sec space. That means I come across ratters all the time and most of those tend to be in Cosmic Anomalies and not Asteroid Belts.
