Try Another Ship!

I have to say upfront that I really like stealth bombers. They are fun ships to fly and can be very useful in certain situations.

But a number of recent experiences have led me to the conclusion that many people, especially wormhole dwellers, fly them badly. Not only do they fly them badly, but they fly them in totally the wrong situations.

I suspect the proliferation of stealth bombers in wormholes is due to a number of reasons. Firstly, everybody in a wormhole has a Covert Ops ship, otherwise they wouldn't be able to do anything. And since Stealth Bombers require most of the same skills I guess it makes sense for wormhole dwellers to fly them. In addition to this, they are light and can cloak, which takes advantage of both the wormhole mass restrictions and the lack of Local Chat in wormholes.

So far , so good. I'm not claiming that Stealth Bombers are bad to fly in wormholes. But every pilot should learn one very important lesson, they are paper thin! They have no tank! None.

This means that you should take the utmost care when putting them into a situation where there is the possiblity of them getting damaged. The biggest tip I can give you is:

Be prepared to flee

Make preparations before a fight to get out. During a fight, keep aligned to a celestial object and if you start to take damage, push that warp button. Keep out of both Scram and Disruptor range. If any of your enemies launch drones, you may as well exit the field straight away, because I bet they will head for you.

Ultimately Stealth Bombers are guerilla fighters. They are meant to be used for quick and decisive action that shatters the enemy in one go. Then they disappear.

But too often I've seen Stealth Bombers being used as a some kind of staple fleet ship. People are using them to camp wormholes and tackle enemy ships. They are being used as DPS ships in long extended fights. Of course they can be used like this, but only with great care and the addition of supporting ships to control the enemies range and give them an alternate target to shoot at.

So my suggestion is, if you find yourself a little too reliant on Stealth Bombers in wormhole PvP, go grab a nice T1 Cruiser. It might not be able to pack quite the punch that Stealth Bombers can, but it will have a decent tank and will be able tackle invading pilots. Not only that, but it will hurt your wallet less if things don't go to plan!

Timing is Everything

Anybody wanting to PvP in Eve needs to get used to timers. Timers in Eve control a great number of things, such as when you may dock, when you may jump through a gate, when you may shoot at another player or when you may be shot at. PvP in wormholes is no exception to this.

There are two distinct timers that will come into play when you jump into a wormhole.

The Session-Change Timer

The Session-change timer is a standard one throughout the Eve universe. The timer is triggered by many player actions, including undocking, ejecting from a ship, jumping through a gate and joining a fleet.

In our case the timer is triggered when we jump through a wormhole. It will last for thirty seconds, and during that time we will be unable to perform any of the other actions that could possibly trigger the timer. Essentially this means that we will have to wait thirty seconds before we can jump back through the wormhole again. But you can get caught out by it in other ways as well. For example, joining a fleet just before you land at a wormhole will trigger the timer. That thirty seconds you have to wait is more than enough time for somebody to lock and even possibly pop your ship.

So the session timer is something you should always be mindful of. Luckily for us, rather than having to count to thirty, there is a visual setting that can be enabled to show us the session-change timer. From the Eve Main Menu go to the 'General Settings' tab then tick the option box in the top left corner labelled 'Show Session-Change Timer'. In-game the timer will show up in the top left of your screen as a very small whirling icon. Holding your mouse over the icon will tell you how many seconds are left until the timer expires.

Make sure to familiarise yourself with which actions trigger the timer and be careful you don't get caught out by it.

Wormhole Polarity Timer

The second timer to affect wormholes is the polarity timer. This timer is designed to prevent people avoiding PvP by constantly jumping back and forth through a wormhole. The timer is triggered when a pilot jumps twice through the same wormhole in quick sucession.

I couldn't find any concrete data on how this timer works, so I did a bit of my own testing. This is the conclusion I have reached. I believe that after the first initial jump through a wormhole a timer is started that is approximately five minutes long. During this five minute period you can make a second jump but are unable to jump a third time. If you try and make a third jump a message will pop up warning you that you are unable to jump. It will also display the time remaining until you can jump through again. This time remaining will be the five minutes subtracted by the amount of time hat has passed since the first jump.

In practice, the longest amount of time you will have to wait before jumping through the same wormhole the third time will be somewhere between 3 minutes 50 seconds and 4 minutes. This is because the two session timers caused by the first two jumps through the wormhole will already subtract 1 minute from the polarity timer and system loading time may subtract even more.

The polarity timer is linked to one specific wormhole. So the timer will not be triggered if you are jumping through different wormholes.

This timer is very important to remember if PvP is occurring on a wormhole. Any PvP targets who are being beaten will attempt to flee by jumping through the hole, and if they are then tackled on the other side they will most likely jump through the hole a second time. At this point they will have a polarity timer, so they can be easily dealt with.

In theory the polarity timer confers an advantage on the 'defender' of a system. The 'attacker' will have to make one jump in order to enter the system. Once the battle has started the 'attacker' will have to split their forces in order to prevent the 'defender' from using the polarity timer to their advantage. This can often make fighting at wormholes a bit frustrating, but it is important information to remember if you engage on a wormhole.

I hope that summary was useful. Feel free to leave a comment if you disagree with my theory of the polarity mechanics, or if you have any good/bad experiences of wormhole timers.

Covert Tackling: Putting Theory to the Test

My last post contained advice on fitting a Covert Ops ship. There have been some really good suggestions in the comments, so make sure you check them out.

In one comment REve Blogger mentioned 'I never really considered the use of cov ops as a tackle.', and it just so happened that yesterday I had the opportunity to prove that a Covert Ops can do precisely that.

A Dominix, a Gallente Battleship, warped into one of our gas mining fleets yesterday. Everybody that was harvesting managed to extricate themselves, but the Dominix, instead of warping straight back to the hole he came from decided to hang around in system. Suspecting the Dominix to be bait, I hopped into my Helios and jumped through the only other active wormhole in the system.

Sure enough there was a fairly large PvP fleet on the other side. I quickly cloaked up and we started to get a fleet together to deal with the threat. This can sometimes take awhile, so by the time our fleet was prepared a number of the opposing ships had come and gone.

When our fleet finally got around to warping to the wormhole that was being camped by our opposition, they had either already noticed our fleet and started to run or thought that we weren't going to take the bait. Either way, I was left sitting at a wormhole with the Dominix, who was about to warp back to his POS - with our fleet fast approaching.

It was the work of a moment for me to uncloak, lock and tackle the Dominix. Then I flew towards the wormhole, just to make sure that I would be able to jump to safety if he started spewing drones at me. As expected, he popped out his sentry drones and proceeded to take me down to 25% armour before I jumped through. But by that time the rest of our fleet was on grid and they made short work of the target.

All in all, I probably tackled him for about 15-20 seconds - but without those seconds we wouldn't have got the kill. It's also very nice to appear on the killmails as well! So there you have it - a fortuitous textbook demonstration of tackling in a Covert Ops ship.

I should imagine many of you have similar stories, where you just happen to be in the right place, at the right time. But in this case I should also add, with the right ship fitting!