Idris Helion
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
21
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Posted - 2012.08.12 03:52:00 -
[1] - Quote
The Retriever is now a great low-skill mining platform for both solo and gang work in hisec. Due to limited tanking ability I wouldn't use it below .5 systems, but it can tank most belt rats just fine. Don't bother rigging it, and you can throw a shield of some kind in the mid (or a roid scanner if you want to avoid wasting cycles on roids close to popping). I'd use a Ret rather than a Mack in some scenarios: during Hulkageddon, for instance, or when I'm prowling around for new "home" systems to mine in and want to get a feel for the belts. I can put a Ret in lots of target mining systems without investing a lot of ISK.
A Mackinaw is now a hisec pimpmobile. You get a bigger ore bay and more mids than you get on a Retriever, and a bigger tank, but I still wouldn't take this boat out into lowsec or nullsec without escort. (The Skiff is the only way to mine out of Empire now unless you're in friendly space or have a lot of armed escort.) But like the Hulk before the patch, it's expensive. You have to figure whether the moderate yield increase and bigger ore bay offset the 200M+ ISK cost (about 10x that of a Retriever). If you're outfitting a mining corp, it may make more sense to just use Retrievers. If you're flying solo, a Mack might make sense, but that's a lot of up-front ISK.
I'm becoming concerned about the Mack being overpowered, in fact. It's a great platform for AFK mining in hisec, especially with ice. In fact, it's almost as if CCP designed it to appeal to AFK players, given the ginormous ore bay. I love the vast ore bay myself -- it finally means that I can turn my hauler alt into a mining alt -- but it's going to ramp up mining like crazy, at least for awhile. Maybe that's the point: maybe CCP felt that mineral prices were getting too high, and wanted a stealthy way to bring mineral prices back down.
Speculators who bought up barges when they were cheap (Procurer, Retriever) are going to make out like bandits for awhile until the miners get their fleets rebuilt. It'll be interesting to see what use cases the Skiff ends up filling -- that tiny nugget with a battleship tank has some interesting uses beyond running lasers on rocks.
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