PS. Just think when you have people who stop mining because the boosts become too expensive to maintain and the mining ships get raped, What will happen to the industrial side of eve... And what will happen to the price of ships and other player made commodities? If it is too costly to mine = no ore. no ore = no minerals. no minerals = no ships. no ships = people quitting. people quitting = less revenue for CCP.... Oh well.

I inspected the new exhumer changes on the test server.

So the mackinkaw no longer has a role bonus? It looks very odd. Hulk and Skiff both have the role bonus attribute and the mackinkaw does not, like it's out of place and missing something.

So,

Hulk gets extra mining range, extra addiitional mining yield from basic bonuses and 25% yield boost from role bonus.

Skiff gets shield HP and small yield bonus from basic bonuses and 50% drone damage/hp from role bonus. (not to mention BS level hitpoints).

Mackinaw gets ore hold capacity and small yield bonus from basic bonuses and NO ROLE BONUS.

This only highlights how much the Mackinkaw sucks. Hulk now mines 30% faster than the Mack whist the Skiff mines faster than the Mackinkaw because the Skiff is free to fit 3x harvester/mining upgrades and still able to fit a sick T2 tank and not worry about ganking. The mackinkaw can only achieve this yield the skiff has if the mackinkaw fits 3x harvester/mining upgrades, but to do this, the mackinkaw has virtually no CPU left to fit some tank to the mid slots.

The triple mining upgrade fit mackinkaw with a 3% cpu implant has only 51.9 cpu left with all mid slots empty. That's enough CPU to fit 1 T2 harder and leave the other 3 slots empty. It's not even enough CPU for 2 faction hardeners, still leaving 2 slots empty.

Meanwhile the triple mining upgrade fit skiff can fit a full T2 tank, using all of its midslots. When you consider the skiff also has 3 times more shield, armor and structure hitpoints than the Mackinkaw and is also able to fit a full tank on a yield fit you can see why the Skiff is the far superior ship. (imbalanced).

Solution? Well the obvious solution is to give the Mackinkaw a good CPU boost so it can actually use it's slots without having to fit a co-processor. Alternatively you can decrease the CPU on the Skiff. Or a bit of both.

We used SiSi. It gives you a error message saying "you can't fit a cynosural field generator I to procurer".


Also CCP gotta be consequent either we're playing in the sandbox and there's no intended usage or it's not a sandbox and everything need to go intended use. I'm looking at you wormholers ;)

2 - Ore lasers and strippers - why can't these be better than t2 ? or at least have crystal options ? maybe a set of ORE mining crystals ? More faction ORE type fittings - ORE faction MLU's , ORE mining Crystals etc... ore cargo expanders and or ore cargo rigs. Have ORE stations in high sec so people can actually get and use these types of things.

I was just thinking today that ore bay expanders would be a great addition too. Trade yield for ore capacity.

I suspect all of the above might be coming in november - remember, the september release is only to go with the new model designs, in a recent o7 show one of the devs mentioned 'new modules, new effects' etc as well, so more on the way.

Just another comment from a noob, but it would be nice if the mining laser cycle time was much lower. Active tank setups are sketch because of the large capacitor hit, even if the overall fit would be stable.

As far as the role bonus goes, the mack doesn't need to spell it out because it's rolled into the stats of the ship. It would be silly to have a 22400 ore hold and a role bonus of +25% ore hold, just so people could count bonuses.

And the skiff isn't the superior ship, just the more versatile one. The mack is the better mining ship, and I'll point to the fact that it and it's T1 counterpart account for almost half the ore mining in the game. The ore hold really is that much of a bonus.

The ship that struggles to fit a tank is the hulk, and I am more interested in making it a better choice out of the 3 than making the most efficient miner even better.

I suspect that a lot of people will, like me, have fitted their Skiff for the single high slot for a mining laser and taken their power grid and CPU usage close to the max to fit the best combination of other modules for yield and tank. Even with the increase in powergrid and CPU proposed in this change I don't have enough capacity to use the extra high slot for a second mining laser. So I either have to ignore this change and carry on as before with an empty high slot, or try to find a change in the fit of everything else to accommodate an extra laser. Ah well, another session with EFT beckons.

If we're going to look at that way the skiff should lose it's drone damage role bonus too. Because the skiff has 3 times higher base HP than the mackinkaw and if the cargo hold of the mackinkaw is to be the role bonus of the mackinkaw, then the huge HP of the skiff should be the role bonus of the skiff.

The metrics simply don't support your argument. The mack is boss because it has an ore hold that is 133% larger than 2nd place. I'm not going to defend the skiff having a drone bonus, I always thought that was odd, but asking for buffs to the most used exhumer because of a characteristic of the least used exhumer doesn't make sense.

Thread full of angry miners, honestly who's shocked.

skiff +150% 1 laser +150% = same as 2,5 lasers
mackinaw +25% 2 lasers +25% = same like 2,5 lasers more training same yield ??
hulk +0% 3 lasers +0% = stays 3 lasers

Changes to the Rorqual and Orca are currently planned for November (rather than September for these mining barge changes). We'll be discussing those more as we get a bit closer.

Orca speculation!

I think the orca will just get a few tweaks. I've flown one on and off since first release and I reckon it's one of the best non-combat ships in the game, so I doubt it'd be tweaked much. Having said that, people have asked for a 4th high slot so we could mount all three mining links as well as a tractor beam, but ccp said the capacitor reduction link wasn't worth using anyway (and wasn't used much as a result). With the new 'crystal damage reduction' link I think we'll finally see that 4th high slot.

The ore bay is bit small by today's standards too, so that might get boosted - possibly by replacing the cargo hold bonus with a 20% ore bay size increase per level. Pure conjecture of course.

With both rorqual and orca working on-grid, it'd be nice to have a little extra speed. They weren't originally designed to move around very fast, but now an extra 20m/s base speed would be helpful.

Finally, since the rorqual gets to be on grid with high-powered excavator drones, the orca might get a couple of those too. On current numbers in TQ 1 excavator would pull in 700m3 with max skills, and being regular, albeit very large drones (not fighters) they'll have a maximum of 5 at once so that'd be 3500m3 mined per minute. Pretty impressive! As they require 200tf to operate the rorqual would have to get 1000tf to fly a full set of these little monsters.

Orca *might* get the same treatment, but be limited to one or two of them. The side effect of this would be the ability to launch a full set of heavy drones too, which would give it a nice punch. But I guess we'll find out soon enough

My son came up with an interesting idea for the Rorqual. Ive seen tons of suggestions, some good, some terrible but here's his. Since CCP clearly would like to see the Rorqs out in the belts doing what they're designed for but no one wants to risk them, the idea is not to give the Rorq a big offense/defensive buff that would break it. Instead, make the aggressors think twice as to whether they actually want to RISK THEIR ships. Either by a Role Bonus or by a fitted module, give a bonus to its mining fleet that the exhumers can field an extra 5 drones each for defense. THis would only apply to combat drones so mining doesnt get broken. When a few ships roll onto a Rorq with 5 exhumers, it would make the challenge of facing 50 drones (plus the Rorqs). 5 might be too many, might drop it to maybe 3 but the idea is to have the gankers have to think twice about tackling the group.