Hello again folks. Got another set of changes today for your feedback.

These changes revolve around the Rorqual and mining in general. We've been keeping a close eye on the mineral economy since Ascension and we feel that we need to make another fairly significant intervention in order to help keep this area of the EVE economy healthy.

At the same time we're preparing some other changes related to mining that have more to do with QoL and module balance.

Here's the package of somewhat related changes we have in mind at the moment:

Excavator Drones:
We're planning another reduction in Excavator drone yield to help keep the mineral economy healthy. I know it never feels good when things get nerfed but we're very confident that the Rorqual will continue to be an extremely powerful mining ship after these changes (not to mention the value provided by its other functions such as foreman links and defenses). We plan on continuing to make changes in this area as necessary over the coming months with the goal of keeping the mineral market healthy and ensuring that a wide variety of mining ships are viable.

• Speed up the cycle time of 'Excavator' ore mining drones to 60 seconds, and reduce the yield per cycle to 110 m3 base. This will reduce the idealized yield per minute, increase the number of trips required to and from the asteroid, but also reduce the amount of wasted cycle at the end of an asteroid's life.
• Add killmails on the destruction of all 'Excavator' drones.
• In March we are also planning on some UI/UX improvements for drones as a whole and mining drones in particular. These include a new keyboard shortcut for launching drones and enabling the "engage target" keyboard shortcut to work with mining drones. Discussion of these UI changes is best directed to this thread.

PANIC Module:
We have been keeping a close eye on potential issues related to the PANIC module for a while, and although we are overall quite happy with the module we are interested in reducing the power of a few uses, primarily use for fleet tackle and cyno lighting, as well as an escape method for entosis operations.
To reduce the power of the PANIC module in these situations while also preserving all of its power for defending mining Rorquals and their fleets we are currently planning the following change:

• Initial activation of the PANIC module would require the Rorqual to have an active target lock on an asteroid.

Other misc mining changes:

• Buffing the Mining Laser Field Enhancement foreman link from 30% to 40% base bonus.
• Increasing the optimal range of the ORE strip miners (to 18.75km) and ORE ice harvesters (to 12.5km).
• Spreading out the asteroids in the Asteroid Cluster ore anoms a bit to help the balance between shorter range drone mining and longer range exhumer mining.
• We are investigating the option of increasing the visual size of nullsec ore asteroids to help improve the feel of the ore anom environments (they've been a bit sad looking since the veld got removed) but we are not sure about some technical details of that potential change atm so no promises.

These changes will be appearing on SISI for public testing over the next few days and we're very interested in hearing your feedback. Thanks!