Here’s the question. You’re an EVE Online player, and you need to buy a ship designed for seeking out and exploring wormholes. You go down to Honest Skeeve’s Used Starship Emporium and Deli and look over their probe frigates. You base your buying decision on which of these important factors?
1. You have the skills to fly the ship.
2. The ship can fit high tech cloaking modules for safety in dangerous space.
3. The power/response curve is appropriate for the fittings.
4. The good reputation of the manufacturers.
5. It looks friggin’ COOL.
Yeah, I went with #5. I don’t even have the skills to put Amarrian beam weapons on the thing.
Every race has a ship designed specifically for exploration. For Gallente, it’s the Imicus, a ship shaped like the Half Life symbol. The Caldari have the Heron. The Minmatar have the imaginatively named “Probe”. And the Amarr, justly famous for flying ships that look deadly just sitting in a stardock, have the Magnate.
A hook-like prow. Two ridiculously massive engines. A vulture’s dead stare. OMG I just HAD to have it.
The whole issue came up the other night when I was flying my recently refitted Myrmidon around exploring stuff. I’d originally had a Vexor as my exploration ship, but my lucky Vexor met an explosive end in a PvP op last week. I’d built a Brutix for a replacement, but decided to sell it instead for much-needed ISK. Since I am using a Dominix battleship as my mission ship, my previous mission ship, the Myrmidon battlecruiser, was just sitting in dock.
It made sense to fit a probe launcher and an afterburner to the thing, and use THAT as my exploration ship. If it found a nest of rats, it could swoop down and clear it out immediately without having to return to base for a better ship.
Probing down and clearing out nests that in the end took longer than simply doing a mission for better rewards. What I really wanted was a site where I could use my code breaker to retrieve necessary datacores for invention. Best place for those is in wormholes.
I took the Myrmidon into the wormhole, but I felt incredibly exposed. Anything could probe me down and shoot me dead and little I could do about it. I needed a cloak. And I needed a ship that gave a bonus to probe strength to make probing go faster.
I trained the Cloak skill (it’s my other character that has already trained cloaking, not this one) and bought the Magnate and the skills to fly it (Amarr Frigate II). Last night I fitted it out, grouped it with my alt’s Amarr destroyer and set out to find some trouble.
There were a couple of sites right in Mandoo — a rat nest and a salvage site (in the picture above). That was a good start. There were also two wormholes in the system. We entered the first.
The Wormhole Database listed it as a Class 2 Wormhole, appropriate for small fleets, and just on the edge of being tanked by me in a battleship. I tried out one of the sleeper sites and made it through the first wave, but the second wave included a battleship and I chickened out. I run a drone ship, see, and drones are mostly useless against Sleepers as they kill drones before they can do much good.
For the next few hours, I had the Excursionator probing down one site after another. Nothing but gas mines and more wormholes. I was somewhat disappointed.
This isn’t the original picture; I fiddled with it to show the ship in more detail.
After all this work training and buying and building a probe ship, I read in Massively yesterday that CCP is giving all active subscribers a FREE PROBE SHIP, of a unique design. It’s a shuttle-class ship with a solar sail and a probe launcher *built in*. It also isn’t seen as a threat by the Sleepers, so you’ll be able to take your Zephyr right into the deepest, darkest wormhole and scout things out without fear of being shot… by NPCs, anyway.
Since these ships are not replaceable and cannot defend themselves (aside from being small and squirrely), I expect tracking down Zephyrs and popping them will be the new wormhole sport. BAM. Your unique, irreplaceable ship is now wreckage! Best plan: Save the ship and sell it for 100m ISK next year when they have become incredibly rare.
Anyway. There are the old school EVE explorers, who tracked wormholes and plexes down using only their noses and intuition. Then there are those, like me, who pretty much got everything for free through the new tutorial. And then there are the hordes of people who will be using Zephyrs to clog up every exploration site in the known galaxy.
I’m thinking the core probe market (the ‘ammo’ for the free probe launcher) is about to EXPLODE. Explode like a Zephyr in a wormhole, yup.
6 thoughts on “EVE Online: A Probing Question”
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I picked the Amarr as race in EVE because I liked being an arrogant slaver. The idea of having no cost for ammo (lasers) and the most heavily armored warships that also have golden armor coating made them a winner. I wonder that so many play Gallente – they are the Frogeaters of EVE, after all. I expected Caldari-Civire Mercenaries to be a popular choice.
The “Unique Free Probe Ship” thing just sounds wrong. There are already too many Hangar Queen ships IMO. Sure, some things just need to be rare to be appreciated. But it is a pity nevertheless. Why do they give this thing such valuable special abilities? Does not sound right to me.
/loves me the Magnate also!
Admittedly, I use an Anathema (Magnate covert ops variant) anymore . . . .
Add in that Caldari and Minmatar covops can’t fit and MWD, cloak, and Sisters launcher without using fitting modules, and the Helios is fugly and. . . why wouldn’t everyone use the Magnate or Anathema? Don’t answer that.. I’m perfectly aware that the T1 versions have more PG and can fit the MWD, cloak, and probe launcher. they just can’t fit covops cloak 😛
As to the Zephyr…. methinks it won’t actually be used much — as you say, it’s going to be pvp bloodsport to pop them. Looking at their linked stats, they’re shuttles with a probe launcher, is all. Sneeze at them and they’ll pop.
Beyond that, they have no scanning bonus nor cloak….. I think they’ll be a curiosity/hangar spinner, but not acutally used for “their intended purpose.”
I wonder that so many play Gallente – they are the Frogeaters of EVE, after all.
Oh, like I knew that when I made a character, or what the ships did, even. But now I don’t want to trash my training. And after all, Toldain is just not an arrogant religious nutcase slave trader.
With no scanning bonus on the Zephyr, I think I’ll stick to using my “ghetto” prober. An Imicus with a probe strength rig, launcher, codebreaker and analyzer. And no cloak at all. I cloak by flying inconspicuously.
The question of whether to clear the other sites you find when you are looking for a radar/magnetometric site is a poser. If I knew more about respawn mechanics I might have a better answer.
I will say this: Finding the Radar/magneto sites is kind of like harvesting rares in EQ2. Some days you get nothing at all, some days you get beat to the spot by someone else, and then some days multiple instances fall into your lap. Sometimes they don’t even have rats in them.
So I guess it depends on whether the bounties/standing boosts from doing the ratting are important to you. It’s a lot steadier income, but slows down the rate at which you find the hacking/analyzing/salvaging sites.
One thing that subconsciously bothers people about Gallente ships is the asymmetric designs. But for me, the deal-breaker is amorphous ship designs, like the Dominix, the Ishtar or the Obelisk. I’m fine with the Megathron, the Hyperion, the Brutix, the Myrmidon and the Catalyst, though. There’s quite a few good organic-looking designs in the frigates as well. For example, the Tristan, the Incursus or the Maulus would not look out-of-place in R-Type.
I remember when we first chatted about EVE and you mentioned how you were looking for more exploration in a game, and that EVE might scratch that itch. Apparently, it has done that and much more.