Mysterious Mysteries

As I have been saying a lot for the past few weeks, I’m waiting to update my Science and Industry guide again because Invention is so horrible at the moment, I cannot envision CCP not fixing things.

I would love to say that I knew how bad the situation with Invention was from experience, but the truth is that I just don’t have the money to get involved with that. Billions of ISK for a single data interface that can be used to run one Invention job at a time (it won’t be used up or anything, but still)? I have some money, but I’m not made of the stuff.

And then there’s the poor returns on the Invention jobs if they succeed at all. Now, the people testing haven’t been using BPCs with maxed out runs or anything, which I think may be part of why they can only get tech two BPCs with a single run, but their Invention jobs still fail to come up with anything an awful lot.

But anyway, the sorry state of Invention has been what was holding me back. But since I am tired of waiting, I am placing my personal deadline on January 7. If by then CCP has not announced a pending (or even desired) improvement to Invention, I will edit the Invention section of my guide appropriately, and re-insert the language mentioning that the Science and Industry interface’s Blueprints tab can’t find blueprints that have not been used yet (I had thought the bug was fixed, but I was just misreading the patch notes).

So cheers everybody, and happy industry.

We did try to give The Company another playthrough, but we learned that while I was very well aware of what The Company was all about once the ball got rolling, as a player I find it very hard to get to that point. All the other RPGs I’ve played (even Tony’s unreleased ones) have very strong cues on how to start. Maybe it’s just because I’m indecisive somewhat, but The Company’s lack of a strong cue made it too hard for an already nervous me to get started.

This re-affirms the value of short one-page fiction pieces being written and placed into the book. The stories would be short enough to not be obnoxious, but transmit a picture of play “as intended” and allow players to work from some known point of comfort.

I guess one of the reasons I have so much trouble playtesting The Company is because I’m not a very good gamemaster. (Speaking of playtesting The Company, I have, sadly, given up hope that I will hear from any online playtesters, and will have to carry on as best I can myself.) Tony, however, is something else. He can spin an excellent roleplaying session from the barest of plans, and I hope some of you will eventually have the pleasure of playing a game with him as the gamemaster at a GenCon one of these years.

On Tuesday we were playing one of his games in development by the name of Demoner. Taking the premise of a town under control of a magic-using cult, with the town church and library decided as two important locations, Tony managed to spin a very entertaining investigation, and then seamlessly allowed it to shift into a shooting spree when I got tired of using subtlety to achieve my ends. With very few bumps I was able to learn what was going on, who was involved, and where their centers of power were. When night fell… Well, away went the joking investigator and out came the shotgun.

This is the versatility as a gamemaster I wish I had. Sitting on my bedroom floor, we can play pretty much any game I want with a premise as general or as specific as I request. Next week we’ll probably play some The Company, since what has been said about the game after I released the playtest copy was positive, and I would really like to get it out there to a wider audience.

Even before Eve came out I loved the concept of being an ECM pilot, so ECM is near and dear to my heart. It may not have turned out as awesome as I thought it would, but nothing suits this scarebear (it’s a carebear, with teeth!) better than seeing an enemy’s target lock disappear while your buddies help you space him.

With the Revelations patch, ECM strength across the board was halved, with ECM ships receiving ECM strength bonuses (or getting existing bonuses boosted) and “damage mods” of sorts for ECM being added.

The only problem is that while the Griffin, for instance, lost its useless missile damage bonus in exchange for its 10% ECM strength per level, a pilot with Caldari Frigate 5, Signal Dispersion 4, and a tech one Signal Distortion Amplifier, the strength of his jammer is going to be just barely stronger than an old jammer being used by somebody with no amplifier and no Signal Dispersion. The Scorpion has now lost its 5%/level jamming strength bonus over the Griffin and Blackbird (being stuck at 10%/level just like them), and all ECM specialty ships have lost their ability to gleefully armor tank while jamming away with their mid slots.

Still, at the very least this should finally do away with the annoying setups that randomly throw on an ECM - Multispectral Jammer for the relatively frequent random jams. I’ve always looked for reasons to love the Griffin, and now I see it being a bit more useful in groups now that it has an extra edge over bringing one more combat frigate. But that might just be me hoping, though I think that its cost/benefit ratio against a Blackbird, given the Blackbird’s loss of tanking ability, would benefit the Griffin in being selected as an ECM ship.

Make no mistake: even with the Signal Distortion Amplifiers, ECM strength was nerfed. While using a pair of tech two amplifiers on a Blackbird with Caldari Cruiser 5 gives almost a 6% bonus over the strength of the old Blackbird’s ECM, the Scorpion can never get as strong as it used to be, even with four tech two mods. Nowadays I wouldn’t be able to get away with using multispecs as well as I used to (which is also in part because the Blackbird lost its capacitor bonus). Still, it’s a relatively minor nerf to ECM strength. As I said before though, ECM ships have taken a major blow to their ability to armor tank.

All this is ignoring rigs, however. The tech one and two rigs offer +10% and +15% jamming strength, respectively. At 200 calibration for the tech one, you could fit two of them and leave your third rig slot empty if you wanted maximum jamming strength, or just one (either T1 or T2) and two tanking rigs. Of course, unless salvaging is changed to drop many more components, these rigs are going to be very expensive, so I wouldn’t plan on fitting them to anything short of a Scorpion. Still, they’re worth mentioning, even if I did forget them when I first put this post up.

So what is my advice to the young ECM pilots of the world?

1. Don’t neglect the Griffin. As I said before, it’s a lot cheaper than the now much more fragile Blackbird. Plus, Caldari Frigate 5 isn’t too hard to get, and gives you potential access to all of the Caldari’s elite frigates if you choose to pursue them later.
2. Now more than ever: love your race-specific jammer. Multispecs are great and all because of their versatility, but having the right tool for the right job is even more important now.
3. Platinum insurance: it’s not just a good idea, you’re probably going to need it.

Now get out there and jam somebody. ^_^