Difference between revisions of "Clones and Podding"

Revision as of 11:22, 24 October 2009

Original text by Rells
Expanded and updated by Dimensionline, Cthulhu, Aether.
Copyright Agony Unleashed

Introduction

If you play Eve any significant amount of time, you will eventually end up losing your ship either from a PvP or a PvE encounter. Once you lose your ship, you will end up in your pod. You will need to know how to fly it properly in order to avoid getting "podded", in which event your capsule gets blown up as well. When you lose your pod, you will end up in a clone bay inside a station sometimes many systems away from the encounter and will have to pay to purchase a new clone. You will lose all your implants and potentially some skill points too. As such is very important that you learn how to avoid getting your pod killed.

Before You Undock

Before you undock to take part in any sort of PvP, you need to ensure that you do not risk losing your skill points. To do this check to see that your clone is up to date. Open up your character sheet and compare your clone skill point capacity to the amount of skill points that your character has. Being engaged in PvP is the wrong time to find out that you forgot to upgrade your clone. You should check for this regularly to make sure that your clone is always up to date. You can do this, for example, every time you update the skill queue.

If you got podded and didn't have a clone to cover your skill points, you will lose a certain percentage of skill points from your character's highest level skill. Very often this means losing that Battleship V or Cruiser V skill you have just recently completed. In terms of time lost in training, this can be very expensive. In general, you always want to have an up to date clone because "things" happen and petition queues are long for bug related death reimbursement.

To upgrade your clone you have to go to a station with a medical facility. In order to find such a station, you can open the map in game and select "Cloning" under "Station Services" on World Map Control Panel. Systems with cloning facilities will then appear to be colored in red. Then all you have to do is hover your mouse over a system with a lit up dot and it will show you the cloning stations present in that system. Fly to the nearest system with cloning, dock at the station that has medical services, and open the medical bay. In this screen you will see two buttons: one to upgrade your clone and another to change its location. Purchase the clone that covers your current points or the next highest version if you anticipate exceeding that clone's capacity soon.

Using Implants

Implants are attribute enhancers that will increase your character's attributes and thus allow it to train skills at a rate faster than it would train otherwise. To use implants all you have to do is train up Cybernetics skill, stop skill training on your character, then right click on each implant to plug it in. Once you have done this, you can restart the skills training. You will notice that the training times will be shortened as the training is accelerated. This is because training rate of each skill is determined by its primary and secondary attributes that can be seen from information of that skills. Skills train at the rate of:

• (points in primary attribute + 1/2 points in secondary attribute) skill points per minute
  

When you increase these attributes through the use of implants, the time to finish training the skill goes down.

Warning: If you get podded, any implants in your head will be destroyed and the training time will be recalculated in response.

Since implants are destroyed when you get podded, it is important to know how to use them in a way that won't see you in the ISK poorhouse. While a set of +1 and +2 implants is relatively cheap, a set of +3s or +4s can cost anywhere from 30 to 80 million ISK. Players who do not want to pay this price will often either use cheap sets or use a separate clone for pvp (see Jump Clones section).

Another way to avoid paying the full price for losing a full set of implants is plugging in an incomplete set. Most skills in EVE have primary and secondary attributes of either Perception/Willpower or Intelligence/Memory. So simply inject two implants, either perception + willpower or intelligence + memory. While you are in your PvP clone train only the skills that rely on the attributes you have boosted. If you get podded you will then lose only 2 implants instead of 4 or 5.

Keep in mind that once implants are plugged in, you can not remove them without destroying them.

Characteristics of a Pod

Pods have the following properties:

• Pods make though any distance in Eve within one warp, even the 300 AU warp of OJOS-T system in Great Wildlands.
• Pods enter warp almost instantly.
• Pods have approximately 500 effective hit points and get destroyed easily.
• Pods have very low subwarp speed, about 170-180 m/s.
• Pods are weakest to explosive/kinetic damage types.

One implication of these properties is that it is very easy to enter warp in a pod and thus save it from getting blown up. However if you find yourself inside a bubble and have to crawl to its edge to escape most likely you will get killed. If you get blown up, do not try to fly 15km to try and get back to the gate. Instead warp to a celestial and then back to the gate if required.

Getting Out With Your Pod Intact

If you end up in a pod after a PvP encounter, the odds are that the enemy will stick around to try and destroy your pod. For this reason you want to be prepared to get it out as soon as possible. When you start getting low on armor and enter structure, it is time to start looking for something to warp your pod to.

Look on your overview and pick any celestial body other than a gate. Warping your pod to a moon is probably the safest option in 0.0, but a planet or belt will also do. If you were in a ship, you would never want to warp to a moon, of course, without scanning it first because of probability of warping into a POS. POS guns however do not target and destroy pods so it is perfectly fine to warp your pod out to a moon. To find a moon easily, hold down the alt key and pan around looking for a circle broken by a solid dot on the right side. You can also just hit alt + x to show all brackets.

Once you have found a suitable celestial object click on it such that you see a box around it. Just before you blow up, start repeatedly hitting the "warp to" button on selected item window. The reason for this is that there is typically lag associated with your ship getting blow up, your pod ejecting, and your character entering a new session. By spamming "warp to" button you are ensuring that you get you pod into warp as fast as possible, since the opponent wont experience that associated lag.

While you are in warp, open people and places and make a mid-warp bookmark. As you exit warp, immediately warp to your bookmark. This will give you a semi-safe point to hang out at, at least until your opponents get out scan probes and start scanning you out. Many players, however, will not bother scanning down pods.

Tip: make sure to configure your EVE client such that it gives you as little lag as possible. The more lag you have playing EVE, the more likely it is that you will get podded.

Sticking Around

In a large, multi-ship engagement you can choose to stick around with your pod and watch the fight with all the associated explosions. You might also serve to distract your enemy. Some of them will attempt to target and kill your pod, which means that they will losing time and firepower firing at the other ships in your gang.

Whether you pick to hang around and watch a fight or not is a personal decision. If you have 100 million ISK worth of implants in your head, that will affect the decision quite a bit of course.

Jump Clones

A jump clone allows you to do two things, first of all it allows you to jump large distances in a few seconds and secondly it allows you to save your implants when going into a potentially hostile situation.

Please refer to the following article for more information on where to get jump clones: Jump Clones

Shuttle Substitute

Sometimes you want to be able to move several ships without having to buy and trash shuttles. The solution is simple: undock in your pod. Dock at a station and wait about 30 seconds. Right click on your active ship and select "Leave Ship". You will end up in your pod. Undock and set destination to the system where you have more ships that you need to haul.

Note: if you clone jump or get podded, you will not be able to undock in your pod until you first enter a ship. In this case, simply enter your rookie ship and then leave it.

Pod Express

If you ever want to traverse a distance of many systems in Eve in a blink of an eye, you can choose to take the "pod express". Pod express refers to the acts of relocating your medical clone to the station where you'd want to end up and then self destructing your pod. To do this, first you will need to find a station with cloning facilities. Dock at this station, open medical facilities window, and locate the move clone button. Select a desired station from the list (note that you can only set your clone to stations where your corp has an office, or where the NPC corp you started with has an office). Undock, the right click on your pod and select "self-destruct" from the menu.

After two minutes of self-destruct countdown, you will end up in your medical clone at the station to which you moved it to. Keep in mind that this is same as getting podded by another player, so you will lose all your implants in the process. Before undocking again, you will have to upgrade your clone. If you change your mind while you are self-destructing you can cancel the countdown by activating it again.

Unlike jump clones that you can utilize only once every 24 hours, you can pod jump as frequently as you want to, assuming that you have the cash to support the purchases of new clones.

Conclusion

Many pilots are afraid of being in open space in their pods. However, pods have many advantages that you might not have considered previously. They can warp to POSes without getting killed in the process to do some recon work. Pirates can travel through high sec empire systems in their pods without having NPCs targeting and shooting them. Pods can make it through very long warps faster than most other ships.

Getting podded is something you have to think of as just another isk cost, one that will gradually get bigger as your character gains more and more skill points. Killing a pod of a 3 year player is likely to cost him quite a bit of cash but killing one of a newbie wont cost him much. If you know the strengths and limitations of your pod and learn how to pilot it properly, will have a much better time PvPing in EVE.