Stealth Bombers

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Original text by Rells
Updated and expanded by Mazzy Star, Vissuddha
Copyright Agony Unleashed


Introduction

The Apocrypha patch introduced a multitude of new changes to stealth bombers. Now, more than ever, the stealth bomber packs an enormous punch. The use of covert ops cloak has improved its defensive capabilities as well as given it a new abilities in intelligence gathering role. A few stealth bombers added to a mixed gang provides a lot of DPS in a small, highly maneuverable package. However, the modern bomber has to operate at closer ranges than its previous cruise missile launching version. It still lacks any sort of tank, exploding when anyone more than just sneezes at it. This combination makes flying the stealth bomber a risky, adrenaline filled experience.

Basic Stealth Bomber Operation

When fitting your stealth bomber, it is important to consider both its strengths and weaknesses and to anticipate what combat scenarios you are likely to encounter. Consider what types of battles you may encounter and what your role will be in any such battle. What will happen if you get targeted? What will happen if you start taking damage? Where should you positions yourself in a fight involving multiple ships? How should you positions yourself in a solo fight? Once you can visualize such scenarios, fitting the ship will be much easier.

Generally, stealth bombers are fitted to two slightly different configurations. One is a torpedo setup and the other one is a bomb launching setup. With a torpedo setup, the bomber is fitted to deliver high DPS to targets at close to mid-range. In a bombing role, the bomber delivers area-of-effect damage to targets and uses tactical evasion to survive. Because of its light tank, the bomber's viability depends on its ability to avoid damage through a combination of applying electronic warfare modules to targets, hiding from sight by activating Covert Ops cloak, careful positioning of the ship with use of bookmarks, and finally using the 'gtfo' tactic when danger level rise to critical. No matter which role the bomber assumes, the pilot's ability to execute evasion tactics will make the difference between life and death on the battlefield.

Cloaked Evasion

Since Apocrypha, the stealth bomber is capable of fitting a covert ops cloaking device, which allows it to enter warp while being cloaked. Nonetheless, the bomber pilot should be familiar with basic evasion techniques in order to escape bubble camps unharmed and to maneuver the ship into optimal position when preparing to engage. While you are warping around system or grid the covops ops cloak can drop after being put into close proximity with other objects. When going through a gate you can always end up in a bubble camp on the other side. The stealth bomber pilot needs to be alert and react quickly in such situations in order to avoid losing the ship.

The most important thing a bomber pilot needs to know about cloaked evasion is that any ship or object placed or passing within 2.0 km of the bomber will make your cloak drop and you will not be able to reactivate it for 15 seconds. As you can imagine, accidentally decloaking by a gate camp or near a interceptor with very hostile intentions can get your ship wtfbbqpwned. Cloak reactivation delay is 15 seconds, which is more than enough time for small ships to get a lock on the bomber. Being locked will prevent you from activating your covert ops cloak. In this scenario your only chance at escaping will be to enter warp. So, watch your ship closely to make sure that it hasn't decloaked and have your warp-out escape planned just in case.

However, there may be circumstances where it is impossible or undesirable to warp the bomber out. The key to evasion is exploiting the trajectory and agility of the ships searching for the bomber or just flying about aimlessly. Usually, when an opponent is searching for a bomber, he or she will use a fast ship and often deploy drones to increase the area capable of decloaking. Cloaked bomber will have much lower speed, but it will have good agility and will be able to see the hunting ship's trajectory. The bomber can thus turn much faster than the hunting ships can, a fact that a skilled bomber pilot may leverage to his advantage. By making sharp turns that are perpendicular to the hunting ship's trajectory (90 degrees off), the bomber can evade the hunter, assuming the bomber can clear 2km before the hunter arrives. High-speed ships would take much longer to make a turn even if they knew which direction the bomber went. This makes it easier for the bomber to put distance between the hunter and itself.

Finally, when attempting to evade attackers even while cloaked, it is important to stay aligned to a celestial of some sort and be prepared to warp out at any time. This will allow you to instantly escape a situation cloaked or decloaked. In contrast, other ships that have to use prototype and improved cloaking devices will decelerate to 10-25% of their maximum speed under cloak and will have to accelerate up to 75% after decloaking to warp away.

Cloaking Rules

Its important that you keep in mind several rules when it comes to using a cloak.

  1. You cannot cloak within 2km (2000 meters) of any object, including asteroids, wrecks, cans, corpses, gates, stations, and other uncloaked ships.
  2. Wrecks, cans, and corpses will cause your cloak to drop if you get within 2000m of these objects.
  3. Cloaked ships should never decloak each other. Note that there is a bug in the game currently such that cloaked ships will indeed decloak one another.
  4. If you come within 2000m of any ship, stargate model, or station model, you will be decloaked. When it comes to stations and gates, it is the model that is important. Specifically, you can be at 0m on a station but still be more than 2000m off the station model itself (a fact used by capital support pilots dropping cynos). The model is defined by that which you can collide with in your ship.
  5. Being within 2000m of a POS shield wont decloak you, but bouncing off the shield will.
  6. An errant missile flying within 2000m will decloak you. This can happen when a target finishes killing a rat and the missiles fly off randomly.
  7. Cloaks never expire and you should never run out of cap while using them because they use so little energy.
  8. Most things, such as reloading, off-lining modules, and so on, cannot be done while cloaked, but modules can still cycle while cloaked without breaking the cloak.

The Gank Bomber

A gank bomber is designed to provide a lot of DPS against large to medium-sized ships. A typical setup will include siege launchers, a target painter, agility and/or speed enhancing modules, and possibly a weapon upgrade or two in the lows. Since there's really no way to fit a worthwhile tank on a bomber, your survival is going to depend on suppression of your opponent's range with sensor dampeners. When fighting slow-locking opponents, such as battleships, with ECM backup you can also use scan resolution scripts to significantly prolong their lock times on any member of your gang. While torpedo-bombers can deliver a lot of damage to larger targets, they present little danger to smaller ships. As such they have problems killing interceptors, AFs, and even T1 frigates.

Stealth bombers have no sensor re-calibration time after cloaking, allowing the bomber to lock onto target right after decloaking. This adds significantly to the surprise factor of the bombers.

Fitting

Like all stealth bomber fits, you will need to have a covert ops cloaking device on the ship. In addition, you should stack your high slots with the best siege launchers that you can use and afford. If you have Torpedoes V skill use T2 siege launchers that have ability to carry T2 torps. If you are using regular ammo, faction torpedoes are highly recommended as they will yield the maximum damage. Make sure to match your torpedoes to the damage type that your steath bomber gives bonus to. With Covert Ops level 4, your bomber will receive +60% bonus to particular damage type (explosive for Matari, EM for Amarr, etc.), so don't waste this bonus.

For your mid slots, you will want a named target painter as it will improve your damage (and your gang's damage) against smaller opponents. Note that T2 target painter is no better than best named one. Additionally, you will want to fit a remote sensor dampener to help with your survivability. There's no practical way to fit a shield tank on a bomber, one exception being the Manticore that can fit Medium F-S9 shield extender, giving it roughly double the EHP. While T2 damps are nice and cheap, your best bet is to go with a meta 3 or 4 dampener. Best named dampener will save you 14 CPU, and it is just as effective as T2 one.

You will want to bring both scan resolution and targeting range dampening scripts. Which one you choose to load in combat will depend on several factors. Against small and medium sized opponents, if you're sitting at range, a targeting range script may be your best bet, especially if there are several remote damps in your gang. On the other hand, if you're sitting closer to the fight against a larger ship, a few scan resolution dampeners can prolong its lock time and provide you with a good bit of safety, especially when combined with ECM support and warping in and out of the engagement.

Combat

A mixed frigate and/or destroyer fleet can augment its damage and surprise factor significantly against larger targets by incorporating stealth bombers into the mix. However, since bombers have less survivability than almost every other ship in the game and get easily primaried for being one of the main damage dealers in small fleets, you need to utilize your covert ops cloak, range and your remote sensor dampeners in order to keep your ship alive. In group situations featuring multiple ships fitting sensor dampeners, each ship can be assigned a different target to suppress. With multiple dampeners per target, this technique can be used to reduce the opponent's targeting range to the point where these ships cannot target the bombers. While this was easier to accomplish with the previous incarnation of the stealth bomber, it should be noted that pilots with Torpedoes V and good missile skills can reach surprisingly long ranges with T2 javelin torpedoes (maximum theoretical ranges of 91km unrigged and 120km with 2 range rigs).

Alternatively, scan resolution scripts may be used against larger ships. Using 2 dampeners with scan resolution scripts and mid-level skills on a battleship will effectively change its targeting time from 18 seconds to 37 seconds. If your fleet has ECM support, using scan resolution scripts will make your target unable to obtain lock for most of the time even if the ECM ship doesn't get a jam over a few cycles.

In any event, the bomber pilot must keep in mind that he is a very fragile piece of internet spaceship hardware and should be ready to warp out at a moment's notice. Knowing this, a bomber pilot should always be moving & aligned towards a predetermined warp out point. Hovering your mouse over 'warp to' and watching your overview like a hawk to see if a ship is aggressed is the difference between flying out with your ship or coming home in a pod. In addition if you are to return to the fray, it is best to come back to the fight via a different vector in case your targets got a line on your warp out point. Since the effective range on bombers has been reduced drastically, situational awareness is even more important.

A good way to reenter the fight after warp out is using strategic BM's. One technique to make an off grid BM is to drop a BM 1-2 AU from the engagement while your initially warping to the fight. This lessens the amount of time spent warping out and back in, because you will be warping a much shorter distance.

The Bomb Bomber

In addition to using torpedoes, stealth bombers can use bomb launchers which launch bombs. Bombs are area-of-effect weapons that fly out straight in the direction the bomber is flying at 3000 m/s, travel for 10 seconds, and then detonate. This means that the bomb flies about 30km away from the point it was launched and targets only have 10 seconds to respond. When the bomb detonates, it hits everything within 15km of its explosion nucleus. Bombs like missiles have explosion radius and explosion velocity and their damage is attenuated exactly like that of a missile. Damage is decreased by target ship picking velocity and being small in comparison to explosion radius of the bomb. Keep in mind that bombs unlike missiles are not self-navigating and will fly out straight in direction that your stealth bomber was facing. You do not need to gain a target lock to throw a bomb at someone. If your ship gets blown up in the mean time, your bomb will not detonate.

Bombs have a base damage of 6400 points. Training up Covert Ops skill increases their damage output by 5% per level. Thus a raw bomb damage of 7680 is possible with Covert Ops level IV. Their explosion velocity of 750 meters/sec five times greater than base explosion velocity of light missiles; and explosion radius of 400 meters is just a bit smaller than 450 meter explosion radius of torpedoes (unlike with missiles, these parameters do not get affected by any missile skills you might have). This means bombs are of greatest danger to small ships that are running a microwarpdrive. They will insta-kill mwding dictors and most mwding interceptors. They can also kill assault frigates that has a mwd active as well as untanked recon ships with mwd on. Multiple bombs are needed to kill more heavily tanked ships.

The bombs themselves can be destroyed before they detonate. It is very important to keep this in mind when preparing a gang to throw multiple bombs at a target, as multiple bombs can destroy each other in flight. If you have a Purifier throwing an EM bomb and a Manticor throwing a kinetic bomb, whichever bomb gets launched a bit ahead will kill the other bomb. The way to circumvent this problem is to throw bombs of the same damage type. If you look in bomb info, you will see that each bomb has 99.5% resistance to its own damage type but no resistance to other three damage types. This means that if all of your stealth bombers are throwing EM bombs at the target, the bombs will all detonate successfully. However if you are mixing bomb damage types, some of the bombs will end up getting destroyed before they can successfully explode. This also means that there is a limit on how many bombs you can launch concurrently and this limit is equal to 5 bombs. A 6th bomb or a single bomb of another damage type will be destroyed by the first 5 bombs.

Fitting

Unlike gank bombers, bomb bombers focus more on speed and agility than conventional weapons and EWAR. While a bomb bomber may still fit siege launchers, the focus should be on fitting a bomb launcher and modules that improve alignment for getting out quickly. The goal of a bomb-fitted stealth bomber is to sneak in on a target, launch the bomb and then escape quickly. For such a ship, torpedoes and gang DPS are only a secondary priority, so you may forgo fitting ballistic control units for example. In addition, a bomb bomber may consider fitting shield resist mods specific to their damage types in case they get nicked by their own bomb.

Another point to keep in mind is that throwing bombs does not require a target lock. However it does require that you get dangerously close to your targets (within 35km range). Just in case things go wrong in this situation (ex: their interceptor survives and manages to get a point on you) you can choose to fit a warp core stabilizer on your ship. Warp core stabs will improve your chances of getting out with you ship intact when the bombing run doesn't go so well.

The problem with warp core stabilizers is that they significantly cut both your scan resolution and most importantly your ship's targeting range. This will make it useless for throwing torpedoes. However you can fit sensor boosters or even signal amplifiers to counteract these penalties. The Minmatar stealth bomber, Hound, has the lowest base targeting range out of the four bombers (55km). Fitting one best named stab (halcyon) decreases its targeting range to 39.8km with Long Range Targeting V. With unscripted T2 sensor booster its targeting range can be bumped to 51km, with targeting range script loaded - to 63km. Thus your stabbed up stealth bomber can still be made useful for applying dps with torpedoes.

Warp Out Bombing

This tactic relies on the bomber being aligned to a warp-out point. Depending on where your bomb target is located governs the distance at which you need to launch your payload. Typically the pilot aligns and then decloaks 30 to 35 km off the target, drops the bomb and instantly engages warp. However if the target is on a station you might find getting into that distance impossible. This is where you can use the blast radius of 15km to add distance to your launch point, allowing you to drop your payload 30-43km. Since the explosion doesn't need to travel past the target into the station, you actually cover a greater area the target will try to escape through.

It is important that the mouse of the player be occupied only by the warp out. The pilot should have their warp out point and distance to warp at selected prior to decloaking so that they merely have to click to initiate the warp. The cloaking device and bomb launcher should be on F keys and are pressed nearly simultaneously. The warp out bomber might warp all the way to a celestial object or, even better, to a tactical bookmark aligned with a celestial object but still on grid to see the damage.

Conclusion

While not everyone agrees that the stealth bomber is better after Apocrypha, it certainly has been given a more focused role and some additional tools and flexibility. Like any ship in EVE, the new stealth bomber has a niche and can be a very powerful ship if you used correctly. Siege-fitted bombers are frigates capable of warping in cloaked and dishing out some serious DPS on their opponent, while retaining all the advantages of a frigate hull (great lock time, maneuverability, etc.). Bomb fitted bombers can cause a great deal of consternation in your enemies and can cause havoc when launched into large groups of enemies. And like everything in EVE, knowledge, creativity and perseverance are the most important factors for flying an effective stealth bomber.