EVE Fitting Tool and Ganker Training

I raised a few eyebrows the other day when I gave advance notice that the New Order will create an army of ganking alts. Some of you may have a lot of experience with suicide ganking miners in highsec. Many others have never ganked a miner before. In any case, I suspect quite a few of you have never created an alt specifically for the purpose. Personally, I haven't trained any skills in three years, so I'm a little rusty. I have possession of an old Gallente alt that I haven't used in a very long time. He had nothing trained, and basically never undocked in his nearly seven years of existence. He is now training to become a suicide ganker.

If you repeatedly gank targets in highsec, your security status will drop quickly--and far more quickly after the Winter Expansion (everyone who aggresses gets a penalty equivalent to destroying the target). After a few ganks, you won't be able to travel freely through highsec unless you go to nullsec and grind security status. That's a boring, time-intensive activity at best, and it sets a limit on gankers.

Our mission is to remove all limits on ganking miners. That's why our army will be comprised of Catalyst pilots who can operate with negative security status indefinitely. No grinding required. The alts we create will do nothing but kill miners, one after the other.

Hopefully you have heard of EVE Fitting Tool (EFT), which can be downloaded via that link. It's a simple program that allows you to see the stats for ships with different fittings, and see how skills change those stats. EFT is useful for preparing suicide ganks in two ways.

One way to use EFT to learn how many hitpoints your target may have. You can load up a Mackinaw, for example, and set the skills to "All Level V" and see a worst-case scenario. Pictured here, a Mackinaw has 14,625 hitpoints when taking resistances into account. I have set up a custom "hybrid" damage profile consisting of 50% thermic and 50% kinetic damage, since that's what our Catalysts' guns will inflict.

Potential gank targets should always be scanned to see if they have defense modules (like shield hardeners) fitted. If so, you can go to EFT and plug those in and see how they affect your target's hitpoints.

More importantly, EFT can help you plan and evaluate your new ganker alt. Pictured here is the most basic setup. It's as simple as it gets.

EFT shows you whether or not you can fit the modules with your current skills. You can easily import your current skills via an API, and you can also change skill levels manually to see what affect they would have. Here, the ganker alt has sufficient CPU and powergrid.

In the Winter Expansion, Catalysts will have more CPU and powergrid, so the above numbers will be out of date. Based on the figures released by CCP, you'll be able to create a new Gallente character and fit the basic setup after you train Destroyers I, Propulsion Jamming I, and Weapon Upgrades I, II, and III. That's right--less than a day of training! Currently Electronics IV is needed.

Sadly, the Babby Ganker has little firepower at his disposal. The top number is average damage per second (DPS). The bottom number is the average amount of damage of a single volley. Both figures are helpful. If you know how long Concord (or faction police) response time is, you can look at your guns' "duration", figure out how many volleys you fire (remember your first volley is fired immediately), and have a very good idea of how much damage you'll do.

DPS is not as accurate, but it's a decent measure of how powerful your ganker alt is. Fortunately, even fitting only tech I modules, your ganker can do much more damage with proper training.

Training Mechanics III, Jury Rigging I, II, and III, and Hybrid Weapon Rigging I will enable you to fit the small hybrid rigs (which are cheap). Currently you'll also need Engineering IV to make them fit, but it looks like that won't be the case after the Winter Expansion due to extra powergrid. For this demonstration, I also added Gunnery III and Rapid Firing I, II, and III. We've already made significant improvement without having trained any level IV skills.

If you're willing to put in additional training, you can steadily increase your damage. Pictured here, the ganker has trained Gunnery IV, which allows you to train Surgical Strike I, II, and III for 3% more damage per level. Small Hybrid Turret IV gives an additional 5%.

The flames next to each gun indicate overheating. The ability to overheat is the first real nuisance to train so far. It requires Engineering IV and V, Science IV, Energy Management I, II, and III, and Thermodynamics I. The good news is, overheating raises damage by about 15% at the press of a button (remember to press it).

With 317 DPS, we've improved by 70% on our freshly-minted ganker. More damage means fewer gankers are necessary to kill the target. Fewer gankers required means it's more likely you can scramble up the numbers. And that means more frequent gankings. But now we have approached the limits of what you can do without training toward tech II guns.

The tech II Magnetic Field Stabilizers require Weapon Upgrades IV. The guns require Small Hybrid Turret V, Motion Prediction I, II, and III, and Small Blaster Specialization I. I threw in Small Blaster Specialization II since it's a quick extra 2%, and Rapid Firing IV.

Note the big jump in DPS of 70% from the last picture. (Also note the use of tech II Void S ammo instead of Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S. Never forget the ammo.) This is nearly triple the 186 DPS that the Babby Ganker had.

The tech II ganker's kit is more expensive and requires more training time. Ideally you want to have enough tech I gankers in your gang to kill a Code-violating Mackinaw. But if you're short on DPS, or if you want a little extra certainty that your target is going to die, having a tech II ganker in your gang will be very useful. If your alt has the skills to fit tech II, it's a good idea to keep a set of both tech I and tech II modules in station so you can swap them out, depending on the needs of your ganker gang.