Barging into Space

Earlier today I did a post about Exhumers and the changes from the patch.  I went ahead and worked up some builds for the Mining Barges (Barges) as well.  The Barges have much lower EHP but I was very surprised to see the output is very similar  or higher to equivalent Exhumer builds.  Combined with the ability to insure on a T1 level and Barges might just end up being the ship of choice for mining in high sec.  For now I'll just list the builds.

Exhumer Changes

A while ago I made a post about CCP fixing the mining ships by giving them some tank.  This week they put in the patch to make some significant changes.  One hull has a great tank with the smallest amount of yield.  The next hull has huge ore bay, medium tank and medium yield.  The last hull has the best yield but limited tank and an ore bay big enough for only one cycle requiring some kind of fleet support.  In theory this type of division sounds pretty good, giving each hull it's own role and providing options for miners to choose what fits their play style the best.

For the ice or gas miners there are no longer innate bonuses for those activities, instead there are two new rigs which boost ice or gas output but you can only fit one at a time due to calibration costs. 

Being Logical

Those that have read my earlier posts (all two of you) know that I prefer support class ships in PVP.  I’ve created one post already with my opinion of the ECM ships I fly and I wanted to take some time to discuss the shield logistics ships.  

When I first started flying logi ships I read through several different forums to help gain a baseline understanding of which ship is better in which situations, and to what level should skills be trained.  One thing that kept showing up over and over was that if you’re going to commit to flying logi you should train logistic ships to V.  The reason to spend over 20 days training is capacitor stability.  The additional boost to capacitor efficiency is usually the different between an additional Large Shield Transporter (LST) or having to downgrade to a smaller sized repper.  Tank can also be affected due to a requirement to add a capacitor recharger or capacitor booster in a mid slot.  Overall the value of training to Logi V is completely worth the training time for anyone that intends to fly a logistics ship as a primary playstyle.