Stealth Bomber! Pew pew!

[Dukat]

Ok I'm currently skilling up for a stealth bomber at the moment. I'm hoping to be using a manticore as my pvp ship, I'm just wondering if there are any tips or anything I really need to be aware of for a start?

I'm still relatively new to EVE, I've got a caracal at the moment, and it does the job so far, its just that to me the stealth bomber seems to be the ship with the most anagalous pvp play style to my old DAoC scout. I like the idea of sneaking about and popping out of cloak to frontload my heart out before running away from interceptors screaming my head off

So yea, I guess any advice for fittings or playstyle tips would really be what I'm after, or even just stories of past experiences in them ?

 

[Jeros]

Hey dukat! Hows it going? Good to see you in eve man.

From what i hear stealth bombers are a bit of a double edged sword but then im no eve vet, just a 1.2mil skill point noob

add "Jeros Bennet" to your address book and maybe i can help you out with some isk when you need it, im just running lvl 2 missons in a BC atm

 

[Ctuchik]

Isnt stealth bombers more a fleet support ship rather then a solo ship?

if your gonna pvp in a gang or fleet then it could be a really fun ship, but if your gonna go solo you would do better in a T2 frig or cruiser imo.

 

[old.Osy]

With initial skills, a bomber is pretty useless - you need at least 1 year of solid training before using one at its max capabilities. And even then, you still need game skill.

They work well in a small gang of 3-5 pilots, working together with comms, camping choke points and destroying high value targets. Ideally, one man in the gang would fly a covert ops, for the obvious purpose of tracking people down, and arranging drop-in points on targets at the distance you want.

A lone bomber is laughable in terms of damage, anyone can shake off your dps, or just sit there repping whatever you throw at them.

Interceptor flying for lone or small gang pvp has been killed years ago, when I quit. Today the interceptor is mainly a fleet support operative, nothing else.

 

[Furr]

A lot of people in my corp are terrorising a system with stealth bombers, although every once in while there is friendly fire or a sneaky ship manages to decloak, smartbomb then cloak and vanish again.

 

[Dukat]

I guess I'm just hoping to learn a bit from being a "fly on the wall" whilst flying about cloaked for a bit. Not fussed if its not great, it'll atleast give me something to do over christmas leave I suppose!

 

[`mongoose]

Right.

I suspect osy isn't up to speed with recent changes to stealth bombers tbh.

Firstly - bomb deployment. Unless you've got three or four friends don't bother - it's not really worth it.

Right now onto the fit.

Something like this works very well (check grid - with lower sp you might need a Micro Axu Power Core to make it work)

highs:

Cov Ops Cloak II
3 x Arbalest or Malkuth Siege Launcher 1 with Caldari Navy Juggernaught Torps

Mids:
Cold-Catylized Arcjet Thrusters (best named tech1 mwd)
Medium FS-9 Shied Regolith Induction (best named med shield extender)
Faint Epsillon Warp Disruptor
Remote Sensor Damp or Target Painter

Lows;
2 x Ballistic Control II OR
Micro Auxillary Power Core x 1 Ballistic Control x 1

rigs:
Small Core Defence Extender I

=============

Tactics

in 0.0

Camp a gate, wait for juicy hauler to jump through, kill, it, loot it, cloak run off etc etc


In low sec and 0.0 belts.

Point your ship at a cluster of belts and open your ship scanner. Change the angle from 360% to 30% or something like that and run a scan. If you get a hit try and narrow it down to one belt by scanning and reducing the angle til you get a 5% hit

Warp into belt and check what's there. If there's a player uncloak and lock him. At this point you can choose to tackle him and pound him with torps or you can choose to look for a better target.

Good targets are Battlecruisers and Battleships that are struggling vs Rats. If you lock a ship and it's taken heavy shield or armour damage then you should hit it with some torps and kill him. if you lock it and it's taking hardly any damage at all then it's a bit riskier.

Never get within 18km of the target and always beware of dominixes. They often fit one heavy neut and that's a good way to lose your bomber.

Basically Bombers are BRILLIANT at killing badly fitted battleships and haulers. Anyone who knows what they're doing however will turn your bomber into scrap metal in about 30 seconds so make sure you're ok losing it before you decloak it.

With the boost to torpedoes - you should kill a hauler in 2/3 volleys tops. They're brutal now.

D

 

[Dukat]

Sounds something like what I'm after Mongoose, cheers!


Just one question though - is the shield extender really worth it? I'd always imagined that the second I'm taking damage I'm most likely to be dead no matter what - would the extra few shieldpoints really help?

Just wondering if it would be worth looking at fitting something else instead is all

 

[`mongoose]

put it like this matey

As it currently stands - anything that looks at you is likely to hurt, alot.

I know a pulse zealot took my shield extended hound to structure in the time it took me to align out when i realised he could track me. Without the shield extender I'd have been dead. it add's maybe 5s to your life should a turret ship hit you. that 5s can be the difference between living and dying

D

 

[LordjOX]

Daco is right, osy is totally wrong. Stealthbombers got changed with apocrypha. They deliver the most bang for the buck dps wise but are paper thin

In the summer I killed shitloads of haulers solo and some battleships, t2 frigs etc solo. And alot of stuff in wolfpack gangs. Battleships tend to instantly melt with the dps of 5+ bombers

Usually we had an arazu / rapier pilot scouting and pinning targets, with bombers warping at 50+km and applying dps

If you know where to strike, you can kill loads with this. Especially since you also can fit a bomb much easier

Scale up the wolfpacks to 20-30 of size and you can kill fleets with a hundred battleships just by dropping bombs and pinning with dictors