I talked a little bit last Friday about how Tech II Command Destroyers are going to change a lot of the meta in the upcoming patch:
These things are going to upset all corners of null, low, and wormhole space but low sec especially will see extensive use of these things. We can`t even comprehend all the uses yet! Chaining multiple command dessie jumps in a row to fling a fleet multiple hundred km jumps away, pulling enemy fleets apart to take on smaller numbers at a time, getting the jump on kiters, surprising station campers, the list goes on and on. Fleets that are precisely composed and constructed and need to have the logi wing exactly X km from the DPS wing are going to need to be watchful that enemy ships don’t infiltrate one or two of these and rip those fleets apart. You’ve got 9 seconds to react, good luck.
A lot of talk recently has been about how these things are going to be used and how people are going to try to counter them. While the thought of grabbing ships and shifting them 100 km away from their friends is intoxicating the reality is that the range is small enough that most of the time it will not be devastating to enemy fleets. Losing one or two DPS ships to a successful MJF dessie will be annoying but not break fleets.
HOWEVER, there is a part of the fleet that is far more vulnerable to these kidnapping vessels: logistic wings. Losing even one logi ship from a wing can be the difference between winning and losing a fight, often a swing in the hundreds of millions of ISK. These ships will be the main targets of command destroyers looking to kidnap someone in big fights.
So the discussion now turns to how to best counter these thieves.
Some suggestions are obvious, such as have logi spread out so that there is no juicy target to aim for (but you will still lose at least one), or have the fleet primary them or scram them as soon as one appears (which will be hard in the middle of the fight or if there are multiple), but all of these require various degrees of constant attention and vigilance.
A more passive approach has been the suggestion of self-scramming fleets. That is to say, since you cannot be carried by the MJF of the command dessie if you are scrammed (reference), one defence for things like logi wings would be to have them dedicate a module to a warp scrambler and create scram chains to protect them from unwanted jumps. It would be just like a cap chain that Guardians and Basilisks already do to create infinite energy, only it would suck energy to protect them from being kidnapped, sort of a pre-ransom price. Even though scrams would shut off friendly micro warp drives this is not an issue since logi are typically afterburner fit already.
Regardless of the solution a fleet uses, this represents yet another nerf on logistics. Coupled with the Remote Repair changes coming that will cut their ranges and lower their cap stability, not to mention the new doomsday and supercarrier area of effect weapons, its sage to say that this winter is the the official War on Logi for CCP, part of the overall strategy to make players more independent and self sufficient on the battlefield.
Interesting times.
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