Hashu Blog: Smartbomb Ratting Part 2:Solo

When your going to try smartbomb ratting solo you need to be very careful which anomalies you try to run.  Several important keys to the right anomaly include distance to the spawn from your warp in, location of subsequent spawns, and the number of battleships that appear in each spawn.

 If the warp in is 50 km from the spawn, your going to waste a lot of time traveling.  During that same time your taking damage, your not set-up to be an uber tank, and this can lead to some harry situations as you travel through the rat optimals to get to them.  Different spawn locations for each wave can also be an issue.  First your wasting time traveling between the spawns, your also providing time for the rats to move around so they are not going to be at the same spot but will try to stay at their optimals to you, forcing you to chase them down or use drones to kill them, which is something you only want to do as a last resort.

Finally you don't want more than two battleships spawning in any specific wave.  While working with someone else this isn't an issue as the other person is blapping the battleships with guns, but when your main weapon is smartbombs, killing a battleship before they get out of smartbombing range can be problematic.  With just one battleship in the spawn it is less of an issue as you can potentially follow them a bit without wandering off the spawn.  With more than one battleship it becomes more difficult, which makes that web on the smartbombing battleship important as it allows you to control hostile bs speeds, providing you more time for your smartbombs to apply damage.  Smartbombs themselves don't do a lot of dps, but they do it to a lot of hostiles at the same time, so keeping the rats within range of your smartbombs is key to ratting with them.

In Providence, two anomalies stand out.  The preferred anomaly to smartbomb in solo is Sansha's Rally Point.  The main reason for this is the warp in is within 2 kilometers of the spawn for this anomaly.  Rally Points are also nice as they are predominately frigates and cruisers which die quickly to smartbombs.  They also have either a single or duel battleship spawn in their last wave.  The finishing touch is their escalation.  Sansha's Rally Points escalate into 6/10 plexes, which have the possibility of dropping Centum A-type loot including A-type EANMs which run up to a billion isk.  While your generally going to make between 12-16 mil a tick running theses solos, when you get several 6/10 escalations a week with up to a bil drops in faction loot, the isk quickly adds up.

The other option is Sansha Rally Point (notice the small title difference).  While very similar to Sansha's Rally Point, Sansha Rally Points have a few quirks.  The biggest one is the respawn is roughly 20 km away from the warp in.  This can slow your attempts to clear the site down as you need to travel to the spawn.  It also has a slightly heavier initial spawn (Sansha's Rally Point is all frigates while Sansha Rally Points have a mix of cruisers and frigates).  If your lucky you can afterburn to the 'clump fast enough and get at least the frigs with your smartbombs.  However if they aggress and move to their optimals quick enough, you'll likely find it easier to kill them with drones and focus on deploying on the spawn to use smarties for the next wave.  Once your on top of the spawn and the initial wave has been killed the remaining waves will play out the same with either a single or duel bs spawn in the final wave.

Initial Sansha's Rally Point Spawn

Final Dual BS Rally Point Wave

Inital Sansha Rally Point Spawn, note this spawn is near the right tower.

Had to use drones to finish the last part of the initial wave.

Final Sansha Rally Point Wave

In the initial tick I ran two Sansha's rally Points and part of a Sansha Rally Point and earned over 13 million isk.  Note this wasn't efficient as I was taking screenshots and waiting between warping to anomalies to do other things.  I've made 15-16 million ISK a tick off of bounties when actually paying attention.  The nice think about smartbomb ratting, especially when running Sansha's is that it is very simple and doesn't require too much attention.  After your initial warp in and F1-F8 of your smartbombs you theoretically don't need to do anything till the final spawn as you should be able to kill everything before they get out of range except the battleships.