History of Incursions: Difference between revisions

{{Incursions links}}

The '''history of Incursions''' is long and storied. Game balance changes by CCP over the years have both indirectly and directly changed the shape of Incursions and the groups that run them.

== Timeline ==

| colspan="2" style="white-space: nowrap;" | <small>''"Alpha Clones"''</small><br>[[#December 2017 - Alpha Clones|December 2017]]<br>&darr;

| colspan="2" style="white-space: nowrap;" | <small>''"Reboot of Community"''</small><br>[[#December 2018 - Reboot of Community|December 2018]]<br>&darr;

| colspan="2" style="white-space: nowrap;" | <small>''"Marauders: The Third Tier"''</small><br>[[#February 2021 - Marauders: The Third Tier|February 2021]]<br>&darr;

| colspan="2" style="white-space: nowrap;" | <small>''"Headshot protection"''</small><br>[[#June 2024 - Headshot protection|June 2024]]<br>&darr;

| colspan="2" style="white-space: nowrap;" | &uarr;<br>[[#November 2012 - Incursions wiki reborn|November 2012]]<br><small>''"Incursions wiki reborn"''</small>

| colspan="2" style="white-space: nowrap;" | &uarr;<br>[[#January 2014 - Accolades|January 2014]]<br><small>''"Accolades"''</small>

| colspan="2" style="white-space: nowrap;" | &uarr;<br>[[#November 2016 - On Grid Boosts|November 2016]]<br><small>''"On Grid Boosts"''</small>

| colspan="2" style="white-space: nowrap;" | &uarr;<br>[[#May 2018 - Into the Abyss|May 2018]]<br><small>''"Into the Abyss"''</small>

| colspan="2" style="white-space: nowrap;" | &uarr;<br>[[#April 2020 - Surgical Strike|April 2020]]<br><small>''"Surgical Strike"''</small>

|}

== January 2011 - Introducing Incursions ==

==== Patches & devblogs ====

{{quote|Incursions have been a hot topic on the forums, so Team Five 0 decided to see what we could do to shake things up a bit.  After collecting a lot of valuable feedback from you guys, we decided to give the spawns more variety, without significantly altering the difficulty of any one spawn.  This was done by grouping the NPCs into waves, and moving the trigger to spawn the next wave from an individual NPC to the group as a whole. This will mean that you now need to kill the whole wave to trigger the next one, rather than just specific NPCs.

==== Patches & devblogs ====

{{quote|With the Escalation to Inferno release we made several changes to Incursions. We promised to monitor the result of these changes and we stand to our promise: after evaluating both your feedback and our internal metrics, we have decided to roll back a few changes. With so many tweaks made at once, it became very difficult to determine the success of each individual change. We have rolled back the following changes:

* Lowering the reward for vanguard sites by 10%

* Navy Battleships:

** Increasing requirement to fly Navy Battleships previously known as Tier 1 (Armageddon Navy Issue, Scorpion Navy Issue, Dominix Navy Issue, Typhoon Fleet Issue) from level1 to level2 to make it consistent with other navy ships.}}

{{quote|

What are the impacts of all of this?

== January 2014 - Accolades ==

{{quote|

I am not a man of lots of words. There are two people who have spent a huge amount of their time for building up and maintaining Eve Uni's Incursion community. It is my honour to award them Eve Uni's [[EVE_University_Medals#The_Star_of_Outstanding_Service|Star of Outstanding Service]]. This is one of Eve Uni's highest awards, which we only hand out for very special contributions.

== March 2015 - Incursions on Shadowlauch ==

== July 2015 - Null security incursion incentive strengthened ==

The role of [[Roles in Incursions#Hacker/Scout|hacker/scout]] can now be performed by anyone since new capsuleers start with {{sk|Hacking|I}} trained. The additional skills also reduced several trains, such as '''minimum skills''' for both [[Preparing_for_Incursions#Minimum skills for damage dealers|damage dealers]] and [[Preparing_for_Incursions#Minimum skills for logistics|logistics]] but also for [[Preparing_for_Incursions#Valet_alt|valet alts]] and [[Preparing_for_Incursions#Orca|Orca alts]], allowing people to get those skills trained a little faster.

With the '''Frostline''' expansion CCP made various changes to remote repairing, which simplified made no change to the overall damage repaired by these modules, but practically made them repair for more but cycle much more slowly. They also introduced falloff to various modules, including the remote repair modules and increased the grid size by a magnitude of 32.

Not long after Cassiel stepped down, the Uni's Incursion Community was able to get back on its feet. A wave of new blood within the Uni that was interested in Incursions, paired with many old timers like Cassiel to fly the more SP intensive roles, were able to break past the critical threshold needed to run fleets regularly once again. Within a couple of months, Ian Tucenghi was appointed as the new Incursion Coordinator, with John Parmelee as assistant coordinator. The community was back with weekly forms and fleets, a pace that has roughly been maintained to this day as of May 2020.

The Invasion update reduced the number of foci in highsec from three to one amidst the [[Triglavian Invasion]], while also allowing faction, storyline, and officer guns and launchers to use T2 ammo.

As for the ammo changes, they did not appear to affect incursions much. Using T2 ammo still requires the skills to use T2 guns anyways, and T2 guns deal more damage than faction guns after the damage bonus from the specialization skill. Faction entropic disintegrators are a partial exception, as their higher damage multiplier to the T2 disintegrator means that disintegrator specialization V is needed before the T2 gun outpaces it. A niche benefit of this change is that Nightmares can equip faction beam lasers that use less capacitor to mitigate traditional cap issues that would otherwise be solved by swapping to pulses. This can be useful in groups that may neither have combat capacitor available nor run fast enough to make low capacitor sustainability a non-issue, such as the Uni's.

The hacking site of an Override Transfer Array was changed to use the minigame that all other cans had used since 2013.

Hail S, M, and L ammo reduced tracking speed is now 25% (previously 30%)}}

A small nerf to the Machariel (after a uniform warp speed increase the month before) and a small buff to T2 autocannon ammo didn't make a significant impact on Incursions.

Due to the third chapter of Invasions and Incursions were kept distant such that the two never overlapped, the Invasion did not have much of a direct effect initially. It just meant that pilots choosing to take part had to take precautions when moving. Similarly, the shield hardener changes did not have a major effect, since it did not Pithum deadspace multispectrum hardeners, which were the line prominently used for bling shield tank due to higher resist over its Gistum counterparts. The Veldspar in NMCs were not treated as anything more than cosmetic by groups, so its removal also did not affect Incursion groups at-large.

[[Command Ships]] were broken up such that each hull became more specialized for boost strength and firepower, or for strong, long range boosts and survivability.

* The Eos received trait changes to give more emphasis on the use of sentry drones

Boosting roles for Incursion groups had already been focused around the Claymore and Sleipnir for shield and the Eos for armor, due to the importance of Skirmish bursts to increase ship speed, mitigate damage through lower sig, or increase web range. This update did not shift that paradigm, though the buffs to tank and targeting was a nice quality of life change.

The system of Niarja falls to the Triglavian Collective, causing major ramifications on highsec [[Topology|topology]] and Incursion moves.

The number of jumps from Amarr to Jita while staying in effective highsec increased from 10 to 45, causing significantly longer travel times when going between Amarr and Caldari/Gallente focuses. This has led to some people buying a second set of ships to avoid the move.

* Battleship range buffs from April 2020 are backported to Marauders, and their weak sensor strength shored up

This update caused the biggest shift in the Incursion ship meta since Into the Abyss. No longer were the [[Vindicator]], [[Nightmare]] (for shield/VGs), or [[Leshak]] (for HQs) top tier anymore. Marauders could now exceed all of them with ease. Even the Leshak - the crown holder of DPS since it was introduced - was now left in the dust by ships that could deal 2,5-3,5k DPS and do so immediately. As such, people with the skills and ISK to fly the gun-based Marauders flocked to them immediately. The Marauders went from an expensive HAW Dread wannabe to a force of its own, with its prices doubling from ~1B ISK to 2B ISK, though this was also commensurate with a "Starvation Phase" of minerals and an industry rework by CCP.

Eventually, groups changed their strategies to fully take advantage of a Marauder's bastion cycles. Even though the ships can't be repaired while in bastion, Incursion rats' use of rigid one-minute aggro cycles means that it is easy to time bastion activations such that a ship is never aggroed while in bastion.  

Vanguard groups, not having to deal with as much DPS as the HQ groups, could instead active tank with armor or shield using a deadspace armor repairer or shield booster. So long as waves are killed at a decent click, this allowed for Marauders to remain in bastion even while aggroed. Not needing a MWD and MJD, that meant that shield groups (e.g. the Uni) could apply an extra tracking computer and sensor booster onto their Marauders, improving their ability to shoot the frigates that comprise the majority of Vanguard Incursion rats. Thanks to this, a fleet largely comprised of T1 ships with one or two Marauders could still clear sites much faster due than a comparable fleet with pirate BSs due to the Marauders' outstanding DPS output. This, combined with other doctrine changes, brought the Uni from a group that could expect a baseline of 10 minute sites (60 M ISK/hr) to one that could reliably reach a baseline of 6 minute sites (100 M ISK/hr).

<references group="Dead link" />

[[Category:Incursions]]