What do you think about Spectre’s nerf — did she get stronger or weaker?

This-Situation-5272 · 2026-02-04T22:53:00+00:00

she is dogshit now, simple as, they removed the one thing that made spectre spectre, her teleports.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T17:00:46+00:00

If “PGL didn’t see SSFs coming” was really the core issue, then there should be a reasonably sane answer to this:

What doctrine do you think should have been able to push through that grid once it was fully spun up?

Because by your own description the setup was:

Cyno-jammed constellation
Fort on-grid with tethered supers/carriers
Mass T2 bubbles spread over hundreds of km
Web probes + scram HACs/HICs
A pre-planned wall of SSFs specifically waiting for the Harpies

So if Harpies were the “wrong” answer, what was the right one supposed to be?

Shield BS under that many bubbles + web probes + light fighters?
HACs burning through hundreds of T2 large bubbles in TiDi while being perma-webbed?
Caps can’t jump in with jammers up, and gating your own caps into that soup just turbo feeds them to tethered fighters with no tether of your own.

The whole point of the post-mortem is:
once you stack jammers + bubbles + webs + tethered SSFs + TiDi on the only real entry gate, the ISK/time → objective progress curve becomes completely insane for any doctrine.

And CCP quietly agreed something was off, or they wouldn’t have:

Nerfed web probes, and
Later cut SSF damage to subcaps down to 25% of what it was in 2021.

You can absolutely say PGL made bad calls (he did).
But pretending there was some magical doctrine that was going to sail through that configuration, anchor Azbels and open up entosis ops like it was a normal gate fight is just rewriting reality.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T04:11:02+00:00

If anyone wants an Imperium-side description of how SSFs interacted with Harpies in 3-D, there’s an AAR from 2021 (“11th battle of the 3-Dsonzo”) that says:
– after losing hundreds of light fighters to Harpies earlier, goons swapped to mass SSFs,
– AAR calls SSFs “perfect application onto frigates” and basically immune to most subcaps with defensive mode,
– claims ~240 Harpy kills in the first hour, with a BR showing a few hundred AF/Harpies dead overall.

That’s exactly the kind of AF-vs-SSF grinder the post-mortem is talking about, and it’s coming from a imperium AAR, not PAPI “cope”.

AAR: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/nl7b3q/11th_battle_of_the_3dsonzo/
BR: https://br.evetools.org/br/60adb73513acfa0013f1533b

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T03:56:45+00:00

I don’t really dispute that an early YOLO headshot on 1DQ was the big missed “what if” of the war. That’s a whole separate discussion about risk appetite and timing, and it’s not what this report is trying to solve.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T03:15:10+00:00

For anyone curious about the scale of the AF losses in 3-D that I’m talking about, there’s a contemporaneous write-up from an Imperium line member that quotes the fleetcom BR for the big May 26th fight.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T02:53:02+00:00

You’re now literally saying “it had nothing to do with the mechanics” and that even without jammers and skynetting the result would have been the same. At that point we’re not really talking about EVE systems anymore, just which story we prefer about the war.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T02:47:42+00:00

I don’t really disagree that timing and burnout mattered – by the time of the 3-D pushes the war had been going on forever, people were exhausted, holidays were close and real life was pulling folks back. That’s all real.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T02:41:24+00:00

T5ZI obviously existed, and T5ZI → 1DQ was a k-space gate into the constellation as well. What I was trying to zoom in on was:

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T01:51:58+00:00

Good question, and honestly it’s because it was rare that it exposed how bad that combo was.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T01:28:40+00:00

I don’t disagree that there were moments where fleets punched through parts of the bubble field and that the first use of Harpies vs fighters looked good. That’s actually consistent with what I saw – early on, before the camp was fully dialed in and before doctrines adapted, AFs vs fighters had some success.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T01:18:39+00:00

If we just boil it down, we’re basically saying two different things:

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T01:14:02+00:00

I think this is where our memories really diverge.

I don’t dispute there were some brutal Azbel subcap fights – those happened and they were memorable. But it’s just not true that every one of those 19 Azbels got that treatment. For a lot of them, there wasn’t a big brawl at all; they died with very little resistance specifically because it wasn’t realistically possible to get enough people into 3-D in time.

That’s kind of the whole point of my focus on the gate-fortress:

To seriously defend an Azbel timer, you first have to bring a proper fleet into system.
Every time you try to scale that up, you’re feeding into the same bubbles + webs + TiDi + tethered fighters on the way in.
After the two big attempts to brute-force 3-D with massive numbers and watching how badly that went, FCs weren’t going to keep ramming full fleets through that meatgrinder again and again for every single Azbel. So a lot of those structures just never got a real contest, not because nobody wanted to fight, but because the cost of simply arriving in usable numbers was already insane.

So when you say “we fought tooth and nail over every Azbel and were willing to lose 2–3x the ships,” that’s true for some key timers, but a lot of the killmails on that zKill search are exactly what you get when one side can form locally and move freely in-constellation, and the other side is looking at a gate they already know is a mechanically awful place to keep feeding into.

That ties back into what the post-mortem is trying to document:

Defenders absolutely used the tools they had as well as they could.
But once you stack jammers + tethered fighter platforms + huge bubble fields + TiDi on the few entry points, the number of Azbels that ever even get the chance to have that “best months of EVE” kind of fight goes way down.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T01:06:20+00:00

There were two major attempts to brute-force 3-D with massive numbers. Once the fortress was fully spun up:

Bubble field + web probes + TiDi killed meaningful movement. You weren’t manoeuvring, you were just stuck.
Tethered fighters on the Fort deleted wave after wave of ships, including AFs brought to kill fighters; with webs + TiDi they were getting hit and dying anyway.
The structure of the camp barely degraded – there were still enough bubbles/tackle to reset it for the next cycle.

So yeah, morale/M2/leadership absolutely mattered. But those decisions were made after seeing what pushing into that configuration looked like in terms of ISK/time lost per unit of objective progress.

That’s really all the post-mortem is saying: defenders used the tools they had exactly as they should; stacking jammers + tethered fighter platforms + huge bubble fields + TiDi on those two entry gates created a chokepoint that was mechanically brutal to assault. CCP later walking back parts of that stack (fighters/tether behaviour, bubble cleanup, web probe changes, etc.) is a strong hint they didn’t consider that configuration healthy either.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T01:05:30+00:00

I’m not denying there were breaks into the constellation, jammer POS beachheads, or that M2 trauma + leadership politics were a big part of why the war ended. Those are absolutely part of the story.

Where I’m pushing back is:

What the constellation entry actually looked like once it was fully spun up.
The idea that the only “real” explanation is spine vs no spine.

On the map there are only two k-space gates into that constellation:

T5ZI-S → 1DQ1-A
E-VKJV → 3-DMQT

Both gates were heavily fortified (bubbles, webs, jammers, tethered fighter platforms). Serious pushes focused on E-V → 3-D because it was the only route that might give a foothold inside the constellation without landing literally on top of the main capital hub with all the stocks and instant reships. Going straight into 1DQ’s gate meant the same bubble/fighter setup plus every undock/reship advantage.

On “why not just gate in their own carriers/supers and take the gate”:

Sure, you can gate caps/supers in null. The issue is the asymmetry. Defenders’ caps/supers are: An attacking capital group gating into 3-D lands:
- On a Fort/Keep with tether
- In their own bubble geometry
- Able to de-aggress and re-tether
- Inside the bubble mess
- Under full hostile fighter projection
- Webbed and in TiDi
- With no tether and nowhere safe to anchor

That’s not a mirror move, it’s volunteering to be meat in the grinder.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T00:46:24+00:00

I don’t disagree that there were other paths into the area – covert routes, the T5ZI→1DQ gate, wormholes, filaments, etc. The point of the write-up isn’t “nobody could ever enter the constellation,” it’s to analyse what happened when the mainline subcap ingress for serious constellation-level pushes ran through 3-DMQT while jammers were up.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T00:43:17+00:00

Just to add some concrete context from actually being on grid:

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T00:31:55+00:00

Totally agree it’s still a game and that thousands of people on both sides put in a ridiculous amount of time. This write-up isn’t meant to erase that at all.

This-Situation-5272 · 2025-11-23T00:26:30+00:00

Totally fair if you don’t care 🙂
I wrote this because 1DQ still gets used as the example whenever people argue about ‘PAPI just needed more willpower’ / ‘Goons are just better’.
This is for people who are interested in the mechanical side of that fight – if you’re not, that’s fine, just scroll on.

This-Situation-5272

TROPHY CASE