Why You Suck At Scanning(And How To Get Better)

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• get your probe strength up to at least 95 points
• learn and understand scanning mechanics
• develop good scanning habits

 

There are myriad resources online about the specifics of scanning. I'm not going to sit here and rehash all the math involved with how to be a god-tier scanner; this guide is intended to be a high-level look at your scanning habits and how to improve them. 

 

Improving your Scan Strength 

 Let's start with the simplest way to improve your scan times: improving your scan strength. The tl;dr is that with a probe scan strength of 95, you can effectively scan most any cosmic signature you'd want to scan down(there are certain signatures that will require a probe strength of 104, but that is an extremely niche site that I won't be getting into right now). There are four main ways to improve your scan strength:

1. Scan Skills
2. Scan bonused ship hulls
3. Mods and rigs
4. Implants

Scan Skills

The big skills you'll want to train are Astrometrics, Astrometric Rangefinding, Astrometric Pinpointing, and Astrometric Acquisition. Train all of these to at least IV. Ideally you'll have them all to V, but that's several weeks of training. I would highly suggest getting Astrometrics to V and all your supports to IV, but all skills at IV will get you to where you need to be, provided you're using a bonused ship hull(which I'll get into shortly). 

If you're planning on using a Covert Ops frigate, you'll also want to train Covert Ops to IV. At this level, the per level scanning bonus to the hull outweighs the flat scanning bonus of the Astero. 

If you're planning on using a Covert t3, you'll want to train the racial defensive subsystem to V. At IV it will also overtake the flat bonus of the Astero, but it's only like a 4 day train to get it to V, so quit bitching and get it to V. 

Bonused Ship Hulls

Your choices for bonused ship hulls starts with t1 scanning frigates and(technically) goes up to the Praxis. For the sake of this post, we're going to be talking about 3 categories of ships:

• Covert Ops Frigates
• The Astero
• Strategic Cruisers

 Each of these ships offers a slightly different advantage to scanning, depending on what your priorities are. You could use a Stratios as an in-between for the Astero and strategic cruisers, but I don't think the Strat offers a lot in terms of being the lead scout for a gang, so I don't want to spend a bunch of time talking about it in that context. I'm also not going to go super in-depth on specific fittings in this post, but I'll provide a basic overview of each ship type. If you're interested in checking out some example fits, check out my addendum post.

Covert Ops Frigates

The Covops frigate line(Anathema, Helios, Buzzard, Cheetah) is your bread and butter for most scanning and exploration. Thanks to the recent black ops patch, the choice is pretty clear-cut: train for the Anathema or the Buzzard, as these ships provide a per-level hull bonus to scan deviation. The Cheetah and the Helios provide a per-level hull bonus to cloaked velocity, which is pretty much useless when it comes to a scouting frigate. Moreover, the maximum training time to get into a different racial covert ops frigate is the amount of time it takes you to get [racial]frigate V. So there's no real reason to be using the Cheetah or the Helios over the Anathema or Buzzard.

Covert Ops frigates are going to be the cheapest option for "serious" scanning ships, so it pays off to train into one if you're going to be scanning a lot and don't necessarily want to drop 100+ million ISK on the Astero or up to 600+ million ISK on a scanning t3. However, the more expensive options do offer certain important advantages over the Covops line. One of the big ones is agility. Covert Ops frigates have the align time of a cruiser, which can be irritating when you're trying to scan out a wormhole chain quick. 

The Astero

If you're tight on training time, or you're trying to get scanning as soon as possible, the Astero is the ship for you. Thanks to the ship's flat bonus to scanning, you only need to train Amarr and Gallente frigate to III for the ship to be effective as a scanner. Other upshots to the Astero include having 3 rig slots and the ability to get a sub 2 second align time, which comes in clutch when you're trying to catch a krab or move through a chain quickly. I'll detail this more in a future post. The ship is a little more pricey, but well worth the price when it comes to getting your scanning alt off the ground quickly. 

Strategic Cruisers

Strategic cruisers differ from the rest of my admittedly short list insofar as they offer much more in terms of fitting. You can really min-max your t3 for scanning and get over 180 points of probe strength if you want the ultimate combat scanner(something I'll talk about in a future post), or you can outfit your t3 to act as a tackler for a pvp gang, or you can set yourself up for a little bit of everything. The one thing you cannot do, however, is jump through frigate-sized wormholes. Overall, the strategic cruiser is going to be the top-line product for serious scanners, but not something you should concern yourself with until you decide that scanning is what you want to dedicate yourself(or at least your character) to. 

Mods and Rigs

Without going into too much detail, the main takeaway from the scanning mods is that you should only fit one of each type(acquisition array, rangefinding array, pinpointing array) to your ship. Between ship hull bonuses and skills, you can easily get over the 95 point probe strength benchmark, so there's not a lot of reason to fit a rangefinding array. If you want faster returns between scans, fit an acquisition array. If you want less probe deviation, fit a pinpointing array.

You can also fit a gravity capacitor upgrade rig to your ship to further increase your probe strength. These are very costly to your rig calibration, but they are undoubtedly the best choice for dedicated scanning ships. Due to stacking penalties, fitting one t2 rig is better than fitting two t1 rigs, but the t2 rig costs 300 points of calibration, so it's really only viable with the strategic cruiser in my opinion.

Implants

When you're ready to take your scanning game to the next level, look at getting yourself a set of mid-grade virtue implants. A full set of these will give you +33.83% scan probe strength, so they are a solid investment for the hardcore scanners. You can also add in another 6% bonus with the Poteque 'Prospector' Astrometric Rangefinding AR-806 implant, as well as tweaking your acquisition time with the Poteque 'Prospector' Astrometric Acquisition AQ-706 implant. Because these are percent-based bonuses, they will server you better if your base skills are in a good spot, so don't worry about investing in a set of virtues until you're sitting at at least Astrometrics V and all supports to IV.

Realistically, you won't need to worry about these implants until you're combat scanning, but the 806 implant in particular is a cheap way to eek out a few extra points of scan strength if  needed.

Understanding Scan Mechanics

Now that the easy part is out of the way, let's focus on what will really improve your skill at scanning: understanding the game mechanics. There are a few things to learn that will drastically improve your ability to scan effectively. 

Probe Formations

There are two main probe formations that I'll be focusing on for this post: The spread formation and the pinpoint formation.

spread formation

The tl;dr on the spread formation is that it's useless for general scanning, because cosmic signatures will generally spawn within 4AU of a celestial in a given system(there is some evidence that this number is 8AU in shattered wormholes, but even then there's no reason not to use pinpoint). With that in mind, you will want to default to using the pinpoint formation for your probes. It should be noted, however, that the default pinpoint formation is set to 4AU. You should set your pinpoint formation to 8AU so that you can cover 4AU on each side of the celestial.

pinpoint formation

 

Scanning Signatures

Bearing in mind that signatures generally spawn within 4AU of a celestial body, you'll want to scan signatures by placing your pinpoint formation probes over a given celestial and execute a scan pass. The result will give you varying levels of clarity on given signatures around that celestial. The levels of clarity can be further categorized by what shape you get from the scan pass. 

Sphere

sphere

 

A sphere indicates that you've obtained a positive hit from one of your probes on the signature. To scan this down, you'll want to re-center your probes over the sphere, increase the size of your probes to a point where your pinpoint formation encompasses the sphere, and execute a new scan. 

Circle

circle

 

Circle formations indicate that 2 of your probes returned positive results. You can cheat this scan result by moving your probes opposite of where they currently reside in the circle. For example, if your probes are centered near the bottom-left of the circle, you can move your probes to the top-right of the circle and execute a new scan. I find that more often the best bet is to simply recenter your probes on the "x" in the middle of the circle, resize your probes to encompass the whole circle and execute a new scan.

Two Dots

two dots

Two-dot formations indicate that 3 of your probes have returned positive results on the signature. This result can be cheated by reducing the size of your probes, determining which of the dots falls outside of the new formation, and then moving your probes to scan that more distant dot. 

One Dot

one dot

 

A single dot indicates that 4 of your probes have returned positive results on the signature. Re-center your pinpoint formation on the dot, reduce the size of the formation, and scan again.

 

The 8/2 Rule

 Obviously the goal is to get from the initial sphere indicator to a single dot. The higher your scan probe strength and the lower your scan deviation, the higher your chances of getting a single dot result are. If you get a one-dot result from your initial 8AU scan, reduce your probe size to 2AU and scan the single dot. With a high enough scan strength, you can effectively "2-pass" this signature and reveal what type of signature it is. From there, you can choose to scan down to 100% or ignore that result and move on in search of other signatures. 

Developing Good Scanning Habits

Finally, I want to discuss the importance of developing a good routine for scanning down a given system quickly. Like any element of game play, you can become more effective at scanning by utilizing good practices and techniques. Some of this section will read as nit-picking, but if you've made it this far I'm going to go ahead and assume that you want to stop being shit and start being good. The truth is that there isn't a magical technique that will suddenly make you a godly scanner; you just have to get into the habit of doing it well. 

Hot keys

The quicker you start using hotkeys for scanning(and everything else in Eve) the quicker you can start playing with both halves of your brain. At a bare minimum, you should set up hot keys for increasing your probe size, decreasing your probe size, and executing a scan pass. Additionally, you should have your module slots hot-keyed so you can quickly launch your probes, cloak up, and get to a safe distance from your entry wormhole. Personally, I have my hot keys set up to 1, 2, and 3 for increasing, decreasing, and executing probe scans. Pick whatever works for you. Once you develop the muscle memory for using your hotkeys you'll be amazed at how quick scanning a system becomes. 

Clicking the Map Interface

You can toggle between a top-down view and a horizontal view of the scan map interface by double clicking at any point on the map. You can also center your map view on any signature in the system by clicking on the signature. This will save you a lot of time when you're trying to center your probe formation on a given signature. 

Batch Scanning

Learn to scan by celestial group, rather than by individual signature. Get any two-dot results down to single dots, then scan all your single dots, then work on getting your circles and spheres scanned down. Use this priority for each celestial grouping that you scan. 

 

Identifying Signature Type

At the very least, you should scan all signatures in a system until you've identified what type of signature it is. Then you can choose to either complete the scan or ignore the result. 

 

Ignoring Scanned Signatures

 Once you've scanned and bookmarked a signature, you can right click the probe scanner interface and ignore that result. The status will remain ignored through session changes, which means you can jump into different systems and back again without having to suss out which signatures you've scanned already. It also helps quickly identify new signatures in a given system; if it is on your probe interface, it's new and you should scan it to see what it is.

 

Recording Your Results

Whether you're using Pathfinder, Tripwire, or even old-fashioned pen & paper, recording your scan results will cut down the time it takes for you to scan & rescan systems. This is even more important when mapping out wormhole chains, but an updated record of scan results can save you loads of time and sanity should you get a random disconnection or have to log out for some reason. 

Determining Your Goals 

Undoubtedly the most important habit you can learn is to determine what your goals are as you scan a system or wormhole chain. Are you looking for K-Space exits? Are you trying to find valuable gas sites? Are you looking for relic sites to hack? Knowing what it is you're looking for will inform your decisions for which signatures you should fully scan out and which signatures you can safely ignore. Ultimately, only you can decide what your goals are as a player, but having a goal and crafting your play style around it will do more for your mentality than any guide can teach you.