ECM Basics

I'm back, baby!

~Bender

Well, finally back to writing again! Work took me on the road for months, and left me with no time but overtime. Life is finally settling down though, and with it, pew has resumed! That's right, back to fighting filthy pirates (hi, De Bug!) and filthier slavers! Emphasis on fighting. Winning, not so much. With all the rust on the inside of my pod, it's no wonder I got a quick express trip back to Hek, sweet, Hek. New ship, new clone, new adventures!

As I'm sitting there admiring the rust on my ship, chatting with my fellow patriots in militia comms, and swapping killmails, my mailbox flashes. It's from one of our loyalists asking a simple question:

This attitude deserves respect and answers, so after giving him a short version, I knew I had to write this article and give everyone the long version!

Hilth Scornz, this one is for you!

ECM

Or:

How to Make Fleetmates Love you, and
Enemies Rage, With One Easy Trick!

Electronic Warfare works on the principle of using a ship to take one or more enemy ships out of a fight. There are several varieties, but they all revolve around making your enemy less effective, thus evening the playing field. Here is an overview of the types:

Remote Sensor Dampeners (Damps):

Reduce target ship's locking range or scan resolution, which means they need to be closer, or take longer, to lock a target, respectively. Can be loaded with a script to double one effect at the expense of eliminating the other.

Tracking Disruptors/Missile Guidance Disruptors:

Reduce turret or missile range/precision. If you know how to use this EWAR, you can often completely remove a target's damage from the field. Also scriptable like Damps.

Target Painter:

Increases target signature radius, making it faster to lock, and easier to hit. Frigates hate these. Two bonused painters make a frigate have the sig radius of a cruiser, and the same two make torpedoes able to hit a station cruiser. Very underrated.

Electronic CounterMeasures (ECM):

The subject of this article (and much rage), a chance based system which will break all locks a target has, and allow no further locks, for 20 seconds. Any ship jammed may only target the ship jamming them.

How to Jam

(No Guitar Needed)

As you can see, EWAR is powerful, and ECM particularly so. This is why it is chance based. It has a chance to fail, and then cause the module to finish its cycle of 20 seconds with no effect, other than cap usage.

Effective formula is: jam strength/sensor strength = jam chance.

So, if I have a 7 jam strength on my Griffin, and a Slasher has a 7 sensor strength, he is permajammed, and can't target anyone but my Griffin.

If I have 7 jam strength vs a Stabber with a 14 sensor strength, I have a 50% chance to jam him.

Basic rule of thumb, you have 20% less jam chance on each ship class from Frigate to Battleship. That is: Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Battlecruiser, Battleship, each has a jam chance decreasing by 20%.

These chances are assuming appropriate racial jammer, and inside optimal range. Falloff is the same as turrets: half of falloff equals half jam strength. Fortunately, they have good range. You'll need it.

Yay, They're Jammed!

(Why is everyone shooting at me?)

I can't overstate this enough, you are support, not combat. Your job is to be alive and jamming, not reshipping.

IF YOU GET SOMEONE WITHIN 30KM OF YOU, WARP OUT OR MOVE!!!

Drone swarms, long range webbers, and fast frigates will all ruin your day, and unlike in the past decade plus, you can't remove them by jamming. If they lock you, and you jam them, they can still target you.

How Do I Jam Well?

(And Not Die Die Less)

When your fleet warps in to an engagement, cancel (or exempt yourself from) fleet warp. Let your fleet engage for a few seconds before you get going to join them. You want to land on grid after your fleet has the enemie's attention. When you do, warp to a fleetmate at your jamming optimal. In the case of a Griffin, I warp in at 50km, which puts me at about my optimal range. Start moving parallel to the direction of the fight, and keep range. If someone burns towards you, bounce a warp off a nearby celestial, and back to the fight at range, but from a different direction. Safes and bookmarks help avoid being caught here. You can create bookmarks midwarp, and have a safe near the fight. Helps save you a lot of warp time.

Listen for your FC to call jam targets, but if they don't, use a priority system of jamming logistics, followed by whatever else is causing problems. Enemy EWAR, tackle, or high damage, easily jammed targets like Destroyers are priority.

Fit racial jammers, preferably one of each type, unless you know ahead of time that a fleet is composed of certain races of ships. A racial jammer has the highest strength against the color it matches. So match the yellow jammer to that yellow amarr background, and go ruin the day of a slaver!

Activate one jammer at a time, with auto-repeat off. That can be toggled by right clicking the module, and turning it off. The idea is, that it won't try to cycle again and cap you out faster than needed. You have enough going on without module management.

If the racial jam fails, you can use an off-race jammer at about 30% of the jam strength. It hits more often than you would think. In this case, I had one target and 4 jammers. He stayed jammed the whole time, and the Gallente jammer never worked.

Remember to watch range, use your mwd as needed, and keep on priority targets. Even if it takes all 4 jammers to lock down a logistics ship, its worth it. When priority targets are down, feel free to spread misery at will. Troll local as needed, ECM has the highest salt generation rate in the game, and you won't be diaappointed. Side effects may include: profanity, mockery, rage quitting, spam, and poor decision making.

Watch out for enemy EWAR. Damps in particular are your greatest threat. A dampening boat can lock and damp you from well outside your range, and take you out of the fight. If that happens, bounce a warp, and come back feeling satisfied: they dedicated a ship to counter you. Also, people tend to get tunnel vision, so if you warp off and back again, often times you will get ignored for a while. Tunnel vision works both ways, however, so be prepared to be primaried a lot.

Hull Overview

T1 ECM Ships: Blackbird, Griffin, Griffin Navy Issue and Scorpion.
Blackbird and Griffin are both very effective in performance and cost. Even with 86 million skillpoints, most of my ECM work is done in these hulls. Griffin is fast, cheap, and able to avoid a lot of trouble, but dies to anything that can tackle it. Blackbird can shred or neut off tackle, but with its crazy good range for ECM, usually doesn't have to.

The Scorpion, is kinda a special little guy. Jam optimal out past 100km, but you have the agility of an asteroid. Very good, but very niche.

Griffin Navy Issue isn't even niche, it's junk. Meant to be strong short range jams, it's undone by the change that lets someone target the ship jamming them. Still a good high dps hybrid platform though, with 5 mids, which makes for a solid scram kiter dealing nearly 300dps.

T2 ECM Ships: Kitsune, Rook, Falcon
Kitsune is a very good, balanced ECM ship. Excellent step up from T1, and not horribly expensive, but is still costly for training. You can welp 7 fully fit Griffins for the cost of one empty Kitsune hull.

To fly the Rook and Falcon, you need a lot of experience in piloting and ECM, since you're much closer to the fight, and in an expensive hull. Strong jammers, but more risky.

Practice on the fits below while you learn.

My usual fits are here, and you can log in to zkill, then save the fit directly to your character's fitting management page. Both are Alpha Clone friendly.

Griffin

Blackbird

Never forget: a 5 million isk Griffin can remove billions of isk worth of ships from a fight. Jams go right, you can make 4 targets go dead for as long as the god of RNG likes you. So pray to Kek, the Lord of Chaos, fly cheap, and expect to both die, and harvest amounts of salt far out of proportion with your ship cost.

With ECM, you control the fight. Fly well, fly fearlessly, and as always...

...fly with Chaos.