To the market we go!
Eighty two million, two hundred and sixty six thousand and seven hundred and eighty five Isk. Yes that is correct. 82,266,785 Isk in the market value of what I just brought out of my second wormhole trip. Total time spent scanning it down and mapping it out and farming the easy spawns was about 2.5 hours. That is insane to me. How come more people aren’t farming these things out?
Looking for a change to my usual mission running I set aside last night for my first solo wormhole expedition. Not being sure of what to expect and wanting to plan for the worst, I jumped into a fresh clean jump clone and stuck a +3 implant in just for the one skill that I was training at that time. Several jumps away in Rens I had parked a Rupture from back when I was running level 2 missions. I quickly hopped into my pod and flew the cruiser back to Balgania to outfit it for PVE combat against the sleepers.
I probably could have read up about exactly what damage types to use and what resistances to stack. But I wanted to change things up a bit and thought it best to just go into this wormhole blind. I ended up going with an omni tank armor tank on my Rupture and fitted it out with 4 auto-cannons, a smart bomb and a salvager. My thinking was that I would only take on combat sites with frigate size mobs or smaller and thus I also grabbed a web and took a drone bay full of small scout drones. The beauty of this setup is that it was assembled almost entirely of mission drops from my level four missions. I have several thousand m3 in a storage container that I drop all frigate and cruiser fittings into that might be useful for outfitting. It certainly paid off here. A loss of this ship to the Sleepers or to some pirate gang would have very little financial impact on me.
Which is for fighting and which is for fun?
Now I was just missing one crucial component, an actual wormhole. Luckily just one jump over from Balgania is a rarely traveled set of systems that I have always found to be nearly deserted sans miners. Sure enough there were only nine other players in local and I found a nice wormhole just one jump from my main base of operations. Taking my Burst frigate in to do some initial scanning and surveying I felt the excitement building. This was, after all, my first trip ever into 0.0 space.
Happily I can report that there was no camp on the opposite end so I warped off to a faraway moon on the opposite end after setting a bookmark for my escape route. Once at the moon I flew out in some random direction and then stopped and set an additional bookmark as my make shift safe spot. Then I got down to the business of scanning down the system. First I opened up my direction scanner and set it to 360 degrees and max range. Assuming I understand the thing, if any other ship was in the area or fighting Sleepers then the ships or wrecks would show up here. It was empty .
Confident in my solitude I warped to the Sleeper site at 100 km. This was to give me time to check out the site as well as adequate time to run away before I was tackled. Upon warp in I was immediately aggressed by eight sleeper frigate size drones that began to MWD at me. As I did an about face to warp back to my safe spot, I was highly impressed by the NPC behavior. Not only were they coming in extremely fast (they had to have been going 2000-3000 m/s), they were coming in at various approach vectors. Thankfully the frigates in my level four missions haven’t been taught this trick yet.
Once in my safe spot I again scanned the system looking for any other sites. No dice on this one. No mining, no gas sites, no salvage, nothing else beside this one combat site. Quickly I warped back to the exit point and jumped back through to civilized space, well you know what I mean. Just one jump over and a quick dock up and I was back at the wormhole in my anti-frigate cruiser.
I took the Rupture in and made it to my safe spot. Once again the directional scanner was not picking up anything besides moons and planets so I warped back to the Sleeper site at 100 km. Launching my scout drones as soon as I came into the area I was again under the guns of the sleeper frigates who were somehow able to shoot me in excess of 100km. I turned on my damage control unit and flew head on into the fray. I am not entirely sure but I think some crewmember started to recite the Charge of the Light Brigade as we prepared to do battle with this yet unknown enemy.
They closed to within 80km coming straight at me, then they all picked up approach vectors and it became difficult to keep track of where they were all going. I simply chose the closest one at 50km and hit approach as the Rupture’s engines shot hot plasma into space in pursuit. Now they were all within 40km and able to actually do some damage to my shields and I watched as their first volley took my shields down to 60%. But it was now my turn to strike back.
I had locked up five of them and began heading straight at their small formation. Guns blazing, drones…well droning along… I soon had the first one down. Now I went to the second and noticed that the sleepers were pulling away from me and were about 20km out. Had they figured out the range of my guns and pulled out beyond my effective range? Did they sense the smart bomb I had loaded up as a nasty surprise for any would-be tackler?
Looking at my drones I now saw was had their attention. In the blink of an eye one of my drones was turned into space junk. I quickly recalled them to the drone bay as I once again opened fire on the nearest Sleeper frigate. A second drone was into structure as the small flight of four safely entered the bay. How dare they shoot my drones! Clearly no one has explained to the Sleepers how aggro is supposed to work and the various rules of engagement.
By now two of the Sleeper frigates were down and I was out of shields. Luckily I was omni-armor tanked and I turned on my armor repper as I saw the red boxes surge back into white. Redeploying my drones I turned onto the nearest frigate that was within 10km from my boat. I turned on my webber and opened up with all four guns and 5 drones back in the fight. It melted under the fire leaving just my rupture and three frigates left on the grid.
Even those three frigates were able to keep up with my tank. Fortunately for me the combined fire of these frigates was not quite enough to break my tank and I was holding steady at around 50% armor. Soon I was working on the last frigate and starting to move towards the nearest Sleeper wreck to begin looting. I saw my drones get the final shot in on the frigate just as my armor repairer brought me back to 100% allowing me to shut it off. Alas my victory was short lived as killing the last frigate caused a respawn and the Sleepers were not quite willing to give up this fight.
Seven cruiser size Sleeper ships and a frigate were now blasting towards me from 150km out. Luckily I had time to loot several of the nearby wrecks and safely get out before the one frigate got close enough to tackle me. On my way out I set a bookmark for the wreck and planned on warping back directly to it to check out the salvage from these guys. Unfortunately upon my return the small frigate was only 40km away and had me targeted almost instantly. I turned and ran.
Needing a plan to loot the remaining few wrecks and possibly score some salvage I decided that I would warp to 100km from the wreck and then draw the frigate to me. Once the frigate was close enough I would destroy it and then I could ninja loot and salvage those wrecks without fear of being tackled. Unfortunately the Sleeper mindset just would not cooperate. While the small frigate did come towards me it stopped to wait at 60k for his cruiser buddies to arrive for backup. So that idea was out.
Sitting back at the safe spot I weighed my options and decided to bring this operation to a close. Perhaps with a bit more planning and research into Sleeper damage types and tactics, I could safely take on the cruiser spawn. If nothing else I now know that I need to tank the last frigate while I loot and salvage all of the other wrecks. I jumped back through the wormhole into Empire and checked the price tag on the loot that I had managed to grab.
400,000 Isk…
Real Minmatar ships use more glue.
As a child I was always rather restricted when it came to playing with Legos. I would buy the sets from the store and carefully assemble them according to the fifty-step assembly instructions and have a new toy to play with. Rarely would I deviate from the intended use of the sets and generally once I had assembled a given vehicle or whatever, it would remain in its assembled state on some shelf collecting dust.
This was in stark contrast to my younger brother, who would occasionally procure and assimilate my carefully collected and assembled sets into his all-encompassing blue bucket of assorted blocks. Whereas I was the careful assembler and viewed each piece merely as a component in a larger pre-designated creation, he was the freethinker of the Lego world. His pieces would just go into a large blue plastic container, which he would then assemble as he saw fit. Limited only by his imagination you would think his assembled machinations would surpass mine in both quantity and quality.
Well to me at least, you would have thought wrong. To my eye I never saw the ships, vehicles and landscapes that he did. I saw a jumble of mismatched colors and shapes all mashed together in a crude manner. But to him, my carefully assembled sets were just as unappealing. He would view my pristine pirate ship and see hundreds of possibilities for creativity and fun. I saw a pirate ship that was fun to assemble and now had a spot on the shelf collecting dust. The fun for me was in following the instructions and building the thing-on-the-box and amassing a collection. The fun for him was in creating his own things then tearing them apart to start all over.
I mention all of this because I have turned my younger brother onto the world of EVE Online. He sent me a text message nearly a week ago asking me which WoW server I was on, as he was planning on giving it a trial run. A few minutes on the phone and I had sold him on EVE as the game of choice. Unfortunately, our play schedules are somewhat different. I usually am logging off for the night just as he is getting home from work, so joint ventures are a bit out of the question.
When I first started EVE I spent several days researching skill training templates and reading up on various topics of interest. I went into the game with a plan and new things like how important it is to study learning skills early and other such tidbits. My younger brother went into the matter rather blind. I finally caught up with him last night on the phone after him playing for several days on his own.
First he was amazed at the lack of PVP in my evening activities. Apparently, he joined up with some new player corporation right out of the rookie help channel and getting popped in frigates while poking around in low-sec space is what they specialize in. He was vaguely interested in running missions and was more interested in a specializing in covert-ops frigates and fighting other players. I pointed out to him about the learning skills he should be training and was shocked to hear that no one had explained all of this to him. I strongly suggested to him that he should check out the Eve University website and listen to some of the recorded classes as well as join their in game help channel.
I tried to explain to him that running out into low-sec and getting shot up was no way to play. But, the great thing about EVE is that his way of playing is just as correct as mine. While I am slowly kitting out my battleship in faction modules from running level four missions, I have no intention of ever placing this ship in harms way in PVP.
In my brother’s eyes my battleship now is just like my pirate ship back then. Simply on the shelf collecting dust fulfilling some alien purpose. An entire assembly of fun and excitement that his older brother simply doesn’t know how to have fun with.
Well I have cut back on my EVE time a bit to allow me to get over this skill training hump. I still have 35 days left on my journey to tech II large turrets. Hopefully they will be worth the time investment to get there. Along the way I will also gain the ability to equip small and medium tech II projectile turrets, which should help me out in both PVP (one day) and smaller PVE.
My corp is also seeing a lull in activity. It is really down to just me and one other guy. He spends most of his time mining, but does have a mission running alt account with some decent drone skills and a cruiser. It certainly passes the time a bit better while running level four missions to have someone there, let alone the time it saves when he fits a salvager to his cruiser and snipes with his guns while using his drones to take out the smaller frigates.
We are discussing some other options for the corp and are looking into setting up a high-sec POS in preparation for establishing a low-sec base of operations. Another member of the corporation is training for freighters and plans on going all the way to jump freighters. Our plan is to eventually establish a base of operations someplace secure in high security that is within jump range of an off the path low sec system. We would then jump a small mining fleet into the deserted area and mine and rat unmolested.
Cost concerns aside, we ideally want to setup a small POS in this back end low sec system with a refining array and then jump the refined ore out. If any hostiles enter the system, we can simply retreat to the safety of the POS shield. I still have a ton of research to do on POS operation and requirements before we start making purchases. I really wonder how safe Low-sec POS generally are. I doubt there are roving gangs of battleships scanning down player owned structures just to put them into reinforced and then come back hours later to actually take them out. But you never know…
Certainly with only a four-man corporation our little operation would not draw too much attention to ourselves. And as long as we choose a low-sec system far enough off the main travel pipelines, but within a few jumps from high-sec empire, we should have minimal harassment. At least, that is the theory.
The only other facet that we are looking into is wormhole exploration. It is more risky than the low-sec mining and POS deployment. And I am not even sure if three players only willing to risk Retrievers and tech one cruisers would even be able to make such a venture profitable. Our basic plan for this is for my corpmate to leave one of his spare accounts out on the safe side of the wormhole, while we both go inside. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find many sites for detailed information about what to expect in a wormhole area or what resources you should be equipped to gather. All information sources do seem to point out that you should all equip a probe launcher onto your ship and be prepared to find another route home.
On a positive note, I now have four faction guns fitted onto my Maelstrom. I am not sure but I think if I buy one more from the Brutor Tribe that I get a free faction toaster with my next purchase! This brings the market value of my ship plus fittings up to about 450 million isk. I don’t quite think that my insurance payout of 150 million isk will quite cover that loss.
Perhaps by the time I am done with the training plan I will have a full set of 8 faction guns. Then comes the decision to sell those off and switch out to the much cheaper but comparable tech II variants. All in good time…All in good time…
Much of what non-EVE players hear about in regards to EVE is the scamming and deception that takes place. Like some kind of space soap opera, lies and trickery will earn your internet space fame much faster than charity and goodwill towards your fellow man. In that light I present to you the following story as told to me by my corporation mate who witnessed the following.
Driz, the CEO of our four-member corporation, was out mining in his Retriever when a Hulk pulled up along side of him. The Hulk, being a mining behemoth, is currently the ship that Driz is training up to fly and for nearly an hour they both silently grazed on the asteroids oblivious to the other. Then the Hulk pilot sends a conversation request to Driz asking him if he wanted to join together in a fleet to share the mining gang bonuses that the Hulk pilot could offer.
Another thirty minutes go by and they engage in idle chat about ore prices and mining ship fittings. Then the Hulk pilot wants to bring his ore back to the nearby station. Unlike a sensible pilot who would simply bookmark the location and warp back in a hauler, this would-be-industrialist abandons his ship in the asteroid belt and zipped away in his escape pod. Driz was taken aback by this action, as once you leave your ship in this manner anyone else with the skills to fly it can simply enter into an escape capsule of their own and go into the ship and seize control.
A minute later the Hulk pilot pulled up along side of Driz and the empty hulk and began to empty the ore into his hauler. Slowly the industrial hauler turns and aligns with the station and warps away. Another minute goes by and the pilot comes warping back into view and begins to dump to ore into his hauler. At this point Driz can’t help but notice that another player in a pod just warped to them in the belt and is closing in on the Hulk. The Hulk pilot however, seems oblivious to this, as he takes no action.
In one moment of pure win the Hulk of this guy now belongs to someone else as the pilot enters the Hulk and claims it for his own. For the next thirty minutes the Hulk thief taunts the Hulk pilot in local, much to the amusement of everyone in the system. Such an opportunist!
After training up some skills both in-game and without, I took another stab at level four missions with much better results. Most of my gunnery support skills are at level four and my drone skills allow me to deploy 5 drones at a time, compared to the four that I was fielding at the time of my first Maelstrom loss.
I think beyond just having better skills some other factors have allowed for me to be more successful. Firstly, I have been reading up on the mission reports from the Eve-survival guide. These reports are invaluable in informing me what I can expect in a given mission. Each wave or pocket of enemy ships is broken down individually. Damage types of the enemy ships as well as recommended resistances and ammo are all easily laid out. Equally useful are the player comments that are entered which will usually provide even further insight.
As for the fitting, I went with 1200mm artillery instead of the 1400mm pieces that I fit my first one with. They fire at a much faster rate and have greatly improved tracking compared to the larger guns while offering slightly less damage output and range. With these guns I am able to hit those pesky warp-jamming frigates at long range and even HACs and cruisers beyond 30km.
Additionally I expanded my ammo choices and really bit the bullet (pun intended) with logistical support for my mission hub. This means that I spent nearly 10,000,000 isk on having a large supply of every ammo type. For each mission that I set out for I am bringing two ammo types, one long range and another short range, set to the specific recommended damage types for use versus the NPCs in the mission pocket. For example, versus the Angel pirate faction I am shooting nuclear ammo at anything over 50km and then swapping that out for fusion ammo for anything under that range. The result seems to be an increase in my overall damage.
I am sure there is some complicated equation that will tell me why one gun is hitting for “Barely Scratches for 68 damage” and another can have a “Wrecking hit for 818 damage” on the same target and at the same range with the same ammo. With any luck, spreadsheets will be involved. At one point a kiting battleship seemed to just be sitting in my sweet spot and he melted under my guns. Eventually I will figure that out, until then I feel like a cave man amazed at the sight of a lit match. Big numbers good. Little numbers bad.
The only other change that provided a noticeable difference was taking a full compliment of mission specific drones. It seems foolish that I didn’t think to change them up before and tailor the damage types of my drones to the mission recommendations.
“Elite” battleships continue to well tank my DPS output. Everything else is dying in a respectable length of time. I am still quite a ways off from being able to fit tech II turrets, including a 24 day skill to train. I could always fit some of the faction turrets, but at a cost of 60-70 million isk each, a loss of my ship would be too financially devastating. Of course I could always just farm up the loyalty points and buy the necessary Amarr Navy tags that I am lacking, but even then I am looking at a cost of around 20 million isk (for the tags) and weeks of mission farming for the loyalty points.
The real question is would I even notice the DPS boost from equipping a pair of the faction guns and then slowly upgrading as I continue to mission? Would I be better off just buying the faction ammo with my loyalty points and firing regular guns?
At least I have options!
My shameful secret is that over the past few weeks I have been playing WoW. It all started when an old guild member of mine requested my account information so that she could reactivate the account and transfer my shaman to Mal’Ganis so that she could raid as a shaman and check that out. Whether that was a clever ruse to get me to start logging in or just curiosity on her part is still out with the jury. Regardless of her intentions the fact remains that I am once again running around Azeroth.
Mal’Ganis is certainly a bustling hive of constant activity compared to low population Azshara. Everything from the towns to the auction house just appears to be busting at the seams. Though I have been logging in on an almost daily basis, my activities in game are rather curtailed and I spend lots of time feeling very bored.
First off the guild that she moved me to is the Order of the Blue Garter. This guild traces it’s roots back to Final Fantasy Online (FFXI) as its guild forums became the defacto home for end game discussion and cross server drama sessions. Before there was Elitist Jerks there was Blue Garter. Now the guild is a shell of its former selves. Not all of the long time players from FFXI made the switch to WoW. Also over time there has been some attrition amongst the ranks. Overall the guild has a very relaxed feeling as they keep to a regular raiding schedule, while maintaining it in a very casual atmosphere. The players have shown themselves to be extremely skillful in the runs that I have done with them.
My personal history with Blue Garter started back on Azshara. When I first installed the game several years ago and logged in I chose the new PVP realm Azshara based on the fact that BG would be playing there. BG went from obscurity in pre-TBC days to become the top and only Black Temple raiding guild on the server. Eventually recruitment was just too difficult for them on a low population server and they all packed up and moved to Mal’Ganis.
It is rather exciting and intimidating to be in the same guild as many of the top players from Azshara’s past. Unfortunately my friend, who reactivated my account, hasn’t really been on that much the past few weeks and I have been more or less left on my own. She also neglected to bring any of my small fortune with me and dropped me off on this new server with only 300g in my pocket.
Over the past two weeks I have turned this 300g into over 6000g in gold on the auction house. I could easily keep going or had tried a bit harder to make more profit, but with 6000g I am more or less set for any of my immediate needs, having already purchased my epic flyer and dual spec. Also with me not currently raiding there are no consumables and repair bills to worry about.
This has left me with a lot of time to work on the more mundane tasks in WoW that I neglected in my sprint to 80 and fast paced raiding life on Azshara. Therefore I have been working on the cooking and fishing dailies to get those skills up, while running the occasional heroic five-man dungeon.
I don’t know how long my stint in Azeroth will last. BG is planning on reforming up for the upcoming title Final Fantasy XIV, which will be the second Final Fantasy Online game to come out, and I do want to be on board for that.
Many things about the game still annoy me. The PVP in the battleground pales in comparison to the lower tier RvR of Warhammer, but it doesn’t have massive lag and abilities generally work as intended. The Argent Tournament seems to be a very poorly disguised massive time sink. The new battleground being released is apparently going to be 40 vs. 40 but entail vehicle on vehicle combat.
When did I sign up for World of MarioKartCraft?
Perhaps it was the games way of telling me that I wasn’t quite ready to fly level four missions. Maybe it was another lesson learned on why you should look over the mission summaries on the EVE survival page. Either way my rigged Maelstrom battleship ended up as a twisted mass of wreckage due to a single warp-jamming frigate.
I had just completed a longer combat mission and was actually considering logging off for the evening, when I saw that the next mission offered was a very low reward amount of 200,000 Isk. Thinking that this would be a simple retrieval mission with a bit of combat I flew out into the unknown. Arriving at the mission pocket I found my target, another battleship sitting about 20k off of my bow. With the other hostiles about twice that distance from me, I opened fire and brought the hostile battleship down in just a few minutes. And then all hell broke loose.
Apparently killing that particular battleship was a trigger to spawn an entire new fleet of hostiles. Also, unknown to me at the time, they appeared right where I happened to be flying. I quickly started locking targets and heading towards the cargo contained dropped by the battleship. Within moments I was webbed and warp scrambled and my shields were halfway down, but at least I had a target lock on the little frigate that had me tackled. My drones did all that they could but with only four of them any my low drone support skills, they barely had the frigate into it’s armor as I started to loose structure. I aligned to the station and spammed my warp-to button hoping that perhaps he would loose his death grip on my ship for just a moment for me to zip away. Just before I exploded I managed to jettison all of the ammo in my hold to cut my losses.
Ding! Mail received to the tune of a 140 million isk payment from the insurance company. Adding up my losses I lost about 20 million in ship fittings and three capacitor control rigs valued around 14 million each. I actually purchased the Maelstrom fully rigged for 150 million isk in the contract section. A new one will cost me 127 million isk with another 45 million to rig it back up, haven’t even looked at the cost to refit everything…
With the sudden influx of cash I find myself with over 300 million in isk sitting in my wallet. Clearly I can afford to go out and simply purchase another setup and start plugging away at level four missions again. But with level fours taking so long to complete at my low skill level, I am content to logon a run a few level threes while I spend the next month training to increase my skill with drones and fit tech II projectile turrets.
My little corp of four members continues to be largely inactive. I had hoped that as the newness of Ulduar wore off they would be spending more time in New Eden and less time in Northrend. There are some other options I can explore with a large bankroll and tons of time to kill. Faction warfare is certainly an option. As would signing up with a PVP corp that runs cruiser operations. So many options…
The Counsel of Stellar Management election results were announced the other day for EVE Online. Congratulations to Dierdra Vaal of Eve University for clinching the top spot, but I am a bit more interested in the numbers included in the press release. There was some speculation a few months back as to the number of subscribers that Eve has and whether it has surpassed Warhammer Online’s 300,000 announced subscribers.
“There were 27848 votes cast out of the number of eligible voters (i.e. older than 30 days and thus able to vote), amassing a turnout of 9.74%…”
Using basic algebra you can put the exact number of Eve accounts, greater than 30 days old, as exactly 285,913.
“…the age going a bit up from the last election where the average age was 1.94 years. 44.6% of the voting accounts are veterans of two years or more whilst those veterans constitute 29% of the eligible voters.”
Taking this quote we can deduct that only 29% of all of the players in EVE have been playing for two years or more. As much as EVE seems to try to stack the deck in favor of the established player over the newly entering ones, it appears that the game’s population is much younger than you would think. Perhaps this is a product of burnout at the high end or maybe all of the game play improvements over the past few years have created this new player population boom.
“…95.5% versus 4.5% male – female ratio of the player base.”
Wow. I know that internet spaceships may not be the most attractive game out there to try out given so many fantasy games and their elaborate games of dress up and communities, but I had no idea that the female population of EVE was that low. This means that out of the 285,913 players only 12,866 are female. Not sure what changes they can make to change EVE to be more attractive to the female population.
Even more interesting to me was that nearly 47% of the player base hails from outside of Europe. Possibly even more than that due to the 11% of the population listed simply as “other.” 38% of the EVE population is from the United States. The next closed country is the United Kingdom which accounts for 12.5% of the subscribers. For some reason I was always under the impression that the game was largely based out of Europe.
Having cruised through level three agents in a few weeks time in a battle cruiser I found that I had several level four agents now available to me for the NPC corporation that I have been doing missions for. Over the past few days I was able to complete four of the level four missions and quickly realized that they were an entirely different ball game from the more mundane level three missions. Apparently piloting a battle ship into a dead-space mission location carries with it an entirely new set of risks from both NPC and player combatants.
My first two missions attempts went fairly well. The NPC battleships take me around five minutes each to DPS through, with some of the elite ones taking over ten. This wouldn’t be a problem except that there may be seven to ten battleships in a room, thus clearing one room takes me around an hour. Most of these missions are having three to four rooms that require clearing. Unfortunately taking that much time to clear the mission meant that most of the wrecks from the first room were gone by the time I came back to loot. But fortunately some other players were willing to “help me out” with this problem.
There is an entire group of players out their who scan down level four mission runners and enter their mission pockets to loot and salvage the wrecks. Not concerned with the loss of an inexpensive frigate, these brazen individuals will methodically steal your loot right out from under your ships nose daring you to shoot back. A bit of research online revealed to me that this is often used as a method of griefing and that these characters will try to get the rigged battleship flying mission runner to aggress to the thieving pilot so that his corporation or gang members can jump in and kill your mission running ship.
Of course, I only found this out after I decided to have my drones engage the ninja looter and he promptly warped out. Very soon after I was telling myself that it may not have been a good idea to aggress to another player while I am tanking NPC pirates in a rigged battleship. Shortly thereafter I docked up and logged off for about an hour just to be sure that the aggression timer was down. Another pilot on the forums was discussing how the ninja looters managed to attack him even after the aggression timer was gone by somehow shooting at the cargo containers in the mission area. He lost his rigged mission runner to these scoundrels’ “creative use of game mechanics.”
Not wanting to stick around in this high traffic system, I relocated my base of operations three jumps away in a much less crowded area with an equal level agent for mission running. I completed an additional two missions out in this area and had no further problems from the ninja salvagers and looters.
My problem now continues to be the length of time that I spend in clearing the mission rooms. Tanking does not seem to be an issue but DPS does. In my low slots I have two gyrostabilizers II and a tracking enhancer II to help out DPS as much as possible. I went with a setup of eight 1400mm howitzer artillery pieces, which work great on anything larger than a cruiser at long range. Close in ships or frigates are slowly picked apart by my drones. It amazes me that in these encounters it is the smaller ships that I fear the most with their Webbers and occasional warp scrambling abilities.
I wish that my corp was a bit more active and that I could pair up with someone for these. Having someone else there in a smaller ship to loot, salvage, and provide some DPS would certainly be a much needed time saver. Isk wise I am floored at the gains to be found in these missions. In just four days of level four missions I have almost made enough ISK to purchase an entirely new battleship not even counting the insurance payout.
Some options to increase my DPS include spending a TON of isk for faction fit howitzers at nearly 60 million each or spending about two months of specialized training for tech II There are a number of other skills that I can train into as well that will provide additional DPS including surgical strikes from level three to five and large projectile turrets from thee to five as well. Currently I have two weeks of additional training for increase my capacitor related skills and after that I will try to work on some additional DPS.
 | Centuri on Wormhole Spelunking |
 | JC on Wormhole Spelunking |
| JC on What You Make of It |
| Centuri on What You Make of It |
 | Wilhelm2451 on What You Make of It |
