What I'm Doing

Y'all might be wondering why I haven't posted much in the past few weeks.  Well, I'm in Spain right now and don't have much time for playing EVE; also I don't even think I can get it working over here, although I might be wrong on that. I'll be here for another seven weeks or so; don't expect me back until August.  There's a chance I might get pleasantly surprised and find a way to play EVE, but I doubt it will be happening.

Drop the Hammer

On Friday, I boarded my first battlecruiser, a Hurricane.  My first impression of it was that it looked simply amazing compared to most Minmatar ships, kind of reminding me of an Imperial Star Destroyer without the prominent bridge.

I did a few important things with my Hurricane fit.  The first is that it's armor tanked; I've never done that on a ship before and I didn't really know how to do it.  I looked up a fit on Battleclinic that had an armor tank and a few likes, figured, "This guy must know more than me," and went ahead with it.  The second important thing is that I've gotten sick of artillery and gone back to autocannons.  While artillery might be safer, I find in-your-face autocannons that allow you to actually see the enemies you're shooting at much more fun to use.  And since it's a game, the point is to have fun, right? The final thing I've done is fitted it out with largely Tech II modules, something I've never done before.  I figured it was smarter to wait until I had my armor tanking skills up and I could use all of the Tech II goodies for my fit.

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Drop the Hammer [Hurricane, PvE]

So, without further ado, here is my fit (and the ever-present picture).

High Slots

220mm Medium Prototype Automatic Cannon I [EMP M, Fusion M, Titanium Sabot M, Phased Plasma M]

220mm Medium Prototype Automatic Cannon I [EMP M, Fusion M, Titanium Sabot M, Phased Plasma M]

220mm Medium Prototype Automatic Cannon I [EMP M, Fusion M, Titanium Sabot M, Phased Plasma M]

220mm Medium Prototype Automatic Cannon I [EMP M, Fusion M, Titanium Sabot M, Phased Plasma M]

220mm Medium Prototype Automatic Cannon I [EMP M, Fusion M, Titanium Sabot M, Phased Plasma M]

220mm Medium Prototype Automatic Cannon I [EMP M, Fusion M, Titanium Sabot M, Phased Plasma M]

Experimental XT-2800 Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I [Scourge Assault Missile]

Experimental XT-2800 Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I [Scourge Assault Missile]

Mid Slots

Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II
10MN Afterburner II

Low Slots

Medium Armor Repairer II

Armor Thermic Hardener II

Armor Thermic Hardener II

Armor Kinetic Hardener II

Armor Kinetic Hardener II

Gyrostabilizer II

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I didn't actually realize the importance of the hardeners until yesterday morning, treating them more like an afterthought than the central part of my tank. To be honest, I never turned them on until yesterday, so they were basically shiny little module icons ornamenting my HUD and nothing else.  Basically, I was flying a tankless ship without even knowing it.

I started off on Mission of Mercy, a Level Two mission that had about 6 Mercenary Tech II Frigates and 6 cruisers.  Needless to say, they immediately began spamming missiles at me, but since every other Level Two I had done had been a piece of cake for my Hurricane, I assumed the same would happen with this one.  How wrong I was.

My happy-go-lucky attitude led to me almost losing my shiny new battlecruiser in its first few days out.  They were halfway into my armor in about twenty seconds, and I didn't even turn my repper on until they had done a sizable chunk of damage.  Stupidly, I waited until they had almost finished off my armor before attempting to warp out, with the result that I left with a flaming ship and came back with a 700k ISK repair bill. (I repaired the armor with my armor repper, but I don't have any hull reppers.)

After this, the only thing I could think of was to try to do a hit-and-run type of thing, where I would pick off one or two of their ships until I dropped the DPS to an amount my ship could handle.  I was generally able to take out two of the frigates before I had to warp out each sortie, and then I moved onto the cruisers.

Now I had a problem. My DPS wasn't high enough to take out a cruiser.  By the time I had knocked out one of the cruisers, the others would be well into my structure, and I would have died before I could warp out.

Desperate, I turned to my corpmates for help.  One of them knew that I had just got a battlecruiser, and said that a Hurricane should be able to solo any Level Two mission with ease.  I linked him the EVE-Survival page on the mission, and he replied that it should be no problem.  Then he asked to see my fit, which he said looked fine, and asked me if I had been switching out the hardeners to match the incoming damage type.  I said I hadn't been, but then noticed that the two damage types dealt by Mercenaries were the exact same ones as those I had hardeners for.

After turning on my hardeners, the damage dropped to an easily repairable level and I could finish the mission with ease. Lesson learned.

Other Stuff That's Happened to Me

• I lost my Hoarder to an Angel Nomad while AFK, but trained up to Minmatar Industrials IV and bought a Mammoth to replace it.
• I ran a lot of Level Three's and Four's with corpmates and other people I'm friendly with to get my standings up with Level Three agents near my home base.
• A corpmate traded my a bunch of BPC's for some mission salvage, so I can now make all the ammo I would ever want.  Two hundred and twenty five million rounds per BPC.

A Newbie's View of Inferno

So, Inferno has been out for a couple of days now.  Now, I'm a newb and not all that used to the old interface yet, so my reaction is a lot more positive than many people who I've been seeing on the forums.

The New UI

A lot of people have been hating on the new UI.  I really like it, though.  It keeps all my stuff in one place instead of having to use two different buttons for ships and items, something that I always found annoying.  The new filters make finding ammo, skillbooks, and modules in the morass of items I keep at my home base much, much easier.  My only real problem with it is that it is extremely slow to load compared to the old inventory, which leads to a few problems.

Just recently, I was doing a Level Two mission called "Stop the Thief" where I faced a lot of incoming damage from Mercenary Elite Fighter missile frigates.  I knew going into it that my artillery cruiser's DPS wouldn't be enough to cut down enough frigates before they got through my shields, so I decided to kill the NPC carrying the objective, who was conveniently named "the Thief," and take the item he dropped.  Unfortunately, when I finally managed to reach his wreck to loot it, I had to wait several seconds for the loot menu to appear, where previously it had popped up instantly.  This allowed the missile frigates to get in two more volleys against me, cutting about a third of the way through my  armor and costing a few hundred thousand ISK in repair bills.

Still, the new UI is quite nice and overall very functional.  Good job CCP!

The Missile Effects

Eye candy is awesome.  We all know that, and its awesomeness comes out in force with the new missile effects.  I wasted 144 Nova Light Missileson my CEO's Loki just to watch the pretty trails and explosions, something nice to do while I mine.  Now, I'm actually looking forwards to seeing a few rats around; it looks like Christmas at the Griswolds'.

The snazzy V3 launchers do look a bit out of place on the crappy old Minmatar V2 models though.  Looking forwards to the next update when Minmatar ships finally get V3 models.

The V3 Amarr Ships

They look wonderful, truly wonderful.  The gold now looks like real metal instead of that cheap plastic you find on kids' toys, and the tacky-looking blood red is now gone in favor of something more realistic.  In short, Amarr ships no longer look like oversized plastic toys and have finally claimed the glory they really deserve.  The glint of light off of the new silver and gold is almost as good as the shininess of new ISK in my wallet.

Everything Else

I don't have too much to say about the rest of Inferno, considering that I haven't really noticed it.  I know they made major changes to Factional Warfare, but I've never done that and don't really even know what it is.  I also know they switched up the wardec system, but I doubt my corp will be wardecced any time soon.  If we are, we've got a nasty surprise up our sleeve, so I'm not too afraid of anything other than maybe losing my own ship, which I accept is a possibility whenever I click the undock button.

Despite the people raging on the forums these days, I think Inferno is quite a worthy expansion.  I enjoy everything that CCP has done in it so far and look forwards to more updates like this.  Devs, good job taking EVE in the right direction!

Daily Update #1

So, I'm going to start posting these Daily Updates whenever no individual event worth a post has happened to me.

Some people are just really nice.  That's the main lesson I've gotten from my mining experience so far.  Several of my corpmates have been more than happy to haul ore, refine said ore, and even sell the minerals gotten from it for me, all at no cost to me.  I'm amazed that people offer to lose so much time on helping me make ISK that they could be using for themselves.

Other than that, one of my corpmates has set up a fleet that he lets me join whenever he is around.  Since we have a PoS and he tends to just sit behind the shields whenever he goes away from the computer instead of logging off, that means I get an Orca's lovely bonuses almost all day long.

Other than that, I've almost collected nearly a hundred million ISK, the first time I've ever done that.

Now for some other random news.

• I can now fly my Hurricane, but don't come close to having the skills to fit it.
• I bought and used my first Tech II modules yesterday.  Nothing very glamorous, just a few Expanded Cargohold II's to help out my Hoarder's puny initial 5,600 m3 cargohold.
• I got my first faction ammo off of a rat when I was flying around the belts in a Rifter.
• I learned how to use the scanner to find exploration complexes.  I'm not sure what ship I should use to do them when I get around to it, though.

Not much else to say for the past couple of days.  I'm downloading the new patch right now, though, and that should be fun!

Angel Extravaganza

This morning, I completed Angel Extravaganza (Level Four) with a lot of help from a friend.  It took several hours to do the mission and the salvage combined, but the half of the loot, bounties, and mission rewards that I received added up to about 15 million ISK.  I also passed 80 million total ISK today; for me, that's a lot of money!

Generally, my friend would take care of the larger ships like battleships, while I dealt with the battlecruisers and destroyers.  We both used our drones against frigates that appeared occasionally.  Meanwhile, I learned some valuable lessons.

• The frigates found on Level Fours tend to be more difficult to kill than the battlecruisers simply because my artillery does not do full damage to them.
• Even with a group of four 650mm artillery, I cannot do any meaningful damage to a battleship.
• I was locked by several spawns of the enemy ships, but I never once had trouble with the incoming damage so long as we took out the webbers fast.  Even though my Rupture is relatively slow at 474 m/s top speed, the battleships had trouble hitting me and their torpedoes hit me for less damage than a light missile.  So bigger definitely does not mean more dangerous.
• The battlecruisers were sometimes quite dangerous, but they had a paper-thin tank for their size, and once I got through their shields, I could often pop their armor and hull in one shot.  Quite a few destroyers also appeared in certain waves, but none of them ever got close enough to me to be able to fire their guns.  This makes me think that NPC battlecruisers and destroyers are glass cannons; although they can do some sizable damage, they die quickly and I should target them first to eliminate them before they get in range.

This is a rather short post, but I learned some things that I want to remember, and this is the best way to do it.

Allow me to throw a question at the crowd.  Any ideas for improving this blog, other than moving to Wordpress? I want to get a handle on Blogger's more limited features before I go into the complexities of Wordpress.

A Mining Life For Me?

I had almost all of Friday free to play EVE, and spent almost all of that time running Level Two missions in my Rupture.  I got myself up to about 52 million ISK at the end of the day from 44 or so million at the start of the day, getting standing with my agent up to 9.3.  By the end of the day, I had plenty of free ISK on my hands.

Today, I bought myself a mining cruiser, the Minmatar Scythe.  I tossed around the idea of buying the Scythe Fleet Issue, but decided against it after realizing that it had no mining bonus.  I bought the cheapest Scythe and modules that I could find, then spent much of the afternoon wandering around high-sec space collecting them.

I also did something rather stupid. One of the modules I had bought was in low-sec space, though I didn't know it at the time. I grabbed a shuttle and scouted ahead through the two gates I would have to jump through to make sure there were no camps going on, then simply took my new, shiny Scythe and came on through.  In retrospect, this was a pretty dumb decision.  Even though I hadn't encountered anything in my shuttle, that didn't mean there couldn't be a cloaked covert ops vessel waiting for me to come back in something more expensive and call in a few gun-toting buddies.  Luckily, I came through all right, but I was risking quite a bit just to avoid spending another 24,000 ISK.

Anyways, here's the fit I've mounted on my Scythe.  And a picture, because pictures are yummy.

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Cash Cow [Scythe, Mining]

High Slots:

Cu Vapor Particle Bore Stream I

Cu Vapor Particle Bore Stream I

Cu Vapor Particle Bore Stream I

Prototype 'Arbalest' Rapid Light Missile Launcher I [Nova Light Missile]

Prototype 'Arbalest' Rapid Light Missile Launcher I [Nova Light Missile]

Mid Slots:

Residual Survey Scanner I

Medium Subordinate Screen Stabilizer I

Upgraded EM Ward Amplifier I

Low Slots:

Co-Processor I

Co-Processor I

Expanded Cargohold I

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The Scythe is a surprisingly agile ship that has no trouble tanking the frigate rats that show up occasionally in the system that I mine in.  I still use the missile launcher because I'd like the bounty, but it's really on the ship only for show.  If a ganker shows up, it probably won't really help me, and my passive shield tank is good enough to stop the damage I'm getting.  Still, it's nice to know I have teeth on my ship, however small they might be.

My Mining "Adventures"

I think you'll agree with me that mining is hardly the most interesting of professions, except when a ganker shows up, of course.  Needless to say, I kept a sharp lookout for gankers, being sure to check out local whenever someone new showed up. At one point, a whole gang of people who were red to my corp  jumped into the system, and I got out of dodge very quickly.  After an alliance member ran a D-Scan on them, he discovered that they were just running a mining operation in a different belt.  Still, I stayed on my toes until they left.  I didn't really have much of a tactic for dealing with them if one of them happened to show up at my belt, but I made sure to align to the station and watch my overview carefully.  Eventually, the reds left, and I breathed easier.

As the evening progressed, things got more fun.  I was whining in corp chat over the fact that it would take about 6 trips for my completely unfitted Hoarder to carry all of the minerals I had refined over to Hek, the nearest market hub.  A very nice corpmate offered to not only carry everything for me, but also to refine everything I had mined with his refining alt.  I got about 4.5 million ISK from the first haul, which was much more than I had expected.

Another corp member who owned an Orca fleeted up with me so I would get the bonuses that came with that ship.  Although he was afraid to leave our PoS’s protective shield and come to the asteroid field due to Hulkageddon, he was more than happy to have his Orca alt sit around and help me out.  Meanwhile, his main came along and orbited me in a Tech III cruiser, making me the safest miner in the system by a long shot.  With the Orca’s base bonus and his mining foreman link, I was picking up about half again as much ore as I would have normally.

Typically, I would have faced the problem of hauling the stuff back to the station in my Hoarder’s meager 5.600 m3 cargo hold, but my corpmate with the industrial offered to use his Mastodon to drop by and take my ore to be refined for me.  So I just got to sit there, mining away, while my two corpmates did half of the work for me and gave me all the profits.  And everyone thinks EVE is a dog-eat-dog game.  It can be, but there are plenty of wonderful people around too.

Meanwhile, I was learning quite a bit about large nullsec operations from my friend with the industrial.  Having spent a while there and caused almost 150 billion ISK worth of damages to enemy ships in fleet fights, he knew his way around PvP.  I learned about all sorts of cloaky shenanigans from him, like how to use a black ops battleship to jump in a fleet of covert ops frigates, force recon cruisers, and other cloaked ships.  Although this information probably won’t be of use to me in the immediate future, it’s certainly interesting to know.

The second haul earned me more than 6 million ISK, putting my day's earning at over 10 million and ending the day with 55 million ISK to my name.  My Scythe has already payed itself back, and I've learned a lot about the value of friendly, willing-to-help people.  If either of the two I'm talking about ever read this, thanks!

Random Question of the Day: How many Titans exist in EVE at the moment?  I asked my PvPer corpmate, and he wasn’t sure. 

An Armor Tank for my Rupture?

This morning, right before downtime, I was running some Level Threes with a friend in a Myrmidon.  He took a lot of the damage, but I was still occasionally locked by a few cruisers or a separate group that had spawned in and I had engaged on my own.

My shields generally tended to melt like ice cream in a microwave, and I had to warp out to a station a few times during the course of our little jaunt.  At one point, he remarked on how lucky I was that some tackler frigates hadn't targeted me.

Let's take a look at your average NPC tackler frigate, or at least average for ones I've encountered.  For you pros, go ahead and skip this paragraph.  You don't need it.  Generally, a tackler:

• is a Tech II version of a standard frigate design with a fancy-sounding name.
• packs some type of tank that my drones and missiles often have trouble breaking through.  There was this one particular interceptor that had such a tough tank all of my combined DPS could barely break it.
• flies faster than I do.
• orbits at close range where my artillery is completely useless.

Now, I don't really have a great strategy for dealing with tacklers on my own.  I can't heal damage any faster than my shield's base recharge rate, so when I hear the shield alarm, my general tactic is to simply warp away.  But when I'm targeted by a warp scrambler/disrupter, all I can do is switch on the afterburner and try to fly out of range.  The problem with this is that my top speed is just 450 m/s; most tacklers are actually faster than me and have no trouble keeping up.  I really can't do anything but pray I'll be able to kill them fast enough.  And since I have no real ability to fix myself up in the field, the battle basically turns into a "my DPS vs. their combined DPS" slugfest.  I can only fight and hope for the best.

An armor-repairing fit would allow me to kite their more damaging ships and actually be able to fix up much of the damage that I had taken.  In addition, since there are five low slots on the Rupture compared to only three mid slots, my buffer would probably be larger in addition to having the armor repairer.  This would mean eliminating the three gyrostabs and two tracking enhancers in my low slots, but since their effectiveness drastically decreases when I stack modules, I could still keep one of each and have three slots left to armor tank the ship. That's more than I currently have for my shield tank; the afterburner takes up one of my three mid slots.

This will also free up my mid slots for a stasis webifier if I need it.  Even though armor plating will slow my ship down, webbing annoying tacklers makes it possible for me to outrun them and engage them with my artillery.

The main problem I have is that I have absolutely no skills in armor repairing.  None at all.  I'm also not sure how this will affect the PG and CPU of my ship, since I'm already near the maximum that I can handle with my current skills.  Training up PG and CPU-increasing skills will help that though, and I have to get the armor-repping skills at some point.

I think I'll give armor a try.