New Toy

So, a couple of days ago I picked up a new toy. This is my new ship a Sansha Phantasm class cruiser, 'Black Angel'.


I've been using it on Level 3 missions. Working on raising my standings with Lai Dai, I want to be able to use some Level 4 Research Agents.

For mission running, this is how I'm outfitting the ship. Damage profile is Guristas.


It doesn't have the tank my Drake does (surprise, huh?) but it has better dps. I went with Beam Lasers instead of Pulse Lasers for range. And the web helps me deal with frigates.

All in all I'm pretty happy with it, even if it was a little spendy.

Blog Banter #13: See the Universe

From CrazyKinux's newest Blog Banter

Welcome to the thirteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

The first banter of this 2nd year of EVE Blog Banters comes to us from Zargyl from A Sebiestor Scholar, who asked the following: On the EVE Fanfest 2009 page are pictures of prizes for the Silent Auction that was held during the event. One of these photos was entitled “Design your own EVE mission”. My question now would be what kind of mission would you write if you got that prize? What would the mission be about? Would it be one using the new system of epic mission arks? What would be the story told by it? Feel free to expand upon his questions and put together your very own mission!

One of the things I liked about doing the original Epic Missions arc was the fact that it took you all over the place.

I know that that there are "landmarks" all over the EVE Universe, and I know that I've not gone out of my way to see any of them. There is the EVE Gate, the Black Monolith, a Titan wreck that has been named "Steve". Mynxee talked about a roam she did looking at these plus other sites in a post called A Worthwhile Jaunt.

I don't know how many capsuleers have actually taken the time to go and see some of these sites, but I suspect a large number haven't. Which brings me to what I think would be an interesting mission series.

Mission: L4 - Meeting at the EVE Gate

Your agent informs you that a traitor and enemy agent are going to be meeting at the EVE Gate and he wants you out there to spy on them and get a record of their conversation. You are specifically told not to engage them or get noticed by them. Which means a CovOps ship.

When you warp in you'll see the two ships about 40km away and once you approach to within 20km the conversation will begin. Once they are done talking they warp off. You are free to look around or you can leave and return to your agent.

Once there he'll hand you another in the series and send you off to another landmark somewhere in New Eden.

I don't anticipate these to be difficult in themselves, but there can be some long travel necessitated by this, potentially through low and null sec. And I required a CovOps ship in it. So I made it a Level 4 mission.

As an alternative it could be made into an Epic Mission Arc by trying to hit every landmark. That would probably take a while. Also this would have missions mixed up with combat vs. just spying.

1. CrazyKinux's Musing - Your Mission, should you decide to accept it...
2. Zen and the Art of Internet Spaceship Maintenance - First Blood
3. The Elitist - Guristas Invasion
4. The Wandering Druid of Tranquility - ...It's another episode of Design Star: EVE Style...
5. Level Cap -Epic Battles
6. Roc's Ramblings - The Cave of Time
7. Aether - Teach a man to fish...
8. Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah - Mission: Tangled Webs
9. Adventures in Mission Running - I can haz spaceship?
10. Nuke Thoughts - EVE Blog Banter 13
11. Diary of a Pod Pilot - Distressing The Damsel
12. Guns Ablaze - Dynamic Missions
13. Achernar - Confidential Report
14. More to come...

Mission Running Part 2: Ships and Missions

Ships (there is an update at the end of this section)

Level 1 - Frigate.
Level 2 - Frigate/Destroyer/Cruiser
Level 3 - Battlecruiser/Battleship
Level 4 - Battlecruiser/Battleship

There are a lot of people that will probably say you'll never need a Battleship for a level 3 mission. The hardest level 3 missions can be comparable to easier level 4 missions. And unless your tanking skills are quite decent you may need to do these in a battleship. And for me I was able to afford a battleship before I've gotten the relevant tanking skills to level IV or V.

Many people go with cookie cutter ship fits. If you are comfortable with this, fine. If not, then outfit your ship the way you want to. But understand what you're trying to attain and what you're giving up.

My favorite frigate for missioning is either the Rifter or the Merlin. I haven't used either an Amarr or Gallente frigate for missioning so I don't know how they would fare.

Typically I'll outfit a missioning frigate for short range, speed tanking. The Rifter I'll outfit with 3 autocannons and a rocket launcher, the Merlin 2 blasters and 2 rocket launchers. Both outfitted with a afterburner.

Level 2 missions I'll use a tanking cruiser. For me a Moa as I can only fly Caldari cruisers.

Level 3 missions I've used battlecruisers and battleships. I started out flying the Ferox and then moved on to the Drake. At the time I did that it was entirely because I had a mission that a few ships kept enough distance that I couldn't hit with the guns I had on the ship, even using long range ammo. The drake with it's missiles could reach out and touch it just fine.

<Update>

Doing a bit of research for this article has led me to re-evaluate my Level 3 mission ship selection and setup.

Using some pointers from this article from Tony at EveWarrior, I've been able to greatly increase the tanking ability on my Drake and am now pretty convinced that this ship is more than sufficient for Level 3 missions.

I've only done a couple of Level 4 missions and have used my Raven for those. This is how I outfit the Raven for missioning. The EFT is shown for all skills at level V and for Guristas damage type (80% Kin, 20% Therm).


















Without the guns firing this fit is cap stable at 57% and with the guns firing, 49 minutes is easily long enough to finish off a room.

I use the medium guns for added dps against cruiser sized targets along with medium drones. I use light drones for frigate sized targets.

I've gone with this build instead of a permaboost build because it still gives a good defense (up to 1068 when replacing the BCS IIs with SPR IIs) and there are some missions that utilize neutralizer towers and completely drain your capacitor very quickly. Replacing the hardeners with 2 kinetic deflection amplifier IIs and a heat dissipation amplifier II and the BCS IIs with SPR IIs still gives a defense 836 completely capacitor independent.

If you need less defense and more dps you can replace an SPR II with a BCS II and bring the dps up to 611.

In general this build gives me good performance with the ability to adjust defense and dps as necessary.

Running the Mission

Now that you have your ship select an agent and accept a mission. If you get a courier mission, deliver the goods. A production mission, make something. But the real fun begins when you get a kill mission.

After you have the mission look it up here: Mission Reports. This will tell you what the mission consists of and anything "special" you may need to know. Some missions have waves that come at you at specific time intervals and if you kill off the preceding wave you just sit and wait. Some missions have triggers and if you kill or attack the trigger, or get the trigger to armor it will trigger a wave. And the next wave may have a trigger that will trigger another wave etc. So, if you're not familiar with what the triggers are you may end up fighting far far more ships than you would have otherwise. To the point of being killed.

Now that your research is done the only thing left is to travel out to the mission location and start the killing!

Make sure the mods that you need on are on and the ones that you need off are off. There is nothing worse than running a armor repairer for so long that you drain all your cap. Ok, so, maybe there are worse things, but not many.

If you're not in a speed tanking ship align to something, I tend to use stations, but anything works and be prepared to warp out to it if the mission starts turning south.

Keep an eye on your overview, your drones, your shield/armor/structure levels, the number of ships, any other players that show up, etc.. Basically, do not be afraid to warp out if you need to. You can always come back.

Once you've killed all the ships there are to kill make sure you pick up anything the mission requires. Loot and salvage all the wrecks and then head back to the agent to turn the mission in.


Links

The single most useful link I've found is the Mission Reports from eve-survival.org.

The Evelopedia has a good article on agents.

Two very important resources are:
EFT - Very useful for looking at ship fits.
EVEMon - Very helpful for planning your training out.

In addition to these links check out the blogs I follow to the right. All are great reading and have great pieces of information and advice.

Mission Running Part 1: General Info

If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a mission runner. I also do some trading and manufacturing. I've tried mining, and I think it would be ok properly outfitted. But you can't mine much volume just using an Osprey. And even offloading to an Industrial gets old as you have to offload so often.

In this post I'm going to go over a few things that I've found helpful in mission running. Solo mission running. If you mission with a gang I would think some things will change.

This isn't meant to be a guide, just some of my own experiences. So enjoy and feel free to comment, be they cheers or jeers.

Agents

First decide what kind of missions you prefer. Kill missions, courier, mining, etc. This will dictate what kind of Agent to choose.

Typically I've found that kill missions will give the most money, standings and loyalty points. So, unless you have a good reason for doing otherwise stick with Command, Internal Security, Intelligence, Security, and Surveillance Agents.

Decide who you want to run missions for. There are some corporations that offer unique loyalty point rewards. Such as Sisters of EVE having the Sisters of EVE probes.

• Run missions for one corporation. Even if you're not trying to grind standings with them. This way, you will increase your standings quicker anyway and will have access to higher level agents sooner. Which will give you more money, loyalty points, and standing increases per mission.
• Keeping this in mind, locate the next higher level agent for this corp and keep an eye on it so you know when you can run the next level missions.

When requesting a mission look at the time limit for the bonus reward. It's important that you complete the mission within this time as it will almost double the reward amount. Usually you'll be able to finish the mission well within this time even with looting and salvaging. I typically plan for the mission to take between a third and a half of this time. So if you can't play this long delay the mission and complete it some other time. Or if you're just looking for the standings or loyalty points ignore the time limit.

If you get a mission you don't like or don't want to do you can decline it. However if you decline a mission from the same agent more than once in four hours you will loose standing with that agent.

Upon occasion you will get a mission that has you killing ships from other Empire Factions. As a Caldari I get missions to kill Gallente. If your standing with other Factions becomes less than -5.0 you are treated as "Kill on Sight" or KoS if you venture into their space. So, if you intend on ever going into those areas, keep an eye on your standings with that faction and decline some of these kill missions.

Skills

As soon as you can afford it, train Connections to level III or IV. This gives a significant increase in your effective standings.

Also train Social (gives bonus to standings increase per skill level), and Negotiation (gives additional pay per skill level).

If your standings with a corp is very low and you want to run missions for them you need to train Diplomacy. Diplomacy increases your standings with hostile corporations.

There are also a number of skills (Military Connections, Political Connections, etc.) that will increase loyalty point gain with certain types of agents. These are usually fairly expensive skills, so you can hold off on these for a while.

Train up your refining skills to support your mission running, both Refining and Refinery Efficiency.

In addition to this you need to have skills to fight your ship decently, but missioning does not require outstanding skills at all.

Loot

Keep everything, don't sell it! Let me repeat. KEEP EVERYTHING. Now with that in mind, there will be a few things that you can sell. But these are the rare module drops or skill book drops.

In general the common module drops are worth more in mineral value after they've been reprocessed. This is not 100% true, but probably 90% true. So, get used to what the modules sell for. Both through an "instant sell" and through sell orders.

Once you reprocess the loot you have minerals to use for manufacturing or you can sell them through sell orders.

Salvage

Salvage everything. When you can afford it by a destroyer and outfit it with tractor beams and salvagers. I do 4 of each. Some people do 3 tractor beams and 5 salvagers. Put as many cargo expanders and capacitor batteries on it and also an afterburner.

If the mission has multiple pockets I tend to salvage each pocket before going on to combat the next. This can help lessen the chance of ninja salvagers.

Only sell your salvage if you're absolutely sure you're not going to do any manufacturing. If you do sell it, check the prices. Many times salvage does "instant sell" for almost what you could get for it through a sell order. If you are going to do manufacturing I know that salvage is used in making rigs. I'm unsure if it's used elsewhere.

The next part of the article will talk about ships and running the missions.