Back! - Apocrypha 1.3 on Monday - POS Changes!

Hey there! Long time no see... my writer's block seems to have dissipated and I'm going to pick up where I left off.

These past 3 months I've been busy doing a mix of exploration/missions/t2 invention and building... same old, same old...

Exploration since the Apoc expansion has been really swell, even in K-space (aside from the fact that everyone and their dog is doing it); I've gotten really lucky and managed to find a couple of sweet deadspace items that basically paid for my shiny Kronos (and a few other shiny ships too), and word is exploration is about to get even sweeter come Monday, with the Apocrypha 1.3 patch.

Patch notes are available here, and what it means is basically they are to increase the number of RADAR sites in WH's (in an effort to bring T3 cruiser prices to a lower point of equilibrium).

Other changes of special interest to me - POS mechanics are being changed a bit:

"Multiple changes have been made to the anchoring and onlining of starbase modules and structures. All offensive starbase structure anchoring times have been reduced by 50% and all offensive starbase structure online times have also been reduced by 50%. Defensive starbase structures such as hardeners will have their anchoring, online and un-anchor times reduced by 50%. Finally, all starbase tower un-anchoring times have been reduced by 50%."

Faster anchoring and onlinin of gun and ewar batteries, faster unanchoring of ALL structures - this is great!

Also of note, CCP has decided to kill freeform contracts. Yup, that's right, come Monday you won't be able to make new freeform contracts, and all ongoing freeform contracts will become void.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, you be the judge... I'm afraid this is yet another step taken to further dumb eve down; while this change in itself doesn't "do much", it creates a precedent where CCP takes action "due to griefing problems".

First foray into wormholes (or so I thought)

So, last night I finally managed to get to actually doing some probing, after attempting to download the new client on a temperamental connection since M10.



My base of operations is currently a station in The Forge with a Sisters of Eve agent, for whom I run missions more or less regularly, so I already had a stash of probe launchers and various types of probes on hand for the LP purchases and , which was a good thing, since there was no way in hell I could get into Jita. So I fitted an expanded probe launcher on my Helios, filled it to the brim with scan probes (80, wohoo!) and set off roaming through the adjacent solar systems to find me a wormhole. On the way I found various combat and mining sites, which were of little interest to me what with the low rewards and so forth. So I kept scanning for that ellusive wormhole. Finally after about 3 systems I found one, but surprise, surprise, it was a K-space to K-space WH. "Eh... what the hell", says I... I jump through and find myself transported in a system (I forgot the name) two jumps away from Tash-Murkon Prime in Amarr space.

Probes go out again and I realise there are 8 sites in this system, including what looked like two hacking sites. So I proceed to scan them down and bookmark them (I had neither the right equipment for the profession sites with me, nor the firepower to do the sansha combat sites). After that was done, I simply jumped back through the wormhole to my home base to bring some muscle.

I decided bringing one of my mission boats was way overkill, so I decided to retrofit my salvage BC, a Harbinger. This got promptly stripped of most of the salvagers and all the tractor beams, and fitted with a light tank, core probe launcher with some recently acquired SOE probes (since they're reusable, now it's well worth spending some extra cash for the 10% increase in scan strength) and 3 damage mods. Guns I didn't have on hand, but I'd get those at my destination, since as I already said, it was 2 jumps away from Tash Murkon Prime.

So with this rag-tag fit I jumped back through the wormhole to Amarr space. I found most of my bookmarks still there and proceded to show the sanshas in the combat sites who's boss.

Sadly, the returns weren't very interesting - they dropped no valuable loot, the salvage I picked up was worth about 2.5 mil (from all the combat sites), but I did get 10 exotic dancers from one of the structures (yay, party!)

Then I went to work on the two hacking sites, which turned out to be just one hacking site, the other being archaeological. And since I've yet to train Survey V and the Archaeology skill, I grumblingly had to make due with just the hacking site. This was one of the more worthwhile ones, as it yielded decryptors and components worth roughly 35mil isk on the Amarrian market. All in all not a bad haul for the two hours and change I spent on this little endeavor.

So, worldly rewards aside, things I learned on this trip:

• Probes are 100% reusable as long as you don't let the timer expire and you remember to recall them when you move to the next system
• Reconnecting to lost probes actually works
• It's way faster than before to scan stuff down
• Sites are WAY more abundant than before
• Spending cash on Sisters' scan probes is now actually worth it
• There are a LOT of sites that are not worth the effort. If you can find them with 100% accuracy using just the onboard scanner, they're most likely not worth warping to.
• Sites are not, repeat, ARE NOT to be found only within 4 A.U. of celestial bodies nowadays.
  

Pretty useful trip, don'tcha think? Oh, the icing on the cake was, when I wanted to get back to The Forge via wormhole, it had already closed down. Note to self: stop slacking off, you'll just end up warping back the old fashioned way, 16 jumps and no bio break :P

The Fun of Training From Scratch

Training a second character is inherently easier than what you went through training the first. For one, you know what the hell you're doing from the beginning and have a plan from the get-go.

You're also likely to be able to support the new guy with the resources needed. A skill costs a few million? No problem... cash transfer, and a few clicks later you're training Exhumers. Implants? Sure, full set of +3's from day one. Your second account tends to train much faster than your first.

A few months ago I started along this road as well, started anew with a Caldari Civire guy on a second account. I didn't start with a Military profession, as this is something I could mold him into on my own. Mostly I picked a Civire based on the fact that I didn't like the other races' mugs any more - atleast Civire look remotely human, hehe.

So I started with the Prospector profession, as I wanted to train a hulk pilot and not waste time for this on the other account. So for 2 months and change he simply sat berthed in a University station in The Forge, churning away at getting the skills needed to fly a decent rock buster. Interestingly enough, the starting skills included everything needed to use T2 Modulated Strip Miners (with T2 Veldspar crystals), all that was needed were the skills to fly the ship and various odds and ends to make it all fit, like mining upgrades, Mechanic etc.

I also trained a couple of levels in Corporation Management so I could start a one-man corp in order not to have to listen to all the newbie chatter in the Deep Core Mining channel every time I logged in.

After 2 months I was looking at a character sporting 3.6 million SP (If I recall correctly, Brutus only hit 4 mil SP four and a half months after creation). A quick 100 mil transfer from Brutus' wallet later, he had a fitted hulk (minus the rigs, for now - forgot about them when I bought it). He's far from a perfect miner, actually he's quite bog-standard, I trained for this just to prove to myself I could, but anything else, like additional t2 crystals can be trained on-the-fly. Now comes the real skill plan, focused on ship and weapon skills.

Even though he's Caldari, I do not plan training this race further than frigates. Instead, he'll focus on becoming an Amarr ship pilot. Not to disrespect Caldari pilots, but I tend to believe the best defence against incoming rounds of ordinance are heavy plates of hard alloy, not shields, and the best weapons are those that cause pain when you press the trigger as opposed to half a minute later - but that's just me, don't pay too much attention to it.

As opposed to my first character, I'm in no hurry to step into a bigger ship. I know how a battleship blows up, just as well as I know how a frigate blows up. So first - support skills, and lots of them. To level IV at least, preferably maxed out in the long run.

Exploration and "Ze Frenchies" (that'd be me)

Well, a few details have been shed these past few days on what awaits us in the new patch hitting Tranquility on March 10th (or so everyone hopes) - for a few answers to people's questions from devs, check out this ENN post here .

I won't go into detail with what's already discussed over there. Basically, what this means for small (-ish) corps like mine is a new playground to establish semi-permanent bases in. By bases I mean a POS and by semi-permanent I mean it's going to be hard to maintain, since access will be tricky to say the least. But enough about pos-es.

The more important thing to discuss would be what ships are best used in this harsh environment, where refit and resupply opportunities are rare. Say you're attempting a small-scale operation, you and 1-2 buddies find a wormhole and go in for an afternoon or so. This can mean no pos, as it's not worth the wait to anchor/online/offline/unanchor everything. So what can be done is bring in one or several anchorable containers (I fly a Prowler - the Minmatar "covops" Transport, so one GSC and 1-2 smaller anchorable containers to maximize space). T1 haulers can work well too, especially if they have 2 high slots like the Mammoth or the Iteron V.

Once on the other side, the designated industrial pilot anchors the cans and waits for the arrival of the "muscle". Ideally, the "muscle" would fly drone boats (heh, sue me, I'm Gallente), as even though the damage may be a tad lower, you have the advantages of no ammo needed and also get free high slots to fit salvagers, tractors, remote reppers to fix damaged drones, cloaks (and daggers, hehe) and so on. Basically you need "monkey-wrench" ships. And since you'd also like to ideally go back the way you came in, they'd need to be BC-sized or smaller. So, that narrows it down pretty well (BS-es like the Domi are out): Myrmidon, Ishtar, Ishkur... T1 cruisers might also do ok if your skills aren't good enough for an Ishtar... so the Arbitrator and the Vexor also fit the profile.

Another ammo-less category of ships are the Amarr ones, which should do ok too, (Harbinger, Zealot etc.). In this case you'd lose part of the flexibility of an Ishtar or Myrm, but gain more oomph.

In any case, leave room for atleast one of those new 'small' exploration probe launchers so you might find your way home if something unexpec when something nasty happens.

What to tank for and how much tank is "enough", though, is still a mystery, but since the areas will be 0.0-like in nature (with "smarter than your average bear" NPC's), I'd expect tanks on the aforementioned types of ships (or atleast on BC's) to be tested quite thoroughly.

That's it for now, more of my thoughts on this matter later on as more details become available.
Comments are welcome, as always.

The Games Agents Play

Blah, blah, missions again. I'm only writing this because it seems interesting to me that it's been a week now since my Sisters of Eve agent and I are playing some sort of silly game, with some disastrous effects on my standing. Basically it all started when I rejected doing Smash the Supplier - a lvl4 mission against the Amarr Navy.

I generally don't like doing missions against other Empire factions because it tends to bust my standing up needlessly and for no bounties. Also, I rejected this one because it's what most may call the hardest level 4 mission you'll come across, and my Kin/Therm dps isn't too effective against Amarr.

So, since this initial rejection, my agent seems to be stuck in an infinite loop as follows:

1. Smash the Supplier
2. Random transport mission
3. Repeat step 2
4. Cargo delivery with Blood Raiders
5. Pirate Invasion with Angels
6. Return to step 1.
   

This is all I get, and if it's not going to stop soon, it'll ruin my standing, which is already down from 8.7 to 7.3 or so due to repeated mission rejection.

Something needs to happen, either I do Smash the Supplier by mustering enough balls to do it solo and cutting it very, very close, or I get some buddies together in Amarr ships and send the bloody Amarr Navy to meet their Maker.

Or I take a break from missions and go visit some old friends in Catch, hehe... more on that soon.