Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Selling Shiz And Making The Iskies

Ok so I made my first sales with some of the stuff I have been making from the mining I have been trying out. I made a good 6mil in sales out of not too much work. So this doesn't seem  like a lot but I am really excited at this because it proves I can make decent isk with the little work it will take once I have better mining, refining and manufacturing skills. Which by the way I have narrowed down to a 27 day plan that will make me fairly efficient at making some smaller stuff. If I want to really get into industry then I will have laid the ground work for later on to be able to invent off of BPO's and to make T2 equipment. I have realized that I miss training up my main for combat skills and want to get back into that within a reasonable amount of time and I think 1.5 months of training on the Indy character will get my feet wet enough that I can supplement some of my income.

Speaking of income, I did my first ever mining op with Orca support yesterday. It was a small op and I suggested it once we had 5 people logged in. I brought out my Arbi and the m3 that it produced was determined to be that of about 1/4 a T1 decently skills Retriever so I made a little bit of income off of the op. But it was cool to be able to chit chat with my corp mates and learn a little about them, which is part of the reason I play the game in the first place which is the people. I enjoy doing things as a team and we certainly put a dent in the asteroid belt and almost cleaned it out before finally calling it quits.

While doing this op I found that it gave me time to think about my manufacturing and where I wanted to be with the char. So I came up with the training plan that will take the 27 days to complete to get me back to training the main. This also gave me time to fiddle away my money on SOMER Blink. A neat little in game isk sink that is fun to kill time with. Basically you buy tickets against ships, modules and skill books that cost isk that you have in an account. Then a random winner is selected and then has the option of taking the ship, an isk buy out or putting it back into your account with a small % bonus. Well I started out with 10m in my account and was doing small blinks. I eventually got to over 105m isk and started larger blinks. At some point I accidentally chose a higher bid with low funds and tapped out my account. Ohh well all I really lost was the 10m and some winnings on top of that. I will play some more to pass the time I am sure.

If this Indy thing works out and I can supplement my income well enough I should be able to reactivate my third account and start doing lvl 4's with that character again. But that is probably not for another month or so to get myself established in a couple of markets around the universe.

Back in the wormhole we did a couple more CA's to make some iskies and unfortunately we have had holes that have been inactive recently. Ohh well I have plans to start doing some low sec and null sec roaming with Vengeances as I have read a blog that someone does well with them in and takes on bigger ships to boot. But that will be something in the future there as well. At this point we still have plans on staying in the wormhole for at least another month and then may pull out due to one of our main Basi pilots leaving the wormhole due to being offline for a month or more. We shall see how things work out there but until that time I will continue to hunt targets down and make the iskies in CA's with my friends and corp mates.

Until next time! Thanks for reading.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Ohh You Sneaky Bastards

Meanwhile back in the wormhole on my main we had a very productive weekend both isk wise and pvp. First we had a very active cave hole that I jumped in with one of my corp mates who was in an Arazu. I warped to the location of the other corps PoS and found quite a few of actives there, including multiple T3's and BC's. We decided it was best to leave the bees nest alone and went back to whome and watched the hole. Well soon a cloaky Tengu entered into our hole and cloaked up. Apparently they also had someone watching the other side of the hole because we started talking in local and they knew our ship types. Well we started seeing battleships jumping in and then out again. Figuring they were closing the hole we just trolled them in local and they finally confirmed that they were closing it due to them planning on running sites and us being cloaky. Soon an Orca jumped in and they gave "our scout" on the other side time to jump back through. Well we laughed at this and waited them out until they finally closed the hole. Too bad we didn't have numbers and combat ships to contend with them as that would have been a fun engagement. Maybe next time.

The next night we actually got a fair number of people online and had 11 CA's in whome! So after scouting the cave we found no actives so we decided to do the CA's and ended up doing them all. Overall from the day I probably made close to 130mil isk in a short period of time. So it was a good day for the corp and the members.

Later that night I was on my alt mining and one of my wh corp mates decided he wanted to find some targets and closed the cave hole. Well he found some actives so I switched over to the main and jumped in with him into the cave. At the time we had 3 people on, with a 4'th on comms. When I got to their PoS we found two Drakes and a Cynabal there. They were all active it looked like and we decided to wait it out as the Cynabal would be trouble for cloaky ships. We waited a fair amount of time and just then the Cynabal and his obvious alt in a Buzzard logged off. At which time a 3'rd toon landed in another Drake. Well we watched as two Drakes warped off to what looked to be a wormhole location. The third Drake pilot changed into a catalyst and also warped that direction. We took this as our chance to ambush them. So we probed the hole down quickly and got the cloaky ships in position with a Hyperion on the other side of the cave hole in whome. Soon the catalyst pilot came back through and logged off. Leaving just two Drakes alone in the adjacent wormhole.

We devised a plan to have the Arazu pilot decloak and tackle one, in hopes that it would draw the Drakes away from the wormhole with his sensor damps so that we could then hopefully ambush them both and get a couple of kills out of it. Well one Drake pilot came back and warped away. During which time the Arazu had decloaked but was not able to get tackle. We thought our plan had been foiled with the Arazu being seen but it turned out that the pilot had not noticed him. Instead he switched to a salvaging ship and went back in the wormhole in his Cormorant. So we waited while they were salvaging, but nothing happened and no new wrecks were being created. So our cloaky Tengu decided to use combat scanners to scare them into coming back to the wormhole. This also had no affect, so he just scanned them down instead. He warped in and landed on the Drake, at which time he took point. I jumped in second and warped to him as he may not have been able to tank the Drakes dps. I landed and took point as well and began to neut and web the prey. Meanwhile the other pilot had gotten away in the Cormorant.

We began our onslaught with just the two of us to start, while the other two made their way into the wormhole. The Drake quickly realized that I was neuting him and I am sure he figured I had less tank then the Tengu because he launched his two drones and began to attack me. Well knowing how well my Pilgrim tanked the last engagement with it I held steady and continued to bash him with my neuts and drones. We even killed off his drones. He managed to get me to about 80% armor by the time our friends arrived while he was into ~20% shield. It was not long after the Hyperion and Arazu landed that he started going down quickly. Well before the ship blew up the pilot ejected and warped off.  We finished the Drake quickly, the others went off in pursuit of the capsule. They got to the wormhole, jumped through and realized that he had not jumped through. Just then a Heron landed on the hole. They locked him up and he seemed to not know which direction to go at that point and tried turning back around. Well that spelled his demise and his ship was soon space dust. Now before it went down the Arazu pilot dropped point and was ready to tackle the pod. He got it so they were able to get another two kills.

Meanwhile I stayed back in the wormhole and gathered my corp mates drones that he had left. Soon the other pilot that was now in a pod and seemed to be stuck in the C3 wormhole with me logged off. Now this is where it becomes funny as he clearly didn't understand that your character stays logged in 15 minutes after getting aggression. So we got out the combat probes and scanned him down. We all got point on his pod and finished him off with the Hype. We sent him an evemail with the killboard kill as well as the explanation of the mechanics so he knows in the future.

So over all I made some good iskies, got to test the Pilgrim's tank out once again (ohh by the way I was top dmg over the Tengu) and had some good fun being sneaky in the wormhole. One thing I know is that you always have to be on the look out in wormholes and scanning constantly really is a priority as the second Drake pilot should have figured out.

Alright, until next time! Thanks again for reading.

The Beginnings Of A Carebear

So I have been doing a lot of stuff in the game recently. I will start off with my alt in this post and post the antics of my wormhole corp and main in another post later on. To start I have joined an Industrial corporation with which I plan on making some salary by participating in their ops. I have also started to do some mining. Right now because of my skill set I am using an Arbitrator and mining drones + meta mining drills. I am yielding about 250m3/min. I have discovered with some drone interfacing skills and miner II drones I will be able to yield 2-2.5 times that in the Arbi, so I am working towards that right now skills wise. I then will get into a Retriever to have a bigger cargo bay along with similar yield with strip miner I's and slightly better with T2 strip miners.

I have also decided on a market to start targetting which means I have a skill plan in place to get into inventing off of a T1 blueprint and create T2 blueprint copies so that I can make the items off of those. I also remembered that I had a bunch of T1 blueprint copies for T1 items that I have started making. Which speaking of which takes a lot of Tritanium. Which means I either need to buy it or I need to mine it. And since I had some cycles from not being in the wormhole due to low activity (will keep this for another post) I decided to do the mining.

Now because the Arbi only has 1.3km3 cargo hold with 4 expanders I have been using a jet can to keep the ore in. This has been working well and I wait until it is up to 10km3 and then I grab my hauler to move the ore to station. Well last night I was mining, and a Vigil landed on grid. Well he warped off again and soon he came back. Now I am fairly new to mining and cans and this is what ultimately got me into trouble.

What he did the next time was that he created his own can, then transferred my ore to his, taking ownership or what is called "can flipping". Now I put out combat drones and soon he flew away. So I figured I had a few seconds to grab some of my own ore and make it back to station. Well that was not true because his corpmate soon decloaked in a Loki and blew me up. This was a valuable lesson and I plan to never have this problem in the future. So in the meantime I went out and built me a new mining ship. I came back to system and saw that a couple of his corp members were still in system, but not the one that blew me up. By this time my timer had run out and I decided to grab some giant secure containers and take them out into space at a belt. Well when I got there I saw that the can was still there along with my wreck.

In the wreck was the ore I grabbed so I scooped this up. I also decided I would get the ore in the can back as well. So what I did was align to station, grab the loots and warp away right away. I then docked with my ore, so I was at least able to make up some of my time. So in the future I will be using the secure containers instead to mine into, even though that will be a pain I think it will be safer and avoid situations such as what happened.

I look forward to this new side to eve and plan on making at least a small income from the things I make in order to supplement my income from the worm hole. More to come later on.

Thanks for reading.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Old Friends And Wormholes

Well this great big world of Eve is not always so big it seems. I say this now after what happened last night. Once logged in I found out that we had a low sec route. Now keep in mind yesterday was a big patch that added walking in stations to the game. Now I had already seen this on the test realm so I was not that excited about it. Given that I decided to go hunting for some targets. So I began to do some warping around and scanning in the wormholes that lead up to the low sec.

I found nothing in the holes and proceeded to go out into the low sec. When I did my dscan there I found some scanner probes and a Ibis on scan. Soon there were other ships and I found that there were about 10 people in system over all. I decided to stalk around the belts looking for ratters. I even went a few systems over looking for people. I found a few mission runners along with some carriers but nothing that was killable or findable with just core scan probes. So back to the low sec that was our exit I went.

Well when I got to the low sec system that held the exit hole I found that there were a couple of Tengu's on scan (both with the owners name in the name of the ship, a classic nub move) and some combat scanners showing up on scan. Well I hung around the exit hole for a little while in hopes one of the Tengu's would find the hole and come to investigate. I did notice that there were some mission wrecks on scan as well but thought nothing of it at the time. I noticed some other ships and people coming in and out of the system, and now that I think of it I did happen to see a Purifier, a Cruor and a couple of carriers. Well the two Tengu's disappeared off scan but one went off scan while I was away from the hole. I decided to make a run back through the route on a whim just to see if a Tengu had ventured into the hole.

When I got in the hole I found 4 core scanner probes on scan. This perked my adrenaline and I immediately decided to keep a look out for anything. Well the probes didn't move for quite some time. So I decided I would take a run through the route back to our home hole. I jumped out of the C3 that the low sec attached to into the adjacent C4. Dscan showed a Purifier on scan, so I held my cloak. Well wouldn't you know it, the ship landed on the hole I was at. I quickly decloaked from the jump and tried to target him. "Target is invulnerable" was what I got. Well I assumed this meant he had jumped through the hole so I quickly jumped through, decloaked and deployed drones in an attempt to decloak him. I orbited for a few minutes and figured he had warped off or actually cloaked up on the other side of the hole. So I waited and waited some more. Nothing. I had missed my opportunity. I decided to head back to our home hole and look around.

I took a short break and was still hungry for a kill. So I went back out through the holes towards the low sec. Just as I was about to jump out into the low sec I received a conversation invite from someone. Curious and thinking it was the cloaked up Purifier pilot I accepted. Well it was him. We had a good chat about how I almost caught him and that he had left his probes in space in the other wormhole. He explained that he was now stuck and assumed I was lying in wait for him. Well I was, sort of. I actually wanted some bigger fish out in low sec but I decided the convo was fun as well at the time. We continued to chat and I was looking over his corp and his information. Well what do you know it was a corp that was part of Amarr Faction Warfare, something I used to be part of. So I brought this up and explained that some of my old corp mates had actually joined his corp at one point. I couldn't remember all that had joined but rattled off a name or two.

Now this is when I decided I would just help him out and explained I could give him the exit hole if he wanted. Naturally he assumed I was after a kill mail and well I was. But I was actually planning on letting him go since he was in FW and I knew some people in his corp. Well as we are talking one of my old FW corps CEO's pipes up in their old public chat asking if I was hunting. I thought this was curious so I checked his corp, well holy shit he was part of the same corp as the mysterious Purifier pilot. Now how funny was this situation. It turns out that he was on his way to the wormhole in an Ishtar to scare off the mean old hunter (me). Hah! What a small world we fly in! Hell I even fleeted him and gave him the hole entrance.

Well come additional fun conversation continued on and eventually we decided to blue one another on a temp basis for the night given my history with the one pilot. So I asked that the alliance/corp blue their corp and it was granted. Luckily because one of my other corpmates that had been drinking and was quite drunk jumped on comms and logged in at that time. He decided it would be a good idea to come back to the wormhole and jumped into the C3. I hear over comms "OHH SHIT AN ISHTAR!!!", well the Ishtar was sitting on the hole. In his drunken stupor he would have been destroyed easily. Well the blue status had gone through and he was able to continue on about his merry drunken way. The rest of the night was fairly quiet at that point and soon I said my goodbyes and logged.

So yeah, what a small world Eve really is. In the next post I think I will speak more on my toon skill ADHD! I just can't keep with my skill path for some reason as there are so many fun things to fly in Eve. At least this time I am just going to add some stuff to the middle of my plan and keep the rest of it the same I think. But I will discuss that next time.

Thanks again for reading.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Missed Proteus Opportunities

I log in the other night and one of my corp mates had just finished scanning down a low sec route. So I decided to go out and camp the gates in the Pilgrim in case I had a chance to snag something easy and then warp off. I was only in system for about 20 minutes when an Iteron IV came through (an industrial hauler) and I missed it because I was busy chatting, lol. Ohh well.

I continued to move around and soon had a Harbinger on scan. It had to be at a PoS or one of the belts so I started looking around. Just then my corp mate who was sitting on the inside of the low sec worm hole blurted out on comms that he had a Buzzard and Proteus on scan with probes being dropped. There were two sets of probes, core and combat. The core probes were near the hole he was sitting on so we decided to set a trap. I warped to the low sec side of the worm hole and sat there uncloaked.

It wasn't long before the Proteus landed on the hole and was about to jump. Now this is where we made a big mistake in that we were going to engage him on the low sec side. So he jumped through and decloaked right away. He actually aggressed me and began to hammer at my shields and armor. My corp mate followed him through the hole and started locking him up. Meanwhile I began to neut, tracking disrupt, web and scram him all the while tanking his damage to the point that I was half in armor. Soon we started to widdle his shield down and I assume I must have capped him out because he stopped firing.

All of a sudden he jumped through the hole. I pulled drones and jumped through after him. I decloaked quickly and saw him. I began to approach him and then he cloaked back up!!! Well I used my Interceptor trick of hitting CTRL-ALT-Space to go to max speed in an attempt to decloak him but he was gone. Well damn we lost our chance at a Proteus kill. We continued to stalk the holes in that worm hole but we did not know what kind of backup he may have on the other side of the C5 hole that was open. So after another 30 minutes of frustrated waiting we decided to call it a night.

Now in hind sight I realized that what we should have done is that I should have aggressed him on the low sec side and then jumped through the hole. Then re-engage him on the inside of the hole. What this would have done is given him a 3 minute timer that would have prevented him from being able to jump through the hole again while we killed him. So lesson learned but it was still adrenaline filled and fun. Ohh well next time we will have the Proteus on our kill board!

In the meantime we have been running CA's as well as Ladars in our home hole and the cave to make some "OK" money. So what I have decided to do is to pause training on my main for a bit and started leveling up one of my other alts on the account in skills to run lvl 1-3's. I have also decided to continue skilling him up to be able to create capital parts in industrial skills.

The reason behind this is three fold. Firstly this gives me something to do outside of the C4 wormhole that I can do solo when people are not online and when I can't stand doing a gas site. Next it allows me to get into something new in the game to make a little money with the production. I also am toying with the idea of my own PoS for production or joining one of my corp mates alts corp that is all industrialists. This also gives me a cheaper way of getting the capital parts for my Chimera once I can fly it properly on my main. Which is a ways away so that is why I am not worried about taking the small break in training right now.

As I learn more about this I will keep you informed to the information that I find along the way. For instance there is a decent guide for science and industry found here. I am kinda excited to get into this other part of Eve as it will be a new experience.

Thanks for reading.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Orca's And My First 'Cry' Pilgrim Loss

So my corp seems to have a special place in their blood lust heart for Orca's. Two nights ago we are in the cave and there are quite a few active industrialists. We knew they were industrialists from their bios and the fact that they named their PoS's such that you could tell they were manufacturing. We also saw them out with retrievers and the likes. Well one of our corpies saw that they left the hole with an Orca. So once again we went on the hunt and camped the hole. For hours and hours we waited. Well we finally had one of our Tengu pilots that jumped in get contacted by one of the corps that was part of the alliance in the hole. They wanted us to leave with our combat ships or they would close the hole. Well that is just what we wanted them to try so that we could jump them. See my corpy decided to play dumb and explain that he was just a miner and didn't know what his friends were up to. Well they didn't bite and so ended a long night of camping for no Orca kill this time around.

The next day dawns. I log in to an empty corp and alliance chat all alone in the wormhole. Which I am pretty comfortable on my own now with. So I decide that I have some time and start to probe down the holes for a route. I find our static hole in my second signature, which is fairly quick considering the number of sites we have in whome. I jump into the Cave and find no one on scan. I start looking for the next static and find it on the first try. I am thinking this is awesome, will have a route in no time. So I jump into the next hole, which happens to be another C4. In here there is two ships on scan and 1 appears to be active. So I find a safe spot and start scanning. Now let me remind you that I am doing this in my combat ship, the Pilgrim, since I do not have a scanner ship in the hole yet. Well in this C4 I find the next static, a C5 in two or three sigs. I am thinking this is great as I never have this kind of scanning luck. So I jump into the next hole and find it has a C5 static. I can't find any ships on scan so I probe the hole down. Now I start to think to myself that this route is going to suck ass so I decide I will fly back to whome and wait for people to come online so that we can close the Cave hole and start again.

So I jump back into the C4 between the C5 and our Cave. Check scan and see nothing. I warp to the Cave hole and am oblivious to what is about to happen. As I am warping I scan again as I get closer and see a Phobos on scan! It doesn't dawn on me that this thing could be on the hole. Well "Son of a Bitch" it was with a bubble up. I land in the bubble cloaked about 20k from the Phobos. When I later thought about my next moves I want to kick myself as I make some mistakes that I will learn from in future instances. My next move is to immediately fly towards the closest point in the bubble to get out of it, which is straight away from the Phobos and the hole that now sits ~37km from me. In hind sight I should have went straight up, down, left or right and I will tell you why next. Because not 10 seconds later a Tengu lands 1700m from me and uncloaks both of us. Had I went in a different direction I would probably have been less likely to have been decloaked. 10 more seconds goes by and the Tengu and Phobos begin to lock me, another Tengu decloaks and starts towards me.

Now I needed to make a decision, either to try to make a run for it or make for the hole. Given what I was up against I decided to try to run for it. This was another mistake as I later thought about what else I could have done. What I did do was the following, I immediately hit my AB and tried to get out of the bubble. Well one of the Tengu's began to warp disrupt me, so I dropped EC-600 ECM drones and waited. At the same time I turned on my damage control and began to watch my shields slowly disappear. Now my Pilgrim is an active armor tank fit with a complex adaptive nano and good resists. So I was tanking the damage "OK", when I finally got a jam with my drones off on the Tengu that was scramming me. Just then the other Tengu began to warp disrupt me as well but he had come in close. So I began to neut him out which happened rather quickly. Now at this time there was a pivotal moment in the fight where I had neuted out the one Tengu, had jams on the other and had just gotten near the edge of the bubble. I began trying to warp off and just then the Phobos microwarp drived closer and rebubbled me. So I was stuck. Now at this point I looked at the distance to the hole and realized I would have been able to make it there since I was now almost 100km off. I decided then to try something different and brought out the dps hammerheads. I put them on the Phobos and continued to tank the dmg with my armor slowly getting lower and lower.

 I made the decision to try to run because I thought my odds at getting to the hole were low given the 3 on 1 terms of engagement. Had I realized that I could tank most of the damage and last almost 6+ minutes I would have done things differently. First I could have realized that these were cloaky Tengu's and they would have had lower dps than a normal combat Tengu. So I think what I should have done is to went on the offensive and approached one of the Tengus. I could have then webbed, scrammed and neuted him out as well as dropped dps drones to go on the attack. I know with the neuts I would have had a good chance at breaking his tank if he was either active or buffered. A passive tank would have been both unique and harder to kill and I don't think I would have run into the passive cloaky Tengu type. I also could have put my tracking disruptor on the Phobos to minimize some of his dmg, even though it was a 1/4 of that of the Tengus it still would have upped my ability to survive and even brought him in close enough to have been able split neuts onto him and possibly neut him out as well.

Now this is all hypothetical but I think I could have at least taken one of the Tengu's out with me and possibly even survived long enough to have gotten to the hole, killed or come close to killing a Tengu and maybe even gotten away. The latter part I am pretty sure would not have happened but at least I would have given a good fight. Which I think I proved a lot harder to take down then they bargained for but what can you do. Except learn from the experience. I definitely plan on testing my 1 on 1 theory with my corp mates cloaky Tengu to see if I would be able to take it out and still tank the dmg to survive long enough.

So as much as it sucked losing a 200mil ship, ohh and getting podded losing 50mil in implants, I learned a lot about how strong the Pilgrim is and have a good idea of what to do in any future instances like that. Next time I hope to have more even odds and be ready to go on the attack but will definitely have more confidence in what is becoming one of my favorite ships for both looks and ability.

Later that night my corp crushed the Cave hole due to my loss and found a new route, which they were able to camp and kill a Raven that was trying to crush a C3 hole in the Cave. The dirty bastards didn't scan the last hole out so that I could get there lol. While they were doing that I decided to scan for wormholes in Amarr of all places. Hell I found one and jumped in and sitting right on the hole was a Buzzard. I uncloaked and locked him up, was even able to launch drones and send them after him before he realized what was happening but alas he jumped out. I camped the hole for a bit, even saw a Tengu log in on scan and thought I would get my 1 v 1 since he disappeared off scan and clearly was a cloaky coming to the hole to check if I was still there. Just then my corp found the low sec hole so I decided to jump out get back into whome. Which is where I am now in a shiny new Pilgrim.

Thank you all for reading and more tales to come!

Monday, June 6, 2011

Death Of An Orca

So if I were to ask you how long you would wait for an Orca kill, what would be your answer? 20 minutes? 30? an hour? Well my corp and I seem to be willing to wait hours lol. I will start with some other information before getting into the Orca kill. Ohh hell why not just get into it.

So while working on a route we ran into some active players that were trying to close one of the holes. So we decided to go back and close the cave hole in our home system with our own Orca. Well it just so happens that we were able to close the hole out. While starting to scan for a new route we decided to check the K C5 hole that had also spawned in our home hole.  One of my corp mates went into the C5 in his cloaky Arazu. He happened to find an Orca and a Obelisk on scan at a POS. The Obelisk pilot jumped in a Buzzard and shortly after both of the ships warped away and disappeared.

This gave us an opportunity to get my Pilgrim in the hole and a couple other ships (a Hyperion and a Tengu) on our side of the C5 hole ready to jump in. Soon the Buzzard came back in and it gave the Arazu pilot, who had combat scanner probes out, time to find a location on the K hole within their C5. So the Arazu and myself sat cloaked off the hole for about an hour waiting. Just then the entire game cluster went offline. We both started warping to a far away planet before the drop to see if we could be out of scan range of the Buzzard pilot when we came back online. Well it seems to have worked because he simply sat in his POS after the 25 minutes of downtime going about his onlining of modules business. We even had one time where I became uncloaked because I got close to the signature of the hole but not the hole itself. This is an invisible area in space that I was not aware of until now. So I won't be orbiting the hole at 7.5k anytime soon again.

So we sat in waiting, and waited and waited another 30 or so minutes, with no signs of the Orca. So at that time I had to walk my dog. I took the pup for a decent walk around the neighborhood that took about 20 minutes. When I got back I found that my friends had tackled the Orca pilot on the hole and he jumped back through, locking him from jumping through another hole for 3 minutes. His shields were going down quickly and I was warping my ass off to get in on the kill. Well I managed to get there just as they had him at ~10% structure and got a scram on him to get in on the kill. I also was able to get in on the pod death as well. It seems he was offering in local a ransom of 100mil isk. Turns out the ship was worth 800mil since he had about 200m in isotopes in it. This brought our kill board positive for the week so it was a good kill for us.

I noticed on the kill board that a couple more industrials were taken down by one of my other corp mates a little later on. All in all this was a good pvp day for us and goes to show that it pays to wait when hunting, lol.

As for the other information this weekend was our first op for sites. It seems that the C4 sites are a lot easier than we anticipated and we killed them quite quickly. Well I have found that even though the Legion has a bonus to optimal range the pulse lasers were not cutting it in the site due to the range at which most of the BS's and BC's stayed. So I have started training for T2 beams which will take a day for me to complete. What really sucks is that this cuts about 130+ dps off my ship making it "OK" for running sites. Either way I will still be contributing and it is the best option I have right now for a C4, unless I want to go back to a Raven or CNR. Which we are trying to stick with all T3's to keep the hole from being disturbed during our farming runs. I will have level V offensive systems in the next 4 days and will work on surgical strike as well to boost my dps on the ship. I should be able to make up another 75 dps or more with some skill boosts. I will let you know how things look as I progress my skills but I at least bring some pain when dps'ing and I have a decent tank. Not too mention the ship is pretty cool looking and I still have the pulses in case of a pvp need.

Ohh well as I have more ops and pvp opportunities this week I will let you all know of the antics of the corp. All in all I am reenergized with being back in the wormhole and I think I am definitely done with null sec in the small scale for the foreseeable future due to there being not enough OOMPH behind having half carebears and small turn outs for Sov wars. If we ever do go back I fully expect to look for a large Alliance so that there is more to do, more pvp ops and better chances at achieving the alliances goals. Not to mention actually having goals and not just flying from the hip every other day like the last alliance.

More to come and thanks again for reading.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Back To Our Roots

So after many weeks of null sec, sov wars and ultimately getting camped in due to lack of planning by the alliance we have made our way back into a C4 wormhole. We decided to go with a C4 that has a static C4. This allows us the ability to have a smaller presence in the wormhole as compared to what was needed in the C6 last time. We have a smaller tower and a lot less assets.

We are still going to be using Basilisks for logistics so we are shield tanking. We have decided to try to get as many T3's in this time as possible due to the smaller hole sizes so that we can farm the static C4. Since I am all Amarr I plugged in all of the skills to fly a Legion. A very cool looking ship with a lot of good pvp abilities due to its bonuses to armor tanking. The only problem is we are shield tanking. So I went to work bastardizing the poor thing to come up with a fit that works. Well it is not the way the ship was meant to work but I was able to get the best dps from it while having a 63,000+ effective hp tank and very nice resists. As much flak as I am sure I would take from the Eve community for using it with shields I look forward to flying it.

I am quite excited as this is a cool ship and is my first T3. And I love doing wormhole ops as they are more dynamic and hold your attention because of the aggro switching, neuting and repping that the sleeper drones do. Tomorrow we should be back into the wormhole with our T3's and salvagers so that we can start doing ops.

I just remembered some other interesting stuff that happened last night. While putting up the tower in the wormhole and setting up the rest of the mods we decided to check the adjacent C4 static hole that we will call the "Cave" from now on for life to potentially have some pvp with. Well when we got in a couple of ships were on scan. Our prober probed them down and well what do you know it was an abandoned bunch of arrays and a ton of small scanning ships. Well I immediately blew up all of the t1 ships as I needed to take my aggression out on something after all!! LOL. But what we did find was some guns, and some arrays including an XLarge Ship Assembly array. This was a nice find and on our first night in the wormhole we have already started looting other peoples crap.

Either way the wormhole has brought new life into my Eve experiences. I learned a lot in my time in null and I found that Sov wars in a smaller alliance is just not fun. It is like trying to stop a mack truck with your bare hands and a rope, soooooo not going to happen. I did get more confidence in my FC'ing skills and will be taking fleets out of the wormhole and into null and low sec for more pvp fun. I plan on running my frigate fleet, maybe as soon as this weekend. We shall see how things play out and how our route looks.

More to come. Thanks for reading.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

So Much Stuff

So once again I post about the failure of our new alliance that we have joined. Currently they have once again made a mistake about trying to take Sov, only to piss off the same big alliance and get kicked out of the one station they were holding Sov in. This means they are going back to their "roots" in NPC null sec space.

Well in the meantime they also were selected for the Alliance Tournament that CCP is holding. I was lucky enough to have been able to participate in the training of our pilots by practicing on the test server. What was nice was that we could field many different looks against the fleet that was going to be used in the tournament. What's nice is everything costs 100 isk on the test server and is seeded so that we could fit just about anything. While practicing I had a chance to do some 1v1's with a corp mate and alliance mates. I was able to test my Armageddon fits, my curse and Nightmare fits that I had been wanted to play around with. The curse fit worked out really well 1v1 against another curse. I also learned some valuable lessons in positioning and kiting. I look forward to playing the Curse and Pilgrim more so on the real server.

Now on to what our personal corp has decided to do now that the dust has settled a little bit. It seems a lot of us miss the money of WH life and we have now decided to move back into a WH at this point. It looks like we will be moving into a C4 wormhole that is on the edge of hard for wormholes in difficulty. This means that we will need to at least do remote rep gangs or have a logistics to really burn through them. I have already decided that I will be selling my PVE Nightmare and be purchasing the ship I will be using in the C4 sites. I plan on taking in my Pilgrim, a SB, a scanning ship and the PVE ship that I will be doing sites with. Perhaps also a Noctis for cleaning up wrecks within the sites after we clear them, which is where the real money is.

Either way I look forward to being back in the wormhole but I do plan on running PVP ops that take us out into null sec space in the future as well. I would like to run Armor HAC/Recon gangs, shield / logi gangs and the ever popular frigate gang that I had ran so many times before. Hopefully the other corp that has been along side us for a while will also venture into the WH so that we can put together good sized gangs for both PVE and PVP in the very near future. Time will only tell but hopefully I am able to start doing more in the game now and will be able to write more about it as well for all of my followers.

I do have more now actually as I think about it. I have to decide what type of ship to run for the sites. I am very enticed by the Legion which is only 4 days away from being trained to level 4. But what this ship does not have is that of a good shield tank which is what we will be running again. I have been playing around in EFT some and with some updates in my missile skills I could have a psuedo Tengu wanna be Legion with 60k ehp and 500 dps. Which should be enough for a C4 with a RR gang and especially with Logi support. It makes me sad to think that I could have my own Logi support had I not had to sell my alt. But I plan on having some good PVP fights in the WHs now that I have an array of better skills.

This also brings up a conundrum of whether or not to continue down the path of a carrier at this point. Being in a C4 there will be no need for the Capitals that I know of, unless we can still do escalations. If that is the case then I can certainly continue down that path. If not then I may want to look to cross train into a Tengu and more Caldari ships to broaden my boat skills some. I may even want to cross train into Minmatar at this point to be able to get the cross-skill ships. I could also build up my support skills for both gunnery, missiles and tanking skills too instead. I really need to sit down and build out a path for both. I know in my current set of skill plan I have Marauders and Black Ops ships queued after the carrier and I may want to move those up a notch as well.

So once again I have some major decisions to make that may delay the carrier once again but may turn out to be better in the short term for my over all skills. I will keep you in the know as I make more decisions on this.

Thanks once again for reading.