Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Dram Addiction

I now get why Dramiels are so expensive. They are AWESOME!!! I have been recently using my Dram that survived the big VFK battle down in Providence for a ton of non-stop fleet ops. This has been anywhere from small random roaming about the area directly attached to our deployment space down on the southern tip of Provi, to frig roams (brings back a lot of memories) and Nano shield gangs. Where I have managed to get in on just about every kill that we have gotten thanks to its speed. And wow is it a blast going 8km/s in the thing!

It also has a hell of a tank for such a small ship and I have been dual prop / shield buffer tank in mine since I bought it.Just yesterday as a matter of fact I was given a couple of opportunities to test the dps and tank out. The first engagement was me jumping in a quick fleet once I came online due to a Sleipner being on gate along with a Vaga in our "home" system. Well burnt back to gate and we only managed to kill the Vaga on the other side, which I missed out on the kill due to aggression. Ohh well. One of my corp mates and another alliance mate decided to form a fleet up and perhaps do a small roam.

We had me in my Dramiel, a cloaky probing Falcon and a Cynabal. I started off by checking one of the systems two away from "home" and while the Falcon pilot was doing some probing. When I loaded on the other side there was a Keres lying in wait. Well I immediately tackled him as he did me and I began to burn away and let my drones start to eat away from him while I used my afterburner due to the mwd being shutdown by his scram. Just then a friend of his in a Zealot lands and begins to try to catch up to us. We had already made some good range and the Keres was starting to dip into armor so he broke off. At which point I grabbed my drones and turned on the speed of the mwd to burn to a safe 300km off gate. Well I alerted my friends to the targets and I warped to and jumped back through the gate and then warped to a safe.

They didn't follow and by this time I had the Falcon in system with me so we decided to go back and see what else might have landed. When we jumped in both the Zealot and Keres were still there. We decided to take them on and we broke cloak and I immediately went after the Zealot and attempted to get in under his guns with a 500 orbit. He managed to get a couple of pot shots off on me which took me to ~20% shield but once in under his tracking his dps fell considerably. I disrupted him and put my drones on the Keres while working on the Zealot with my guns and the help of the Falcon who had jammed him and was trying to get point on the Keres. Well the Zealot was going deep into armor and was almost to structure when he all of a sudden warped off. The Keres being out of scram ranged also bugged off. I was puzzled as to what had happened until I realized that I had gotten jammed myself and lost point without realizing it. Well holy fail! Ohh well it had proven to me some of the power of the Dram.

Later on we put a Nano shield gang together and went roaming down the bottom pipe of Provi. We managed to get a Drake along the way before a large CVA gang was found to be jumping in from Mishaba so we jumped to the next system and burnt up from the gate and then warped to a ping. Well apparently someone was on the phone and didn't hear the order so we lost a Rapier on the gate. We managed to avoid this gang for a little bit but then found word that it was between us and our home system. The orders from the FC were for one of the Dram's to jump into the next system and get eyes. So I jumped in and found them jumping into system with their scout on gate. I quickly burnt away from the gate and alerted our fleet to their intentions. They warped around in the previous system and the enemy fleet actually came back through the system I was in and warped to the next system towards "home".

The FC then needed eyes in the next system and I volunteered again. This time when I loaded the entire fleet was right on top of me. I held my cloak long enough for my session timer to be up and I quickly tried to get to gate, but it was not to be. I was quickly locked up and alpha'd down before I could even hit the jump button. Looking back on the killmail there was a Huggin that seems to have webbed the shit outta me. No biggy, I later went 44 jumps round trip to put another one together, this time with double nano's, as I had no other ships down in Provi to play with.

That night I was part of a couple more roaming gangs a couple of which allowed me to get a few more kills on the day. But the damage of my addiction had already been started and I don't know if I can ever go back to another type of interceptor again. Only time will tell but I foresee a lot of fun in my future with this ship!

Monday, July 25, 2011

Encounters Of A Laggy Kind

This weekend I got up early to participate in a large fleet of what is called the "Thunder Cat" fleet. Which consists of Tengu's, Logistics and some other support ships. I can't fly the shield ships Scimitar or Tengu so I put a Dramiel together to join up in this fleet. The gathering was pretty good for NC.Dot, with us having 40-50 in fleet.

Just after form up the FC called for all super cap alts to log in and get ready to jump. It turns out that PL was in the process of breaking out their supers from VFK and we were slated to assist. We began by titan bridging over to a mid system and then jumped into the adjacent system to VFK. We landed on gate and the call to jump in was made.

When in system it took forever for the grid to load. I was still able to move and immediately gave the fleet a ping. As the gate was heavily bubbled. Everyone was burning out when a decent sized Maelstrom fleet landed and a small skirmish began. Just then we found that the fight was taking place at a pos and a warp in was made. We all warped to that point and more laggy grid issues occurred. At this point in time there were about 600 people in system.

This particular pos had the cyno jammer located at it. We began to kill off some of the BS fleet that was located on the pos that was in the middle of fighting PL's Abaddon fleet. We all had to log out and back in at one point to get grids to load but we were finally able to target the cyno jammer and the fleet began to take it down. Meanwhile we had our supers ready to jump in once it was taken down. Also on the field were Goons supers with a couple actually being outside of the enemy pos. Since I was in a quick ship I began to work on some of the smaller ships and killed a bubbler (Sabre) solo as well as locked down an Ishtar for a bomber to kill.

As the cyno jammer went down we jumped in our supers and it was then called out by the FC to point an Avatar Titan that had bounced out of the PoS. We began to attack this as best we could as lag was terrible at this point with almost 800 people in system. The titan managed to get back inside the pos so the entire fleet changed to an Aeon that was also outside the pos. This ship didn't make it in and we managed to take him down within a few minutes. I was lucky enough to get in on the killmail for that one.

We burned down the rest of the bubbles around us as well as killed off any dictors. The entire fleet then warped out to a planet where we had a couple more enemies that quickly were killed off. It was at that time that what we had come to do was successful and we all warped to the out gate. Where our supers happened to have warped as well. Upon jumping I noticed that there were more than 1000+ people in local at that point and lag was rediculous. I pressed jump and waited there for a couple of minutes, which in the meantime an angry Maelstrom enemy fleet landed a short distance from the few of us that were left there.

I finally jumped into the next system but lag was still bad, so I did a log out and back in. This fixed most of it and I came back into a warp to the out gate. After that I was able to burn out and catch back up to the fleet. Now I have been looking forward to something like this for a while and it was interesting to contend against the lag as well as the sheer numbers of ships on grid. I really enjoyed it and I think I will see a lot more of these large engagements due to the next move by NC.Dot, which is to deploy to Providence to assist White Noise in their assault on Against All Authorities. I know providence pretty well from us roaming there a lot back when we were part of a null sec alliance in Catch so this should be a good time.

They already had an epic fight, which didn't go so well considering the huge numbers that the enemy brought to the field. I will try to keep you up to date with the different fleets that I join as well as some of the political stuff that seems to be happening down in Provi.

Meanwhile my Indy alt has gained a new title over in the corp he is part of, that is the Mining Leader. This means I plan ops and lead them. As well as pay the participants and take care of the logistics for the ore that is mined. I held our first op and it was very successful. We had 7 people show up and we depleted one roid field. In future ops I hope to get a lot more people and bring in a ton more ore. One thing that I love doing is coming up with fair ways to compensate people and my first act was to come up with a pay schedule for the members that was fair and also left some money for the corp afterwards. I think with my research into the market and calculation of approximate m3 ore mined per minute I was able to come up with something that works well. People seemed pleased with the outcome and I was too.

One problem with the mining ops currently though is that some random mercenary corp war dec'd our little Indy corp. This puts our mining ops on hold and gives me some potential pvp ops with the alt as well. I still am not sure where the dec came from, it could just be that they wanted to pick on the Indy's or that someone paid for their services. We shall find out hopefully, but if not ohh well. More on that to come I guess.

Finally the corp I am in down in null sec also has a couple of war dec's currently and we went out last night in battle cruisers to find some trouble in Jita. I took a Harbinger that I found on contract in our staging system. On the way we ran into some random neuts that wanted help in killing a Nightmare that was on station. We figured it was clearly a trap and took the bait. On the warp their we kicked the neuts and found the NM aggressed on the station with two carriers along side of him. Which seemed to have been repping him. Well we quickly gtfo and moved on to Jita. Where we used some neutral alts to get us warp ins on some WT's that were sitting outside the station. There was a Machariel, Megathron, Hurricane, and a Dramiel. We attempted to bait them off of the station with someone but they didn't bite, with the exception of the Dramiel. We landed on the bait and were not able to catch the little bastard unfortunately. We then saw an Apoc Navy and a reg Apoc undock instead of the Mega and Machariel. We decided to warp to zero on them and attack the Apoc to get one kill out of it potentially. We landed and it started to burn down, but not before both myself and one of our Hurricanes were killed. At which time the Apoc began to get reps from neuts and the attempts became futile.

So we gathered our pride and headed back to home base. Where I contracted my ships to be moved to Provi and now I have to figure out if I want to do the 44 jump trek or if I would rather pod myself down to maybe Amarr and then grab a ceptor or bomber maybe to make a run for the staging system in Provi. I dunno yet but I will let you know what I end up doing in the next post.

Thanks for reading.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Light The Titan Bridge! ... WTF Is Going On???

So there was an op scheduled yesterday that I planned on joining. This was a nano fleet that was going to be going through a wormhole to find some kills. So I decided to put a Curse together quickly before the roam. So I stopped my running of the Havens in our home system that I had been doing to make some iskies. Which it took me a few trips to a station 6 jumps away before I had the perfect combination of both tank and gank for them on the Sacrilege, but eventually had it.

Ok, back to the fleet. I quickly jump clone over to the staging system and began to put the Curse together. Well just then over comms it was made know that a hostile fleet was roaming through our space. they announced that they wanted to quickly put together the Hellcat (Abbadon, T3 and Guardian) fleet. So since I didn't have an Abbadon down there I grabbed a Guardian off of a contract for retarded money. Well we ended up going back to the nano shield fleet and all warped to a Titan! Well this was my first time seeing one and it was impressive. The plan was to have our scout that was following the fleet in a Rapier to drop a cyno on them and we were going to Titan bridge in. Sitting there, ready to spam right click on the Titan and the cyno is finally called to be lit and the bridge is called to be opened.

Nothing...
Nothing....
Nothing.....

"WTF IS GOING ON??" I hear over comms. The FC begins to ask if the Titan pilot is on comms and is wondering what the F is going on. No one knows, he did mention in fleet who is alt was earlier. But no responce. Well soon someone notices that the pilot is actually in another room within the team speak server! All I could do was shake my head and think "Wow ... FAIL!". Suffice it to say the Rapier died to them.

Shortly after that we found out they were one jump from one of our cyno beacon systems. We jump to that beacon and warp to the next systems gate to find that they are landing on the other side. We quickly see them starting to jump in and start to kite away from the gate. Well they decidedly jump back through the gate.

We jump in our bigger ships and then the rest of the fleet. Only to find that they have started to burn away from the gate. We begin the chase and primaries begin to be called for. Almost immediately a Hurricane gets primaried on our side and goes down. Well it seems I was closest because next was myself. I quickly hit the shield broadcast and saw my shields go from 50% and back to 100% over and over. But it seemed like I was ok, so I burnt back towards our Scimitars so all of them could reach me. Meanwhile we started taking down the closest targets and were able to melt a Drake and a Lachesis. The enemy fleet warped off while we had two more Drakes tackled and we quickly took them down. We chased the other fleet on the way back towards our staging system and had a HIC ready and waiting for them. But they ended up making a change in course and safed up. "GF's" were had in local and we decided to go on our regularly scheduled roam.

This was through a wormhole that lead over into Esoteria and right into a nest of carebear's that were doing Sanctums and Havens by the dozens. In the system that we popped out into we were able to get a Paladin kill, that unfortunately was meta-4 fail fit. We hit quite a few other systems and came out with a hand full of kills which included a faction fit Nightmare worth 2 billion iskies! It was a great kill and is currently the highest ship kill for the week. They planned on going out again but I had things to do before ending the night up. So I missed a few more kills.

Ohh well it was a fun night and I look forward to using the Curse some more and can't wait to get to use the Guardian in a fleet. In the next post I will let you know the cool news about my Indy toon and what has happened with him.

Thanks for reading.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

It's Official

Well I have been given the opportunity to participate in some of the bigger engagements in the game now as I was accepted to the corp that I applied to. So far they are a great bunch of guys, very helpful and they definitely have a good grasp on the game, so I look forward to flying with them. Since yesterday I was able to get an Interceptor down in our staging area and was lucky enough to join two roams already.

The first roam I joined up with as they were on the roam and they went through a WH that landed us in Syndicate space. Well we roamed around for a good 45minutes to an hour with no luck of finding anything. So we took the more direct route back which took us through 2 jumps of Gallente hisec space. I am not liked by the Gallente NPC's, so I was lucky enough to be in a fast ship and made it through easily, as did the others that had security issues.

Well as we were making our way through low sec back into the safety of null sec we found that someone was following us. Well we waited for them at an "In" gate in which we left a rear scout to let us know what was coming. Well even though he saw the scout he jumped into us anyway. This poor Drake had no chance, although he did fire a couple of shots at me he melted pretty quickly. This turned out to be our only kill on the roam but at least we got one.

Later another roam popped up that needed people and once again I took the ceptor out. This time I was the forward scout for the main fleet. We had about 40 strong mixed with nano'd cruisers through battleships, which included a couple Machariels. The trip to our destination was fairly uneventful. We got into the system right before VFK where we found a dozen or so orange tags but no real numbers of Goons. So we sat on the gate and setup our strategy. Meanwhile we had a scout inside VFK on the gate and he was letting us know that massive amounts of people we landing. He counted approximately 40 Maelstroms and fair number of smaller support ships. At this time we found that there were more targets in YAO so we quickly got into that system. Warping off before the alpha fleet jumped in on us.

Once in YAO we quickly sat off of a gate with our strategy ready to go. Soon the Goons entered system and the population spiked to well over 150. Now completely outnumbered the ceptors were ordered to scout the gates. I went to the first one to find them warping off to another. I followed and landed 100km from the gate. Bubbles were being put up all over the gate and there were about 60-70 at zero on the gate. I immediately reported back and aligned to the star and started to MWD off. A host of smaller ships broke off from the main enemy fleet and began to burn out towards me. I was able to keep range on most of them and when one got to within 70km I decided I would change directions and keep eyes on the fleet as long as I could. This was my downfall, as just then a Dramiel warped to the Stilletto that was now 60K away and burnt to to me in a blink of an eye at 8km/s+ and tackled me. It wasn't long until a handful of people we on me and I went down. The rest of the fleet was beginning to get chased around and we suffered about 8-10 losses out of the engagement.

Ohh well I look forward to be able to fly the Malediction more often in more fleets. I have also brought down some Vengeances, Zealots and a Sacrilege that I will be using to do ratting in the area. The tank on the thing is insane and I really like what they have done with the model now, so I am looking forward to flying it and perhaps taking on some Havens and joining corp mates in Sanctums as well.

Meanwhile in the wormhole with my mim alt I was able to get into the wormhole this past weekend. And was able to run a site with my new corp mates. We had a whopping 15 ships in our fleet and melted the shit out of the sleepers. I look forward to some pvp and more sites with my new friends there as well in the near future. I am still on par to train for the Rapier and should be working on those skills by tomorrow.

My Indy toon has been doing well, joining missioning and mining fleets to make some iskies as well. Recently a division of our corp has found a wormhole and put up a PoS in it. I have not moved my toon in as he is not ready for wormholes and one toon in is enough for me at the moment. I will continue to do my manufacturing and mining in hisec thank you very much. Speaking of which the alliance I am in has a PoS in hisec for doing research and I plan to use this. They may be shutting it down as some of the people that upkeep it are in the wormhole but I have asked that I be able to keep it fueled in order to continue to run my BPO's through. We shall see what happens with that.

More fun to come, thanks for reading.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Changes, Changes and More Changes

A status update on my application is that the CEO of the corp that I have applied to in NC.Dot has been away so there has not been any movement on my app as this time. So I have been bored with my main and have recently taken to trolling low sec in a Vengeance looking for targets at the belts. I recently found nothing so I decided I would go somewhere that I know I would find a fight, top belt in Amamake.

Well as soon as I landed there was a Jaguar 400km off and a Thrasher about 2k off from me. Well I wanted a fight so I quickly locked up and tackled the Thrasher. I knew this would be a hard fight to win but decided to overheat and give it my best shot. One thing I did wrong was to get 7.5k away in my orbit, where instead I should have gotten under 500m from him to assist in keeping his tracking off and would have led to having been able to last longer. Basically while I ate away at his shield buffer he was able to break my tank and eventually I popped. Now I posted a "gf" in local and warped my pod away. Later on I found that I was on the killmail for the Thrasher as it looks like the Jaguar warped in and finished him off. So it was win-win for me, I got my pvp fix and got a kill out of it.

Meanwhile back on the industrial character I found a new corp that is a larger and more active corp. Within a few hours of joining them I was able to join both a missioning op (as the salvager) and a mining op. One thing that I am disappointed with is that there are less 5% and 10% asteroids in the system that we live at but I have a lot more people to chat with and do things with. Which is part of why I play the game so this should be a lot of fun at this point. I also happened to have dragged along one of the other corp mates from the first Indy corp into this new one as well. It kinda sucks for the guy that was trying to build his numbers but I needed something more active now, not later on. This corp is established and has dedicated goals which were things I was looking for.

I also have been toying with the idea of doing some hisec exploration with the Navy Omen on my Indy toon or I may put together a Sacrilege with my main to do them. I am still up in the air on what I will do and which toon to do it with. It really depends on if I get accepted to the null sec corp as to which I do I think at this point. I definitely want to play with exploration a little to try to add more money to the playing game fund.

Also my wife gave me permission to pay for an account recently. So I have decided to activate my third account, the Mimintar character. And have decided to add her to the wormhole corp that we merged the old corp with (which by the way provided more than 650m isk of dividends recently to its share holders). I have gotten the scanning skills taken care of on this toon thanks to the free skill points that we were awarded a while back. I also have a few support skills to train to be able to fit the Maelstrom shield buffer fit I plan to fly in the C6 wormhole. I also have fit out a scanning Probe ship and a rupture for pvp. Now this toon was wide open for skills and I have asked the CEO of the new wh corp about what would work best to fit into their needs. What I have come up with for a path is to train for a Rapier > Broadsword > Scimitar > Loki, in that order with full T2 gun skills mixed in as well. The Rapier looks like a very fun ship to fly and I hope it turns out to be as fun as the Pilgrim has been for me. We shall see.

So while I await possibly more changes to come I think I am getting myself setup to make some iskies in the C6 and with the Indy toon, which I have a pretty good base of sales already with the markets that I am in. I will continue to expand on those markets and I also have learned that the alliance for this new Indy corp has a hisec pos that I might be able to use for research on my blueprints. If so I have just been able to make even more money with research of ME and PE on the blueprint originals so that I can sell BPC's as well as keep my costs much lower on making the items themselves from the minerals that I mine. Although I am starting to think it may be better to just sell the raw materials to the corp and keep my industry foot print on a small scale of just salvaging as well as mining. As salvaging recently has raked in over 50m in just one days work and that was splitting the loot with someone.  Hell I may justt make salvaging into a small business in the game as well. This combined with the possible money from the wormhole could very well pay for my pvp fix on my main as well as pay for the account itself. That is the end hope that I have and I look forward to trying to make this a reality.

Either way I really hope my app is accepted as I am really looking forward to being in on some bigger gangs and engagements as Deklein is continually being sieged by NC.Dot and friends. The future is promising and I will let you know as I have more and more run ins with both my pvp stuff as well as the newer parts of Eve that I am exploring.

Thanks once again for reading.

Monday, July 11, 2011

While The Cats Away All Hell Breaks Loose

Well I have been on vacation for the last week and a half and wow has a lot of stuff has changed. To start my Indy character is now into a Retriever and man what a difference in the amount of Ore that I can mine. It also seems that the alliance that the Indy corp that I am part of seems to have gone off the deep end and has war dec'd another alliance for some real life reasons. What this all means is that I get to watch local and make sure I don't lose my Indy ships while trying to mine up some Ore.

Ohh well, soon I will have T2  strip miners and then I will be taking a break from skilling up this character. Which brings me to the next portion of this post and that is that my long time combat / wormhole corporation will be closing its doors very soon. The decision was made to pull everyone out of the wormhole due to lack of activity and the fact one of the more active players will be gone for a couple of months. And the leadership basically has decided to liquidate all of the assets in the corp and potentially split it up between the active members. The decision on what will be done with the end isk is still being decided upon and well I was recently provided a nice token of gratitude from the corp in the form of two skill books, Captial Ships and Caldari Carrier!! I was dumbfounded with the generosity of the directors that unanimously was to gift the books to me from the corps assets. I really have to say that I appreciate the gifts and couldn't say "Thank you" enough to them. Basically we are talking about 800+ million isk worth of gift here and I really appreciated these as it saves me a ton of time of saving up.

With that let's discuss some options. Basically they came up with two options for everyone. One they made a deal with one of the alts corps from their NC.Dot corp mates down in null sec that has a wormhole corp that will accept any members of us that applied. The other option was to be able to apply to that NC.Dot corp that requires that you have internal references which I am lucky enough to have my two corp mates that have alts in the corp. This is a huge opportunity for me in my opinion. For one this certainly would get me going on my carrier skills to be able to participate in their capital ops. This also would allow me to do something that I have been wanting to be part of which is large scale warfare. So I have decided that this is the route that I will be taking initially. I at least want to apply and see where it goes from there. This may prove to be a challenge given the fact that they have a 40m skill point minimum and I am at about half of that. But they do have a stipulation that this might be able to be overlooked given the internal references that are used. So we shall see how my app goes over once my friends have spoken with the CEO of the corp.

I am really excited about this chance and I hope to be able to get accepted so that I can have some mad PvP fun in the large fleets that NC.Dot has been known to field. This means I will also be training for a heavy interedictor as well so that I have a chance to get in on some of the cap fleets that require the HIC's, something I was on the fence about but really wanted to do as well.

So this means that my blog may get very busy very quickly. Now I still have the other wormhole corp to fall back on as well and I would expect more activity given the size of that corp too. I have some good things going for me they will just be in different spots within the game and I look forward to the future right now.

One final thing I have started to work on is the amount of Ore that I need to mine in order to have a Chimera built by the time I can actually fly one correctly, meaning Fighters, energy skills and shield skills. I actually was given the below link to calculate the needs:

http://eve.smith-net.org.uk/index.php?c=cap

I look forward to continuing to offset my costs by using my friends cap parts BPO's and buying their BPC's that they have left so that I can get one built. However I may just continue to use the ore to continue to build the items that I currently have a market for. Will have to crunch the numbers and see how things look. I will let you know what I figure out as I go.

Thanks again for reading and a lot more to come.