Wednesday night, I bought and trained the Destroyers skill and purchased a new Cormorant, which I have named Mountain of Entropy. It’s not the sweetest-looking ship the Caldari have – it’s somewhat reminiscent of the shuttles from Space 1999 – but it’s far from the ugliest ship in EVE (which as far as I’ve seen would be the Caldari Shuttle.) Its eight high slots let me fit six rather low-quality railguns, a missile launcher and a salvager, and the combination seems pretty effective in the engagements I’ve put her through so far, although the volume of ammo that I’m going through with this setup is frightening. I’ve also fitted her with an Afterburner, a Shield Booster and Cap Booster, with Damage Control in the low slot. As has been pointed out, her shields are not as resilient as the Merlin’s, but thus far, at least, I can live with that. I’ll need to worry about it in the tougher missions, but by then, hopefully, my skills will help a bit in that department.
It being time for me to start heading into mission-running, I’ve set up shop at a Caldari Navy station and run a total of five missions for them so far. Tuesday’s trial mission went very well, and it was much tougher than either of the two missions I did yesterday. My skills are still really weak at this kind of thing – I’m going to spend a solid week or so working on ship-centered skills, not just Spaceship Command, Gunnery and Missiles, but on various Navigation, Engineering, Electronics and Mechanics skills as well, which are invaluable to almost anyone regardless of what they’re doing. I already have a reasonable base of social skills from character creation, but I’ll be putting some time into a couple more of those as well. At this point, with maybe half a dozen exceptions, I pretty much have (or at least have the books for) all the skills I will need for the foreseeable future. Tractors are some ways away yet, but I can live without them for the duration of Mountain of Entropy‘s lifespan as a mission-runner, after which she’ll be converted to a dedicated salvage ship.
Speaking of which, as I figured, Salvaging is helping a ton, even after the alleged nerf from some months back. I spent a little under a million ISK for the skill, ship and a couple of pieces of gear yesterday, and still closed out the evening at 8.5 million, about 400K more than I started with – and this is after running only two missions. It’s not impossible that I’ll hit 10 million tonight, although I’d better not count on that. I’m also now trained up for Cruiser, but like I said before, my Osprey is located about 22 jumps away, so I didn’t plan to get pick it up until tonight. I do plan to get into a Moa or Caracal eventually, but there’s little reason for me to worry about that quite yet, as I can’t run Level 2 missions – although I’m actually not all that far away.
It’s probably time to start doing some corp scouting as well. I have an in with at least three different corps right now, but two of them are outside of my time zone and the other I don’t know much about. And in any case I would like to hook up with a corp with a high level of activity during the times I’m online. The in-game recruitment channel is pretty dire, filled with spam and nimrods. Truth be told, I was thinking of going the EVE University route, but they’re at war and not recruiting just now.
Last night I ran three more missions, one of which was a courier run and the other two being very easy. This did not get me much in the way of loot or salvage – and this is why the more challenging missions are better. Three heavy combat missions could put 2-3 million ISK in my wallet, whereas the ones I ran last night made me maybe 450K. Oh well… the big ones will come along in due time, and meanwhile the easy ones are generally quick if nothing else. My base standing with the Caldari Navy is now a whopping 0.07, although that’s getting boosted considerably through my social skills, and as I noted, all told I’m really not all that far away from running the level 2s. Tonight I plan to go pick up the Osprey, do a mining run or two to see how she flies, maybe do a refit or two, and run some more missions.
Speaking of that, I remain very unclear on exactly how standings work, what the difference is between faction and agent standing, how standings increase and how agent quality is affected by them, and what agent quality actually means in anything but the most general sense of wanting to work for the highest-quality agents you can. If anyone is aware of a detailed explanation of the subject, I’d appreciate a pointer.
I signed off a bit early last night so Mrs. Ardwulf and I could go to an early showing of Iron Man, which was pretty much everything I’d hoped it would be, and with which I was absolutely delighted all around. I think it’s easily on par with the first two Spider-Man films, and I thought it was better, but that may be because I was always a bigger fan of Iron Man than Spidey, who’s always started to grate on me after a while. Without getting into any details about the movie, I offer the following advice to anyone else going to see it: Stay until the very, very end.
Previews included the new trailer for The Incredible Hulk, which makes it look better than the last preview did, and like Iron Man it’s pretty well-cast, although I still think the CGI Hulk looks pretty terrible. And the new Indy, which of course everyone will go see even if it’s terrible, which would surprise me. Missing was the new trailer for The Dark Knight, which has also not yet officially appeared on the internet, although there are bootlegs available if you want to root around for them. You know those people in Marketing who think it’s a good idea to not show people your promotional material, and who prefer that when you do see said material it’s in crappy phone camera format instead of snappy hi-res Quicktime? Well, I guess those people are smarter than I.
A useful trick for salvaging deadspace missions, where MWDs don’t work: bookmark a wreck or can in each area, then when you’ve killed everything and completed the mission, turn it in to your agent. The deadspace vanishes, along with structures & other scenery, but your bookmarks will still work. So you can warp directly to your BMs, and then MWD between wrecks.
This makes salvaging go much faster if you follow the ‘kill everything then salvage’ technique. If you salvage as you go then it’s not as useful.
One caveat: wrecks and cans last only 2 hours and then vanish, so make sure you leave yourself time to get to them.
Here’s a great resource for mission-running. I think most of this is up-to-date.
http://eve-survival.org/
One HUGE benefit you’ll eventually get from running missions is Jump Clones. You’ll eventually get up to +8.0 standing with one of the NPC corporations (raw standing, without the bonus from connections skill), which will allow you to purchase a jump clone from that NPC corp. So, make sure the NPC corp you are running missions for offers jump clones at their stations with medical facilities. If Caldari Navy doesn’t offer jump clones, I’d change to another NPC corp to run missions for. It’s really a good idea to look at the NPC corp you’re running for before you get too far.
One thing I’ve done to help new corp mates get going is work level 4 missions as a team. I usually go through and solo the mission in a battleship, then they follow behind me and loot/salvage after the bad-guys are clear. Then we split the loot and salvage and turn in the mission for gang. That way, I don’t have to loot/salvage and they get really fast standing increase, lots of ISK, and more loyalty points than they know what to do with (sometimes I just let my helper keep all the loot/salvage, rather than fuss with dividing it). That allows me to go run the next mission while they are still working on cleaning up the last one. After a month or two they are usually ready to do level 3 or 4 missions on their own, and have nice ships with plenty of gear. A smart looter will save a station container full of the good “named” loot to use on their ships until they can use tech 2 modules.
P.S. I am currently running level 4 missions at the Corporate Police Force station in Irjunen system. I play after 5:00 PM Eastern US time on weekdays, so if you see me online give me a shout in-game.
P.P.S I know a lot of people in-game. My corp probably wouldn’t be a good place for you, since we are mostly high-skill-point players. However, I know some really good people from all different time zones, and I would be happy to reccommend a couple in-game chat channels where you can meet people.
Oh, BTW, another good reason to have standing with NPC corps is that you may want access to Location Agents at some point. A location agent will tell you the location of any player in the game. Higher quality/higher level agents will give more accurate locations at longer ranges, with quicker results. The highest quality level 4 location agents will tell you exact locations anywhere in the universe in just a few seconds. Lower quality agents may only tell you a region or system name, only if the player is within a few jumps, and may take an hour to reply. That is a really nice thing to have access to if you are at war and want to know where the enemy is hiding.
Destroyers excel at ranged combat due to the bonuses they have, so use the huge range and volume of fire to ‘stand off’.
Salvage – is dependent of mission level so try and get into level 2 missions asap. Im of the opinion its better to forget lvl1 salvage as it just increases the amount of time required per missions. get into lvl2 and you will get more and better salvage per hour.
Plus concentrate your mission running to specific agents as you get better rewards as his effective quality increases – plus more storyline missions – which hugely increase your standing.
Plus – yeah Irom Man totally rocks, but the hulk looks like its using very dated cgi.
Downey just pwns as Tony Stark!!