Monday 20 September 2010

Epic Mission Arc Part 4: The Conclusion

So finally I reached mission 50 of 50. Dagan was in my cargo hold and the walkthrough I had been following said the last part held no surprises, but it also said Dagan’s battle was pretty straight forward…



It turns out it was indeed a straight hand over of Dagan to the authorities who have been so keen to capture him.

The Epic Arc was finally over, but what should I do now?

Saturday 18 September 2010

Stupid is as stupid does

I havent been playing EVE that long, but I sure know what the consequences are of going in to system below 0.5 system security rating. To see what happens when someone tries to play EVE without taking any notice of system security ratings please watch the video below.

I cant quite decide if it is tragically sad or incredably funny. Most viewers seem to think its funny, so enjoy!

 

!Warning! This video contains foul language. Although it has been bleeped out of the audio, you can still work out what was said.

Saturday 11 September 2010

Epic Mission Arc Part 3: Dagan

Mission 49 of 50, almost done! …But it wasn’t going to be an easy walk across the finish line.

When you start this mission you get a choice of which faction you want to help you. There was no mention in the walkthough I was following, but I later found out that your choice does make a big difference as it affects how Dagan’s ships is speced. I choose Amarr (because I was Amarr), I later found this was the worst choice I could have made…

Which ever ally you choose, Degan is setup resistant to that factions natural setups. So by choosing Armarr I had setup Dagan to be resistant to lasers (my primary weapon choice), great…

How your choice of ally affects Dagan’s ship setup:

• Caldari: He has Defender missiles plus Kinetic resistance boosters.
• Amarr: Active armor tanking and massive EM/Therm resist.
• Gallente: He'll throw heavy Kinetic damage missiles and may have Target Painting as well.
• Minmatar: He'll have short range blasters or autocannon and a cap drainer on top of that.

In this mission you meet Dagan’s Battlecruiser. Where as with Kritsan Parthus I had to battle an armor tank, with Dagan (at least he was for me) I had to battle a shield tank.

By this point I had my Omen and lots of different weapons and ammo left over from my experiments with working out how to defeat Kritsan. Thankfully Dagan was quite slow and didn’t hit that hard so I didn’t need to be constantly running from him. A close orbit was sustainable with my noob shield tank whilst I fired everything I had at him. The problem was I was doing very little damage and despite the table above my Degan seemed to have an active shield tank a very good one…

Every time I made any sizable inroad in to his shield he simply flipped on a active tank and I was back to the start again. I needed more firepower! Much more firepower… But I already had a Cruiser stuffed with weapons and there was no chance of getting a Battleship anytime soon…

Switching to a smaller ship (like a Frigate) and avoiding getting hit wasn’t an option, as the problem was not having enough offence this time. It was pretty easy to stick with Dagan and take his damage, even in my easily hit Cruiser. I didn’t have my Destroyer anymore as I got rid of it (insurance fraud) after obtaining my Cruiser. In hindsight it might have been useful as it had a lot more hardpoints than the Destroyer.

Over the course of a weekend I trained up skills, tried to acquire more powerful weapons and searched the net for advice – which mostly advised not choosing Amarr as your ally, hmm…

It became obvious I just wasn’t going to defeat him using lasers. I tried using missiles, but they weren’t doing much, so I trained for heavy missiles. They did something, but cycled far too slowly – I still needed more… I trained up drones skill and was now using 3 Hobgoblins in combat in addition to my 5 Medium laser turrets and Heavy Missile launchers. Even with all that it wasn’t doing enough to take down his shield.

I stumbled across an online article that mentioned that Kinetic and Explosive damage was the way to take down an Amarr speced Dagan.

I didn’t have the patients to train up to medium projectile weapons, small would have to do. After a bit of head scratching I choose to mount 280mm Carbine Howitzer I with Fusion S ammo.

Yes, I was finally doing significant damage and his shield was taking a pounding! But, progress through his shield and armor was slow. His offence wasn’t huge, but as I sat there broadsiding him for such a long time it eventually took its toll on my cap. I didn’t have enough sustainability to remain engaged with him long enough to take him down completely and any break I made from combat allowed him to put his shield back up. Grrr….

Nosferatu (Nos) was the answer! I fitted one and it worked fantastically! As the fight went on my cap dropped, I flipped on my Nos and it drained Dagan. This was a double plus as not only did it allow me to keep my shield up, but it stopped Dagan rejuvenating his too.
Victory was mine!

After days of bumbling about with ship fittings and different tactics I finally hit on the solution. So if you have to kill an Amarr speced Dagan, one of the ways is to use the following:

Nos + Projectile Weapons (Explosive/Kinetic ammo)

Make sure you use an active shield tank on yourself as you need low cap yourself (1/4 – 1/2 is fine) to be able to drain Dagan. If you have high cap the drain wont work and Dagan will be able to rebuild his shields easily.

At one point during the fight I had Dagon’s shield and armor completely down and was working my way through the interior. I saw my energy was about 1/4 and so decided to turn off my Nosferatu. Immediately I did that his shield tank came back on, so don’t be tempted – keep the nos on until he is dead!



Friday 10 September 2010

Create a starship contest

Design a starship and enter it into the EVE Online Create A Starship Contest for a chance to have your dream ship become a reality. The 1st Place winner will have their ship added to the premiere space MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), EVE Online where countless pilots will build and fly the winners' creation.

Entry must be received by 11:59:59 PM (PT) on October 13, 2010 and be submitted to the Contest gallery on www.deviantart.com

Thursday 2 September 2010

Epic Mission Arc Part 2: Kritsan Parthus

Mission 47 of the Epic Mission Arc is called ‘Chasing Shadows’. In the walkthrough that I was following it mentioned that this was a particularly difficult mission, but missions so far had been mainly taxing my ability to stay awake rather than my ability to complete them. I felt confident that with a little effort I would be fine. I was a little worried as the walkthrough listed a Battlecruiser as one of the ships you encounter in this mission and I was only in a Cruiser. I trusted that the game designers wouldn’t give me an impossible task and I set off to the mission site with high hopes.

After the fifth time I was forced to warp out and repair leaving Kritsan Parthus with a tiny sliver of red on his armor from 20 minutes of my efforts I really started to hate him! I was able to get through his shields OK, but he was running an armor tank (a huge one) and I wasn’t getting through it…

To make matters worse he hit really hard and was easily getting through my shield tank, I was only safe when 35Km+ away from him. I re-speced my ship for long range combat, I re-speced it again and again with only slightly better results each time. I fitted more and more powerful medium sized laser turrets (my charater is Amarr). Each time I was defeated, I was paying out hundreds of thousands in repair costs. The money I had made from the Epic Mission Arc thus far quickly dwindled away…

I searched the internet for help, but the only two pieces of advice I could find were:
1. Get an experienced player to kill him for you
2. Wait until your skills are higher and then return to these missions some time in the future.

This was a mission you are sent on right after completing the tutorial missions, it must be something a noob can complete on their own… right?

On two occasions I considered giving up, but I kept coming back for one more try. Eventually I hit a build (see attached image) which actually made a dent in his armor whilst enabling me to stay out of range of his stinging attacks. Finally I was doing more damage than he could repair and I almost got him, but at the last moment had to retreat when I ran out of capacity.

I repaired and quickly came back feeling more confident that he wasn’t invincible after all. I waited until my capacitor was full before attacking him and after a long struggle I emerged victorious!

It was a tremendous relief to have overcome the odds. To me it really was an epic battle that not only had taken its toll on my bank account, but I was exhausted IRL. After handing in the mission to the agent (not within the bonus time limit of course) I decided to take a break and continue the rest of the missions the next day.

There were only a couple of missions left and I was sure they would be easy ones just to round off the story. There couldnt be anymore missions of this difficuty, could there?