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?