The power of two

CCP are running an offer at the moment where you can subscribe a second EVE account at a greatly reduced rate.

6 months for 49.99 Euros

It is a full account and at the end of the 6 months you can choose to extend (at the standard subscription rate) or move the character to your first account and terminate it (transfer fee will be payable).

This offer is available until November 7th 2010. It seems they only run this offer once a year around this time. So if you dont take advantage now you will probably have to wait until October 2011 for the offer to come around again.

Follow this link to learn more.

CCP Announces the new "Incursion" EVE expansion

Recently CCP announced details of the next free EVE expansion which is due to be realeased in November 2010.

It will be named Incursion and more details can be found here.

One key feature will be a reworked character portrait design system. This should get rid of the problems I had creating my portrait (more details in this blog post if interested). However, I hope they dont change the race styles too much. I like the way my avatar looks and choose the race for the look.

Leaked details have already stated that existing players will be able to redesign their portrait but will not be able to change race, so I hope they do a good job with the male Amarr...

Rookie Skill Training Bonus

My skills were around 800k by the time I even realised I was receiving a rookie training bonus. New players get a 100% bonus to training time until their total skills reach 1.6 million.

CCP Quote: “Newly created pilots will train skills 100% faster than older pilots, until they have reached 1.6 million skill points. The first skill that will train past 1.6 million skill points will not receive the training speed bonus.”

Up until that point my plan about what to train next had been pretty random. I hadn’t even noticed that some skills had training time penalties (that’s the x1, x2, x3 etc. you see in the descriptions). It’s a good idea to try and squeeze in the skills you most need before you hit the 1.6m point.

So for the first time I started to think about what I actually wanted to train and this meant thinking about what I ultimately wanted to do in EVE. I gave up on that quite quickly as I still didn’t have much idea of what I wanted to do.

Mining? Yea, its OK
Missioning? Yea, its OK
Exploration? Sounds interesting
Industry? Maybe
Pirating? No thanks, well maybe

I decided the best bet was to just training the learning skill (for now anyway). I followed this guide, although I didn’t follow the implants as that was too much to spend at this point in my career (I felt).

So my short term goal became training learning skills, mine and mission whilst I work out what I want to do. The missioning and mining lead to a desire for a few skills and so they got mixed in with the learning plan along the way. Evemon is a tool that helps you plan your training, I recommend you give it a try if you haven’t already.

I tried to squeeze in as many skills as I could before I hit the 1.6m barrier and so as time went on more of the higher level training skills fell off my hit list as I was increasingly doing shorter and shorter skills so I could get eth maximum benefit of the skill bonus.

Inevitable I eventually lost the bonus. But continued training learning skills as a priority. I quite enjoyed mining. Would I become a miner? That’s boring right? I actually started to like it, but would my interest still be there after I had maxed my mining abilities and wasn’t chasing a higher yield anymore?

Time would tell…

Lessons to be learned

The huge trouble I had with the Kritsan Parthus and Dagan certainly taught me a lot about how weapon type and shield/armor tanking can make a big difference in a fight. My lessons were learnt rather by necessity though, as I was forced to learn to have any chance of killing of these super hard opponents…
 
To celebrate my success I decided to splurge out on better implants and a couple of expensive learning skills books. Up until then I had been trying to resist spending on anything unnecessary, but I felt like in a spending mood. My money went below 100m for the first time.

I received a couple of follow up sister missions, which I was informed about via EVE mail. I’m not sure when these come in, as I hadn’t been checking it, so they may have arrived mid-arc for all I know.

One was a simple courier mission just a few jumps away, but the second was a combat mission over 27 jumps away, back in an area I was in mid-arc. I made the long trek, but it was a real pain and I struggled against boredom on such a long journey.

The mission was over quickly and so I made the 27 (or so) jumps back to Arnon again... I crammed anything useful in to the cargo hold of my Omen and the rest I sold. I had decided long ago that when I finished the arc I would return to the area I started the game in and nothing had made me want to stick around the new areas I had visited.

So off I went on a 20 (odd) jump to get back ‘home’

Landing at my ‘home’ station I dumped my ‘loot’ and took a few days off playing EVE. Doing nothing much else than manually jump for the last few hours had turned my brain to mush. On the plus side a trip to a system 5 or 6 jumps away now seemed quite trivial, something I would have considered a long journey before beginning the epic arc.

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?

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.

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!