Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Less Planetary Interaction, More PvE and PvP

I was flying one of these hull-tanked Megathron battleships.

Our Sunday night roam led into a great battle where we teamed up with RDraw and temporarily with CalMil in order to whale on some guys that had just left the Snuff alliance. Kirith wrote about it here - our fleet lost 5B of ships and killed 16.4B. Our job was to land after the main forces had engaged and take out their five repair ships. Props to the brave pilot who got us a warp-in so we could land right where we needed to be.  I got out with a nice chunk of loot too, some of which I'm using for PvE. I could've got more but my cargo was full and I forgot that I could transfer some of the cheaper loot INTO the wreck with the juicy loot in order to make room for said juicy loot. I'd already done one jettison operation and couldn't do another in time. I left with my fleet before the CalMil guys decided that the temporary truce was over.

PI Sales

I have been watching PI prices at Jita and slowly selling the stockpile of 13,000 P4 items I have accumulated over the last couple of months. The prices are mostly drifting slowly downwards, except Sterile Conduits which has climbed. Broadcast Nodes had been holding at 4.4M each but just this morning dropped to 3.6M. I haven't seen any notable spikes in price so I'm going to push the remaining stock out faster and take my profits. I'm also still considering what to do with my PI setup: I'd like to set up a much less labor intensive scheme. I'm still doing well on High-Grade Ascendancy implants so I need to at least keep making Gel-Matrix, Cryoprotectant and Synthetic Synapses.

Besieged

I solo'd my first Besieged Covert Research Facility! After watching this video I modified his fit a bit and tried the first Besieged site I found in Fliet. I wasn't watching my sentry drones and lost one. I went back to station for another, and to strengthen my tank, which had been failing. This took a while and by the time I got back and repositioned myself the site timed out and vanished.  But I tweaked the fit a little more and the next night I ran another Besieged site. Success! Shitty loot (9M isk) but I cleared the site.

UPDATE: THIS DOESN'T WORK!  I'll leave it here in case you want to try tweaking it. Mordu's Legion actually do omni-damage, (the advice in that link is good!) hitting you wherever you are weakest. It worked once for me, maybe because the first wave had only two battleships, but the two subsequent tries both failed. I tried increasing my tank with a second ENAM and a Reactive Armor Hardener, but my reduction in DPS meant I couldn't finish the site in time.

Here's the old incorrect advice and fit - 

Here's my fit - I'm going to try dropping the ENAM and putting a Thermal Hardener (or maybe a second Kinetic), since Mordu's Legion do 70% Kinetic, 30% Thermal. It'd be nice to fit two guns too. I may put a deadspace armor repper in place of the tech II version I'm using.  This fit is cap-stable at around 40%.

[Ishtar, Ishtar - Besieged Covert Research Facility]
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Damage Control II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Centus C-Type Armor Kinetic Hardener

50MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Phased Scoped Target Painter
Cap Recharger II
Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Small Remote Armor Repairer II
250mm Railgun II
Drone Link Augmentor II
[empty high slot]

Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump II


Warden II x5
Salvage Drone I x5
Garde II x5
Ogre II x2
Hammerhead II x2
Hobgoblin II x1
Hornet EC-300 x5


I'm continuing to assemble ships to be ready for various PvE sites like that one. I've sorted out my best probing ship so I can scan cosmic sigs down faster, I want to have ships ready to roll for 3/10, 4/10, 5/10, various wormholes and of course our corp doctrine ships, of which I have plenty already.

Lastly I want to try some solo PvP - I found a couple (Jalep) of good (Solomon - I love this one!) Atron videos that I intend to start with. The Atron's falloff bonus is a really useful tool that doesn't get used effectively by a lot of pilots.