On the way home from seeing the family I stump up for a First class upgrade on Virgin trains. I don’t know if you have Virgin running trains in other countries. If not then its the same company as the airline. It doesn’t mean I was on an …. inexperienced ….. train.
I only wanted a guaranteed seat since my reserved seat is for a train that ran two weeks ago when I was too ill to travel. It turns out that you get free drinks, a box of snacks and free wifi all the way home too. This is nice. I get to stretch out and do some urgently needed catch up writing for the blog with the ability to look things up.
I download EFT - the EVE Fitting Tool via the safe link on the forums first and check out last nights speculative fit of the Incursus. It’s possible but I’ll have to downgrade it a bit until a few skills are up to spec. I’ll also need to watch the capacitor as it looks like it’ll be gone in the blink of an eye. This suits me, I don’t need to be “cap stable”. I like tactical flying and choosing when modules are up and running is part of it. I really should download EVEMon too but I’m scared of the game taking over my life as it is.
I’m tempted to log into EVE itself from the train - I have it installed on this laptop. With heroic levels of effort I prevent myself from doing this. I’d not blog anything and I’d probably mess something up using the utterly shite piece of plastic that passes for a touch pad on this machine.
Despite all brilliant plans for conquest of this and that when I get home I end up pulling a massive logistics exercise to pull out of my secondary mining location. It’s useless to have a system set for mining a particular mineral when I now have the money to pay people who have already done that and still make cash. The great thing about this is that my Vexor is now free to be reassigned away from mining duties and, since the great drone skill effort, it is now pushing half decent DPS without even fitting any guns. With some easy skill increases and some tactical drone management my level three mission runner will be born. I had forgot how much I liked the ship. It is slow but it is threatening. Any opponent who realised just what amount of drone damage it can do would pick another target. I need to speed it up and try and dictate a 20km range which is going to be a whole new style of fighting for me I’ve been thinking about it with the Atron, but not at these ranges. Suddenly I’m filled with a love of Vexor class cruisers and I realise I learnt drones mainly to prevent hassle while mining. The side effect is dangerous drone boats. Vexor ahoy!
The thing is, I might not head out in the Vexor just yet. What I’ve found in my own experience is that you rush to cruisers, and get them before you can really make the most out of flying them. You see a lot of people out there zooming around in Battlecruisers and big cruisers like the Thorax that are sitting ducks for a well piloted frigate because while the minimum skills to fly a big ship are there, the skills to get anything decent out of it aren't. This is particularly true of me. As soon as I could fly a Thorax I bought one and was out there in the scrappiest fit ever. Simple 0.8 belt rats would have had me for dinner in that fit. The lesson here is, yes go fly bigger and bigger Internet spaceships, but when you need to get something done fall back on a ship where you have more skills. Frigates are way way more forgiving that the larger combat ships, and less to pay for if you lose them. If your main combat ship after two weeks is a Battlecruiser then my PVP fit Incursus wants to meet you. The best I got out of cruisers in the first month wasn't combat. It was the Vexor fitted as a mining vessel and the Exequror fitted as a low volume, cloaky, tanked, trader. A proto-blockade runner. Neither had guns fitted at all when I made credits in them.
So I’ll temper my desire to mission and fight in big ships. They aren’t that far off in the skill queue....
You're certainly right about the big ships - too many people want to step into battlecruisers like the Drake and the Hurricane because they've heard good things about them, and then they get killed because they may be (technically) skilled enough to fly them, but they don't know how (and when) to fight them.
ReplyDeleteIt's a pleasure reading your diaries - reminds me of a year ago when I was struggling to get back into the game, four years after a six-month session got interrupted by Real Life. If you don't mind some unasked advice, while I was mining, I put quite a bit of time into things like armor defenses, because I wanted to properly fly ships like the Vexor.
And when you want to fly some real heavy metal, if you like the Vexor, there's a good chance you will fall head-over-heels in love with the Myrmidon. Tough, powerful, fast, versatile (and dead sexy too)...