Day 91 : Derailed

My morning trip to New Eden is derailed by CCP Seleene of all people. He posts a Guild Wars 2 review from YouTube via Twitter. The Monty Python bit alone had me laughing. Nice start to the morning but so much for my early Jita run....

                                      

It’s Friday and traditionally I wait all week to get back and have a late night, no work tomorrow, session in front of EVE and then never do it.

This Friday I’m in an odd mood and do manage to log on before collapsing in a heap. I trigger a storyline while doing a mining mission. This storyline mission is a combat orientated one. I get this from mining? I’d been labouring under the false assumption that mining missions would result in storyline mining missions. It means that I had better be careful about triggering storylines when I start doing level 4 missions. I’m hoping that obtaining the required standings for level 4 missions will coincide with both decent skills for the Ishkur and a decent fit for the Brutix that I bought ages ago. I think both should be able to handle level 4 missions. I have some concerns about level 4 missions resulting in Distribution storyline jobs requiring me to head into low sec. My rust bucket haulers are no where near tanked enough to survive anything that might happen down there. I’d have to get the corp involved to do some scouting. If only I could spare the month of training required to fly and fit a blockade runner. Have you seen that Power of Two offer by the way? Yeah. So have I. I’ve stared at it several times now and still not given in....

The current level 3 storyline mission revolves around some Serpentis dude called Garkon Puman. Apparently he has been kicking up a fuss, presumably he is angry at people continually  assuming he is a waiter in France. Time to send in The Sweeney, the Federation Navy Comet I am so enamoured of. I want to play the music from The Sweeney but can’t find the soundtrack to the original TV series so I kick off the soundtrack to an equally cheesy 80s cop show instead - The Professionals. Cheese-tastic. Technically I think they were MI6 rather than cops. It still amuses the hell out of me. I told you I was in an odd mood.

These Serpentis guys must not know what hit them. My fitting skills are poor but even my badly fitted Comet just soars in and sorts them out in short order. Oh, shields gone, in armour am I? Meet my new friend, Armour Repairer II, nosferatu powered by your pal over there. Compared to PVP all this level 3 PVE content is laughably easy even with my shoddy combat skills. The benefit lies in trying modules out, seeing how they work, gauging their effectiveness, and employing them in different strategies. In PVP you don’t get much chance to experiment, particularly when flying frigates like I do. Small PVE missions are perfect places for trying out things like speed tanking and attack approaches. The only problem is that in PVP I’ll still have about a tenth of the time I have in PVE to adapt and use these strategies. This level 3 mission is a kids bike with training wheels and PVP is a motorbike.

Later on I spend some time chatting to Elethiomel, an older hisec pilot with a lot of game experience. I first ran into him in Essence somewhere. His character name is sourced from the same book as my characters first name. Read the book Use Of Weapons, I think I mentioned him earlier in the blog. I’d spoil the book if I told you why we were amused by our character names.