Been a while since I posted anything of substance, but with work and side projects EVE play time has been hard to come by. So much going on – new epic mission arches, new rigs, DUST 514, etc – but I’ll keep things a bit closer to home and talk about mission running.
Limited playtime means Furious hasn’t undocked to fight Minmatar capsuleer fleets in some time, but it does mean a renewed focus on building some ISKies in the service of the Amarr Ministry of War.
Daniella is my primary mission runner – she’s about maxed out on relevant skills and can fly level 4’s for corps across both Amarr and Caldari space. While she once was a classic, plain vanilla Raven pilot, she now exclusively flies her Nighthawk deep in secure Amarr space. I’ve expressed my love for the Nighthawk here before: not only is it beautiful, but its passive shield tank is awe-inspiring. A classic “warp in and forget” kind of tank, except in very rare missions.
However I wanted to speed up my missioning due to my limited playtime, get Furious back in the mix with his Amarr ships, and just play around with a two ship setup. Following my missioning mantra of 1) little to no faction ships or gear and 2) no marauders (too pricy to lose, in both cases), I set him up with an Abaddon armed with a decent tank, 8 mega pulse lasers, and pathetically small cap (5 minutes). Enough cap, though, to melt just about anything in a level 4 mission in short order.
My basic kill mission goes like this:
Daniella in the Nighthawk takes care of most of the aggro, leaving Furious’ Abaddon to function mainly as a massive golden blowtorch and no worry about his LAR2 eating up all his cap. Warp the Nighthawk in, piss off a few bad guys, draw all the DPS *and* all the tracking disruptors (against my heavy missiles…mwuhahaha), then warp the Abaddon in.
Daniella focuses on the small ships, working her way up to battlecruisers, while Furious starts in on the battleships. They meet somewhere in the middle. When the DPS is manageable and just a couple ships remain, Daniella warps home to grab my new favorite ship: the Salvage-Cane (Hurricane fit for mission looting).
Until this week, I was using a run of the mill Cormorant for mission loot and salvage cleanup. Never again, my Cormorant is permanently parked. The Salvage-Cane has the same highs (4x each of tractor beams and salvagers), but can fit both a MWD and Afterburner (for max flexibility running around while tractoring wrecks) and can hold over 2,000m3 of cargo, compared to the Cormorant’s 400m3 (or so). Brilliant, I love this thing.
Plus, the Hurricane is one of the best looking ships in the game IMO. It, along with the Abaddon, just looks like I always hoped combat spaceships would look. So even while just salvaging, it’s a hoot to fly around in.
The combo works out pretty well. I just tested it all out on a Sansha Blockade mission, with loads of DPS and gobs of ships, and with some window toggling it went incredibly fast.
More to share later on, as I consider taking the little gang out on the Amarr epic mission arch, hopefully posted about here in less rambling prose. Meantime, fly safe!
*Screen cap by CrazyKinux over on Flickr.
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