Awesome! Except I had no clue whatsoever where to find datacenters (I’ve only been playing for 3 years…meh). So early this morning, before RL took over, I fired up Google and came across this incredibly helpful entry on EVE-Wiki:

Data centers are deadspace locations found at beacons in high-security ‘empire’ space. There are twelve data centers total, which is three data centers per major empire faction (Caldari, Minmatar, Gallente), however Amarr split theirs with the Ammatar (and hence have more agents total). Each is a single location with two or more agents each (the agents are located on interactable ships). Each Data Center focuses on one of the major npc pirate factions; Caldari collect Guristas, Gallente collect Serpentis, Minmatar collect Angel, Amarr collect Sansha and Ammatar collect Blood (their agents are however somewhat mixed).

The above is followed by a ton of data on each faction’s datacenters, locations, missions, agents, and so on. Pure awesome.

20 minutes, a quick trip to the Ferira system, and a few million ISK in tag purchases later, my Amarr faction standings went from 6.47 to 6.81, and off to the Epic Arc I go.

Thanks again Kirith (and I love the blog).

My main mission NPC corp is Amarr’s Ministry of War – the nice Level 4 Quality 20 kill mission agent in Taru is basically my best friend. So I’ve been grinding away with him, hoping for some helpful storyline missions that will bump my standing up just a few tenths of a point and get over that hump to 6.8. Grind grind grind, and finally a storyline mission from “my guy” with Tash-Murkon Family.

A courier mission. Which, yes, nets me a 27 million ISK implant, so that’s nice. But it boosts my faction standings all of 0.02. At that rate I’ll need another 9 storyline missions, and at, what 15 regular missions in between each, I’ll be grinding for YEARS.

Can I please get a storyline kill mission? Or does anyone know of a MoW level 3 or 4 agent has a better associated storyline agent?

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.

I admit it, I have an issue with Shiny Ships. A problem in that I ignore all EVE conventional wisdom and train for, buy, and fly ships that just look pretty even if I have no real use planned for them. Some of them do have actual utility – like the Sacrilege, which is just a joy to fly in small group PVP (the five whole times I’ve been involved in that, mind you). And the Pilgrim, which, though often derided is at least handy for sneaking precious cargo through 0.0.

Or the Nighthawk I just bought for my alt run level 4 missions. Yeah, the Raven was doing just fine, but why run missions the smart, sensible, and fully-insurable way when you can fly a sleek black ship with high resists and lots of blinky lights? Oh yes…it’s a sweet ride. Load up a permatank and some Fury heavy missiles, grab a beer, and enjoy the light show of bad NPC guys going “boom”.

However, more often than not, I spend loads of ISK on something shiny that has no real value to my current playstyle. I kit it out, rig it up, and fly it around for a while showing off to the local residents of my home systems like I’m cruising the El in a tricked out Impala. After a while the novelty wears off, buyers remorse sets in, and up on contract it goes.

The Falcon I bought for my high-sec mission-running alt is a great example. As is the Zealot I once flew around Amarr for a couple of weeks, running level 3 missions just to see the shiny laser lights in action (even though my Harbinger or Drake were a fraction of the cost and more than effective at the task). Or even just skills and time – I spent the past few months training my alt to fly the full set of Minmatar ships just so I could one day hop in a Sleipnir. You know, just in case.

But nothing is quite as representative of my obsession with all things bright and shiny as the purchase of a Damnation. Coming from a lover of the whole line of Amarr ships, I’d have to say the Damnation is the best damn looking bird of prey traversing the skies of EVE. It’s black. It’s got loads of blinky lights. It’s got an unGodly monstrous tank. And it does the damage of a moderately wet noodle.

Now it IS quite useful – tank it up, install some armor-boosting gang modules and a pilot with the Armored Mindlink, and drop it in the middle of a large gang or fleet, and the Damnation is a powerful asset to any group. I’m just saying it’s not particularly useful for my needs at the moment, which largely involves mission running. Nevertheless, it’s a Shiny Ship. 250M ISK or so later, I had one up and running and tagging along with my alt’s equally shiny Nighthawk on level 4 missions.

It tanked like a monster, taking full aggro in several missions, which was nice. But the Nighthawk can basically take full aggro on its own, so what I needed was a companion ship to do some damage. As I mentioned, that just isn’t the Damnation, by *any* stretch of the imagination.

So, a few missions in, and the Damnation is parked in my hanger awaiting my someday return to PVP. For now, I sprung on a well-equipped Apocalypse with Mega Pulse’s to churn out some nasty damage and compliment the mean tank already on my Nighthawk. So far, so good – the two split aggro enough to be virtually worry free when it comes to tanking. And the Nighthawk’s solid damage output combined with the monster damage from the Apoc’s pulse lasers rip through NPC battleships like there’s no tomorrow. So at least I can keep using one bright and shiny ship when I log on now, even if that beautiful Damnation has to wait out her time in the hanger until I can find something useful for her to do.

Now my main is almost trained up to fly Gallente command ships….more shiny please!

Screencap by empeekay on Flickr

My Raven post to come shortly…meantime go read Ancient’s post.

This guide was written to give a simple explanation to how you can grind up a fresh character to be able to use 5 lvl4 Mechanical Engineering agents. This guide will focus on Minmatar/Gallente agents from three corps: DuVolle Laboratories, Core Complexion and Boundless Creation.

It looks like it may work. I still need to get Daniella up a bit more with Carthum in order to accces the last level 4 R&D agent, so maybe I’ll go out and try some pirate tags just to see what comes of it.

(h/t to Angelonico in Amarr Militia chat)

EVE Agents

If you are just getting started, moving up a level, moving locations or corporations, or venturing into R&D – whatever the situation, EVE Agents is a fantastic resource to tap into. This is another one from Chribba (EVE Search, EVE Files…) so you know the quality is going to be high. Aside: Chribbs has one of the best RL company names I’ve seen yet: OMG Labs. I used this religiously to select where Daniella would primarily base out of to run her level 4′s (hint – Amarr L4Q20 kill mission agent with no risk of being sent into low-sec!). I also recently used it to select Carthum for Amarr-based R&D agents and find the research specialties of several level 4 agents. Again…invaluable.

EVE-Survival’s Mission Reports

If you run level 4′s, bookmark this site NOW. It recently found a new home and moved to a more wiki-like format, as I believe the strains of maintaining the constant flow of updates was wearing on the site owner. Note that this is a good problem to have, as it’s in large part due to the steady flow of new and revised PVE content CCP is putting out. The guides, while occasionally imperfect, are the single best way for a mission-runner to avoid losing that favorite faction-fitted CNR (excluding Goon suicide ganks, of course). When I have Daniella out building up some ISK, I keep the Mission Reports open in a browser at all times for quick reference.

If anyone knows of any must-have PVE resources, please let me know in comments!