Advil plz thx bye

Sorry about being a bit out of date but I just wanted to post a little something to proove that I'm alive and survived my comeback to work after vacation... barely. I will be posting a full blog update tomorrow as quite a bit has happened in my EVE world since last time but as I'm writing this my brain is literally running out of cap so I'll dock up before I get podded :))

I'll say it this one time:

Fly safe !!!

o7

Ouch wallet !!!

Well, it is done. I've plopped down my 46 million ISK for the 2 books that will allow me to fly a Sabre. Time to work the trade alts like slaves, run missions like crazy, Ninja-rat in Curse with TCF flying all over the place, and blow ships up to collect insurance !!!

I also have to think up names for my soon-to-be-bought ships. Any suggestions?

Fly mental !!!

o7

And I'm back

Hello everyone!

Yep, after being away for my parental weekend I can finally play decents amount of EVE as I am now on vacation. I still have some duties, like making I'm fed, picking up after myself, and more Dad stuff Wednesday all day and a few hours on Thursday now too. But apart from that I don't have much else to do but game. It sure beats watching TV !!!

So I came back to the game yesterday afternoon (read Monday September 22nd) in the middle of Euro prime time so sure enough my system is camped in with a massive amount of TCF who are extremely eager to pick off stray Bozos. But as if this wasn't bad enough, some guy in an alliance we're "blue" to (you know who you are... jeeez) is asking, even begging, for someone to open a cyno field; look up "EVE terminology" on Google if i just spoke chinese. Anyway, all this as there are about 25 "reds" almost begging for this to happen. You see, the person in question hasn't learned his lesson after being caught with his pants down when his Archon (Amarr carrier) got surprise sexed by 20 plus dreadnoughts, 10-some carriers, a few battleships and some support ships. That battle took apparently something like 30 seconds. And here he was almost ready to have it done to him all over again. Excuse me sir, but if you are so eager to throw away ISK, you might as well give ME a billion. At least I'll do something useful with it, like buy enough interceptors and interdictors (training up for that) to last me a life time, and then give the rest to my trade alt to make it grow and grow and grow. End rant.

On other news, as happy as I am to have a second account with a main that can fly a Megathron and do a good amount of missions, my finances have taken a beating lately with an unexpected trip to the garage to have my car fixed. As I now can feel the waters slowly rising past my chin it looks like I may have to put the second account on ice for a while. I did buy all the necessary skillbooks to have Cozmik be able to fly and fit Gallente ships and hybrid guns so as soon as he's done with Science V (obligatory for Covert Ops and Interdictors) I'll be going slightly off track and in 3 weeks I'll be able to fly a decent Thorax, Brutix and Megathron. it will also give me the financial break in EVE to save up for two very expensive skillbooks, Graviton Physics and Interdictors, priced at 10 million and 36 million respectively. When you think that a Sabre costs roughly 25 million it's downright appalling... oh well.

Alright, enough typing now cuz I feel like I'm at work!

Fly dangerous, and remember that cap ships are NOT penile extensions !!!!

o7

Court, Brain Death, and EVE

Hey there podsters!

Just a short update today as I'm starting to feel the arrival of one of those nasty man-colds (you know, the lethal ones). It did put a crimp on my EVE playing yesterday; I had some overtime to do at work (the "Court" part) and as I deal with literally tons of paper work to enter into the City of Montreal's black hole of a computer system I came back home feeling like a freight train had hit me, and then proceeded to back up just to make sure it had hit me. The result was that I opened EVE to deal with my little menagerie of toons, and just thinking about the little things like having to pick up the stuff from buy orders, putting stuff up for sale and placing new BOs for both trade alts, and chosing what skill to train on the two mains, was doing some nasty things to my already-damaged brain.

And lately, PvP ops with the Bozos have a tendency to start late, as well as taking long to start. I can't blame the Midwest and Pacific players; it's right in their prime-time for them. I guess we have to get more East Coast/East Canada players so OUR prime-time gets more populated, and it's also giving me an incentive to start learning proper FCing. I stepped up to the plate the other night after the O'Regan's pilot meet (being slightly drunk and having talked about the game all night helped) when I got in game because the current FC was literally falling asleep. It was towards the end of the op anyway so other players were getting tired so I said "F*** it, I'll do it". The plan was easy enough: get everyone home in one piece while flying through enemy territory, then escorting a guy who had a Tempest in an another system a few jumps away from home and escort him back. The entire operation happened without any reds getting in our way and I think I did an OK job of getting scouts where I needed them, and knowing the general area like the back of my hand helped quite a bit. After all was said and done most of the fleet went to bed, and the four who stayed (me included) did try to tackle a Drake which cost us two Rifters, but then we didn't have enough DPS to do anything so we called it a night (or morning!).

And as a parting shot, during one of my hauling runs with my Amarr trade alt I had the opportunity to see quite a sight, Mr Cribba's Veldnought, one of the very few capital ships in Hi-sec space. Of course I had my drone cam point his way:

Good thing he's fitting Miner I's instead of Capital Lasers !!! So there you have it. A short post by a player in dire need of Advil and Vitamin C.

Fly dangerous but don't catch colds...

o7

Bye bye Shambler... Hello Makron !!!

Yes, in my typical fashion, I've had my Dominix barely a couple days and in an alignment gone wrong during a level 4 mission, the fat bi4tch got stuck in some asteroids and the Angel Cartel then punished me by sending me home in my pod. Annoying but I could live with it as my ship was insured. I'm sort of used to it; since my first days in EVE, every time I get into a new ship class I manage to lose it in spectacular fashion. So as I proceed to pod my way to Rens to pick up new gear, which I was expecting to be of much lesser quality, my dear buddy Madcoy asks me how much ISK I have in my account... I basically had enough to buy a New Dominix and fit it in pure Tech 1 gear, nothing fancy. He then asks me "Are you sure? look again..."..... and sure enough he had just prooved that Santa Claus DOES EXIST and he lives in Drummondville Qc !!! After receiving the order to go fit out, this was the result:


That's right folks, Demonia has achieved the goal she had set out for as she is the proud owner of Makron, her very first Megathron battleship !!! Needless to say we didn't have too much trouble finishing off those pesky Angels as not only I had a ship that can tank a lot better thanks to more capacitor and more armor hardeners, but this thing put a new definition to the word Gank. Oh boy, does it gank !!! And she wasn't fitted with damage modules yet. I just can't wait to see how she'll do when Demonia can REALLY fly it to the best of its capabilities. I won't be sending her out to join Cozmik in 0.0 quite yet though. I do want to see more IVs and Vs than Is and IIs in her skill tree before that happens. You have to realise that Demonia is extremely young in EVE age to be flying something so big, and it'll take a few weeks, if not months, before she can fit the Remote Repair setup required for spider tanking gang. But when she does, OUCHIES !!! :)

On a side note, one may notice my tendency to name my more important ships with Quake related names, and yesterday at the bar we found the name of my eventual (read 3-4 years from now) Dreadnought. Care to guess what I'll call it? If you know your Quake, you'll figure it out :))

And speaking of bar, yesterday was the bi-weekly meeting of Montreal pod pilots. It's been moved to Saturdays as Fridays are now taken by Carbon Freezer's new guitar lessons. We usually get a small turn-out, but now that we have more people in the EVE MTL channel the information was given much more in advance and finally we had a turn-out of no less than TEN people, coming from different backgrounds, from very new to damn-near ancient SP-wise. Many thanks go out to Crazy Kinux, and also to my great buddy Letrange for making a successful happening come true.

On a finishing note, I've just had more that this is indeed a small world. After not seeing him for about 10 years, as the evening was starting to take off I heard someone yell out "Hey, Red Five ?!?!". It was none other than Paul "Cmdr Vortex" Larivière, a different kind of pod pilot from the good ol' days of the Virtual World center. He was also one of my main adversaries as he was, along with me and a few other pilots, one of the Montreal Master Pilots, and all of us also happened to be known as the Best Pilots in the Whole Damn @#$%@#% World. Like me, Vortex didn't believe in the "Fly safe" mentality, as he was known for pulling some extremely fancy moves to take some racers out in Red Planet Martian Death Race, but my best memories were of us two in 1-on-1 races in the canal called Paingod's Passage, some won by him, some by me, where we would be flying so close together that it felt like formation flying, but in an industrial mining canal at full Double Boost (tm) speed. Man those were the days..... !!!!

So again, awesome night yesterday (even if I'm slightly hung-over) and I pray the next two weeks go by fast for that next meeting.

In the meantime, fly like it's the last day of your life...

o7

The Way of the Tackler, Part Deux

And I'm back. Before I get back to my tackling subject, I just want to say that yesterday night saw the Baptism of Fire of Demonia's Dominix as I did a Level 4 mission with my Bozo buddy and compatriote Madcoy Flinstone and his alt. I discovered a few things: decent tanking requires some skills, which at 2.7 million SP Demonia just don't have, and hitting frigates with large railguns and low-nav skilled medium drones is quite a pain in the derrière. On the other hand, cruisers and battlecruisers melt in record time; battleships take longer but when I do get better drone skills (read nav-linked heavies) the time will seriously go down. It's great fun though, and with the Bozo High Command in party mode in Las Vegas this weekend will probably see a lot of missioning so my bank account will feel better :) Alright, on to business.

Now that I've shown the world two of my favorite ship setups, let's talk about using them. My favorite job in a fleet is clearly that of a scout/tackler. I don't think I have the subtlety required to be a good Cov-op or Recon scout because I'm the kind of player to shoot first and ask questions later. But being a tackling scout give me the advantage of freedom compared to the other members of the fleet, although I do try not do anything rash without the FC's consent. I do get to see a lot more space, and occasionally someone red to me is careless enough to aggress the lowly Rifter only to find himself webbed, scrammed, jammed, and melting at an alarming rate. It does turn the other way sometimes, but by being very fast you can come out of some extremely hairy situations. Let's go into two of my favorite engagement styles...


The small gang

The idea here is to get some action when it's an odd time like early after the daily downtime or very late when you're feeling insomniac. The idea is to do a small gate camp in a well trafficked system and just be a major pain in the ass until a huge alliance blobs you 10-to-1. Ideally, here is the composition of such a small fleet to be successfull of getting a few kills, using cheap ships to encourage practice:

- ECM boats (Griffin, Blackbird)
- Fast tacklers (Rifter, Vigil, Stabber)
- Damage (Rupture, Thorax, Caracal)

Rule of thumb is everybody should at least have a warp disruptor fitted, and if a gang member can anchor a bubble then all the better. My dream small gang would be to have 6 guys: 1 ECM, 2 tacklers, and 3 damage dealers. Any stray wanderer (even a battleship) would find a nasty end to this small gang. The ships I've given are just examples; of course you can replace some with interceptors, Recons, HACs, etc, but I always believe in destroying more value than I'm actually flying. Enter the second favorite style of PvP.


Jihad warfare

This is simple. Get as many friends as you can. Fit ONLY Tech 1 ships with the cheapest mods you have. Follow the 1-2-3 rule for gang composition. Find a good route to roam (with known ratting spots and enemy bases on the way) and proceed to kill ships that are worth more than your entire fleet! The down side of this, you will most assuredly die, especially if a big alliance decides to drop 5-6 carriers on you. but kill, say, a HAC or battleship or 3, and you can go laughing all the way to the bank! Just make sure you insure your ship before you undock :))

The tactic is to roam basically unscouted, so as to not reveal your arrival (you will get noticed and reported on the enemy channels at some point, that's inevitable). When the gang jumps in each member warps to his/her previously assigned asteroid belt, and the lucky one to land on an enemy ratter/ISK farmer yells out "WARP TO (enter name)!!!" on comms. When you kill a Raven, you're happy. When you kill a Marauder battleship, you're falling off your chair laughing. And when you kill a badly fitted, faction-fitted carrier who doesn't give much of a fight, you talk about it for weeks !!!

How can you not love PvP after that ?!?!?! :))

Kick the tires and light the fires

o7

Milestone

Well, it is now official. Yesterday night, as I was waiting for an op that never happened (the Bozos were thinking more about Vegas than pew-pew, and I don't blame 'em) I had my second training alt buy and fit MY FIRST EVER BATTLESHIP !!! Of course, it will still be a long time before I can fly a BS in PvP as a lot of support skills have to be trained up, and these things aren't exactly cheap to fly. But at roughly 80 million ISK fully fitted and insured, the Dominix is probably the best deal as far as BSes go. But the ship, named "Shambler" after that big white furry eyeless lightning-shooting critter, will still see some action because I've moved Demonia back to hi-sec where she'll be able to do lots of missioning to earn a good deal of ISK, as well as work on getting not only the support skills, but maybe also some advanced hauler skills so she can keep Cozmik well stocked in ships and parts.

It's sort of ironic that it's my second character that gets the biggest ship, but as I knew I was going head-first into PvP when I started the game I knew that Cozmik had to fly the ships he can fly to the best of his abilities. When Coz was the same age Demonia is now (2.6 million SP), he could barely fly a Stabber right, but he could already make a Rifter sing. Same thing happened with battlecruisers; my first Cyclone was barely spaceworthy but the Stabbers were seeing lots of action. I also expect that when Cozmik gets his Tempest (skipping Typhoons cuz I'm just not a missile kinda guy) only then will his Hurricane be something to fear. And there's no way I'm risking getting into a remote-repping BS gang before the skills are ready for the correct fits; I'd only ridicule myself, I'd waste tons of ISK, and it would just be painful!

And there you have it, my first foray into the world of big, bad and (mostly) ugly ships. The exception to "ugly" will come when Demonia as gathered enough ISK to graduate to her target ship from Day One, The Megathron >:)

I'll be posting again fairly soon because I've finally remembered what was missing from the "Tackler" train of thought: small gang composition and Jihad warfare (in absolutely NO WAY related to suicide ganking. That's just wrong!).

Until then, fly dangerous and do make fun TCF, IAC, and all those awesome blobbers !!!

o7

Whoa, that was a long lunch hour !!!

Sorry about that. Real Life sort of "got in the way" there for a bit.

So I didn't have much more to add to my last post, except that, as you can imagine, those fits become much faster and nastier as you fit them with Tech 2 modules. It does make for much more expensive ships (about 7 million ISK for the Rifter, 15 million for the Stabber) but for the role I don't think you can get any better. Now, only time will tell how the Stabber survives the up-coming Nano-Nerf. From what I hear, what the Nerf will do is that in each ship class the range between slowest and fastest will be much reduced. Now, between what was tested on Singularity and what will be applied to Tranquility, everything that we hear will happen is pure speculation. Being mainly a Minmatar flyer, I know that Minnie ships are supposed to be the fastest and I don't see that changing, but maybe it'll mean that my tackling duties will be done in frigates alone, and maybe I'll swap my Stabbers for damage-dealing Ruptures and Thoraxes (yes, I've started cross-training!).

Now speaking of damage, I went on a skillbook shopping spree lately and my alt and I are now at the door step of flying Battleships! My alt can already get into a Megathron if she wants but at not quite 3 million SP she's in dire need of support skills, even though she can fit the large guns. Cozmik probably has better support already but as he is the main PvP guy other skills need to be learned to make what he can already fly much better (read Hurricane) and also needs to start the Covert Ops ship training, for which I still need some till-now not much needed Electronics Upgrades skill training. Stealth is not much my style to start with (in any game I've ever played) but sometimes there's not really any other way to get around. I am really itching to get into a remote-repping Tempest though, but I know that to do the job right I'll need a lot of field training and I'm praying it won't be too expensive... well, relatively :)

Well, that's it for now. Please fly much safer than I do, and if you're one of the old hands flying a capital ship, please don't warp it to an hostile gate... it makes the Baby Jesus cry !!!

o7

The Way of the Tackler

After writing an e-mail wearing the same subject to my great buddy Letrange, and also because the same buddy has taken a break from the industrial career to get a crash course on PvP, I've decided to carry our conversations, e-mail exchanges and blog comments over here because tackling is one of the things I do best in EVE. It's also something I plan on doing for good while because I love doing it, it's an extreme sport (ship loss rates in my early days were... special), and the required ships to do the task are the cheapest in the fleet so literally, it's the best Bang for the ISK in EVE.

Let's start with the tools of the trade. The first thing you need is a fast ship, and I mean FAST ship. If it goes below 3000 meters a second, forget it you're too slow. So of course the best ships for tackling are the interceptors (especially those with 3-4 mid slots) and fast nano-fitted frigates. Stabbers also make good cruiser-sized tacklers as they are extremely fast; this may change with the upcoming Nano-Nerf but something tells me it won't change much. My frigates of choice are the Rifter and the Stiletto interceptor; I use the first in big gangs where there are more experienced inty pilots (though I'm getting there) or in suicide ops, and the second in mid-sized fleets where the more experienced guys are in bigger and/or specific roled ships. I use Stabbers when it's a bit more important to have a little more DPS, but with good Navigation skills it can not only catch up with frigates, it can tear them to pieces. My most memorable experience was being death-locked with a Malediction interceptor in a fleet battle; I would've taken the ship out on my own but when he was about half-way into structure some help arrived and the inty got BBQed.

The next tools, the Warp Disruptor and the Stasis Webifier, hereafter called Point and Web. I use the Disruptor exclusively because even if it has only 1 point of warp disruption (hence the name) the longer range of 20km (24 for T2, 30 if you're a rich bastard) is a lot more useful than having an extra point with a Scrambler, plus in good fleets there will be multiple tackler, as well as some extra points in some DPS ships. Webs are also very important as they keep the target from moving away from range, though their range is more limited. Unless you fly a Huginn that is, which has a huge bonus to web range; most Huginns fit 2 webs by the way.

Here are my 2 most used ships, which everybody can train while still on the 14-day trial, T1-only Jihad style fits:

[PVP Rifter Basic]

Overdrive Injector System I
Overdrive Injector System I
Nanofiber Internal Structure I

1MN MicroWarpdrive I
Warp Disruptor I
Stasis Webifier I

200mm Light AutoCannon I, EMP S
200mm Light AutoCannon I, EMP S
200mm Light AutoCannon I, EMP S
Rocket Launcher I, Foxfire Rocket


[PVP Stabber Heavy Tackler]

Overdrive Injector System I
Overdrive Injector System I
Nanofiber Internal Structure I

10MN MicroWarpdrive I
Warp Disruptor I
Stasis Webifier I

220mm Vulcan AutoCannon I, EMP M
220mm Vulcan AutoCannon I, EMP M
220mm Vulcan AutoCannon I, EMP M
220mm Vulcan AutoCannon I, EMP M
Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I, Hellfire Assault Missile
Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I, Hellfire Assault Missile


Even with the ship size difference, one can notice the similarities: high speed and very close range.

Aight... lunch hour over so I'll have to write Part II later at home :))

BBL

Slight deviation from the usual subject

Hey there!

EVE is all fun and stuff, but once in a while it's good to play other games that rock my boat (Q will disagree but oh well!) and that are more physically involving than tackling an opponent. In case you never noticed, I am a Speed Freak. Not just a nanofag in EVE, but everywhere (I do try to stay safe on the road as I don't have the budget to pay for multiple speeding tickets) and in everything I do. It did get expensive when I was aiming to be the fastest Red Planet pilot at the old Virtual World center. These days when I need my speed fix I play rFactor, a racing simulator that handles F1 cars as well as various GT cars, other open wheel series (Indy, Champ Car, Atlantic, etc), WRC rally, Nascar-type ovals (not much for me, thanx), monster trucks, lawnmowers, you name it! You can also download a plethora of tracks, both in existence and fantastic.

Well, one of 'em is MILES ahead, literally. It is both "in existence" and "fantastic".

Enjoy my fastest lap around the Nordschleife !!!

Fly dangerous, baby !!!

<:*)