Sunday 7 July 2013

Assaulting Yards

I got myself an assault frigate. My first T2 ship. No T2 guns yet, but small Meta4 guns are pretty cheap. I fitted a blaster Enyo, purely for Serpentis PvE, so I left the glaring explosive resist hole alone, put a nanofiber structure on it, and hope that I can warp out before any other players can lock me. Or fully land on grid, I am not sure how long the time is between appearing on overview and being able to move, but I think there is some?

The ship is pretty brilliant for belt ratting and, which took me a bit to realize, lowsec anoms. With its bonuses, great accuracy and faction ammo it destroys cruiser rats pretty quickly, one shots many frigates and maybe three shots destroyers. Which is effectively quicker than when I did this with a cruiser, since it locks things much faster. And small ammo is cheap enough to just use faction ammo all the time. And I still don't have Small Hybrid Turrets to five. With that and T2 guns I should get another ten percent DPS. Or more, depending on what is considered base.

It even takes out battleships reasonably fast, a bit slower than in a Brutix, but there aren't that many in lowsec. And it has small enough signature that it is pretty much immune to anything cruiser and above. Unless I mess up traversal, but even then it has enough resists to recover. I have actually not tried to do a Serpentis Rally Point, because there were too many people in systems where those happened to spawn when I was flying around, but I can complete Serpentis Yards just fine.

I even got an escalation of one of those, but leading to a Serpentis Logistical Outpost, which, if the description is in any way accurate, is way too much for my little frigate. Blowing up a battleship or two is fine, but then would get boring, and I don't like the mentions of missile sentries. It is good to know that escalations are actually a thing. I wonder what the odds are for highsec anom to escalate, I did a good hundred of those probably, and never seen that.

On the other hand I have never seen a faction spawn from lowsec. Or belts for that matter. I have seen some tag rat spawns, a courier twice, but no faction. But then I either play in bursts to short for belts to respawn, or get scared of some pirate. And I read that belts work in cycles. Although I saw them at many points of those cycles, including special spawns, so I wonder, do they start at those points or I just happened to hit a belt someone left in that state? I know that happened at least once since, I got a special spawn in a belt where there were still wrecks from the final cycle stage.

Another thing I did in my new Assault Frigate was a highsec combat site, Serpentis Narcotic Warehouse. It had so many frigates and destroyers that they actually got pretty far into my armor, even though they died pretty much in one shot, but I beat them all. And the overseer structure dropped a Coreli A-Type 1MN Afterburner. So that is nice. I don't have much use for it, but assuming it sells, it is another thirty-something million ISK.

I got one of those better Tags4Sec tags, apparently worth about fifty million. Assuming it sells, the market seems a bit weird on those right now, some sort of introduction bounce I think. In general, pretty nice. I need some ISK because I want to start producing T2 ships without cutting into my half billion reserve. I still need the interface and skillbooks. And datacores. And materials, but I want to stick to frigates at first, so it is not that much per unit. But then, invention and manufacturing is a hobby within a hobby, really.

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