After the Dominion release, planets are no more grey discs but look a bit more interesting and natural. Like you have seen it on the Discovery Channel and in Star Trek…
Evolution of a plan: Half a year ago I planned to go strait for mining. Later the tritanium prices dropped from the mid year high of 4 ISK down to 2.5 ISK nowadays. So I switch to mission running. Later I learned about jump clones and a corp giving them for free. Unfortunately, that corporation stopped services and I’d to grind the necessary standings myself. Then I realized that the NPC corp I was running missions for had no jump clone service. So I switched over to another one. Now I’m at the point that I can run Lvl3-missions. So I did cut short the question posed some days ago: Myrm or Hulk? I played with EFT and created a Myrm-fitting that goes along the same style I used with my Vexor (drones & sniping) and for which I already had all skills. On the other hand the prices for Hulks did increase from 100 mil ISK to 140 mil ISK. So it became the Myrm. The first two Lvl3 combat missions went smoothly. P.S.: Did anyone notice that the Myrm (upper picture) looks like a Catalyst (see below) turned vertical? Said the other way: the Cat looks like a Myrm fallen to one side.
Today I found an email with a *tadaaaa* Dawntide beta key. Great! I’m very keen to see how it goes and I hope I can give some useful feedback. I find it more exciting to see a young game evolve than to hang around in something like WoW, how polished and streamlined it may be. Today it’s a bit to late to do much – but I’ll give as much information as possible. I have to recheck, but AFAIR there is no NDA.
As a miner I had early started to train some drone skills. The last missing step was Drone Interfacing V. As it is a 22 days skill I’d postponed it for a vacation time. Now it’s waiting in the queue and will finish on 2009-12-31 just when I’m back home. Then I’ve to decide if I go on for a Myrm, Sentry drones and Lvl3 missions or for a Hulk and mining.
These days the latest Eve expansion called Dominion reached our PCs. Beforehand everyone in the chats was complaining about the oncoming NPC corp tax. Nevertheless, there is more in Dominion than tax. My first glance fell on the new starry background. Now you feel like in space, not in some dark matter nebula. In general, the graphics seem more polished.
Today I remembered about something beeing anounced called “Moondoggie” – which was the project name for the new in-game browser. So just for fun, I tried my own home page – and it did work. Even the javascript based photo gallery. Then I tried wordpress.com – I write this post from inside the Eve in-game browser. Next checks: facebook => works, google mail and calendar => working, leo.org => working… I’m impressed. Alas, uploads do not work. So I’d to upload the following image using the good ol’ firefox:
The usual silence here was not only due to no ingame news. Instead I had started (again) with my own private Eve 3rd party tool: http://code.google.com/p/eveassetbook/. If finished, it will give some numbers about your assets: What’s worth all my ore? Which loot is better to refine than to sell? I bought at varying prices: what sell price I must choose to avoid loss?
It’s still in an very early stage and I dont expect it to be useful before the new year.
Back in september, Frogster released chapter two of Runes of Magic. It brought a new race (Elven) and two new classes (druid & warden). Short after release I had tried a druid to level 10 (pro: it heals, contra: it heals). Still on my todo list was the warden. Now I found the time to log on again and add the warden as a secondary to the druid. Soon I realised that the warden should be the main class and that the warden/druid combo burns mana. Further: the warden had no ranged attack. But I knew, that the scout as secondary adds a nice ranged DoT (vampire arrow). So I deleted the warden/druid and instead created a warden/scout.
This combination resembles the WoW-warlock as well as the WoW-hunter. Like the warlock, he has strong DoTs (vampire arrow & thorne vine). The oak pet is as good a tank as the the blue garbage bag aka voidwalker. Like the hunter, the W/S uses bows and wears chain, the oak pet may be comparable to a bear pet in WoW. Anyone having played a necromancer in Age of Conan knows, how valuable a real tanking pet is (In AoC, pet aggro added to your aggro – your pets attacked a mob, mob sees pets, thinks “There must be some necromancer, I’ll kick him!” and attacks you instead of the pets).
I tried the warden/scout on my default low level bosses:
- Hungry Greyce (Things that go bump in the night): with other combos I had soloed this with level 9 or 10 (Greyce at level 8). The W/S can do it on level 8.
- Anglie (Final clue): This was done at level 12 or 13. Unfortunately, when clearing the area from the kobolds, I aggroed Anglie and the fight started with some nasty kobolds around. The combined dmg of vampire arrow, thorne vine and the pet killed Anglie fast enough so I survived with about 25% health – enough to clean up the remaining kobolds.
- Redeye night bear (Blood sacrifice): Quite easy, just let the pet take the aggro and then double DoT.
- Yuri (Scheming Yuri): Now confident of my powers, I tried Yuri (lvl 15) when I myself still was level 14. Unfortunately I was too fast with nuking so I got aggro and had a hard time running around and drinking healing potions. Nevertheless, pet and nukes killed him finally.
The W/S can usually pull 3 mobs of the same level: attack one with the pet, pull a second with vampire arrow, pull the third with a normal shot and dot it with thorne vine.
Little hint: Other than in WoW, your pets don’t remember their active skills. You must remind yourself to activate them whenever you summon your companion.
Conclusion: for the friends of pet classes, the warden is a good choice. I’d guess it shall be a good solo class and some kind of (off-)tank in group play. In the forums, there are voices stating, that it becomes weaker in the end game – but I’ve no patience to try it to that point.
In the early october I dropped my Medium Cargo Optimization blueprint into some distant low sec research slot (while learning about null sec and warp bubbles). Last week it got completed and yesterday I retrieved it back into empire space. I had a lot of the material at hand but I still needed 58 units of the (quite expensive) Alloyed Tritanium Bars. There was just enough ISK in the wallet to set up an according buy order. I didn’t expect it, but today the order was completely fullfilled and all units were distributed in a relative compact area. Two hours later I was the new owner of three freshly manufactured(*) cargo rigs, took my Itty over and enhanced it to 38.000m3 raw space (about 49.000m3 with Giant Secure Containers). And I saved around 1 mil ISK per rig.
(*) Why the hell is it called manufacturing (latin for “made by hand”) if it is done by automated robot factories?
Some weeks ago I decided to change into another tarif of my internet provider. In detail: before phone and internet where on different suppliers, now its all in the hands of the internet provider. After a lot of emails and paper sent back and forth the line switch took place yesterday. For real man do always change more than one critical part of their IT-systems at a time, two days before I bought a copy of Windows 7.
The thumbs-up part:
- Windows 7 installs really fast and painless.
- Most application settings could be restored.
- Contrary to my expectations the line switch did work well, the line is now cheaper and faster.
The scary part:
- Making a backup of your old system drive is kind of tricky: the Linux-based HD-tools have some issues with NTFS system partitions and demand a checkfs run whom they never accept. So I copied everything in explorer and checked the data consitency with some diff tool. This took the about 5 hours.
- Installing all your software freshly will take several days. After two days, mail, browser, banking, Eve Online, theHunter, Logitech drivers, some graphics apps & some tools are running. Some more are to be done in the next days, mostly just on demand.
- One time Windows 7 didnt recognize the DSL router. The usual windows magic finally solved it: switch off, switch on, if still not working, repeat.
- Some app settings are spread and/or hidden to well to restore.
These days I found out about a Corp named “Estel Arador Corp Services” offering free jumpclone service (thus, providing you temporarily with the corp standing needed to create jumpclones). Alas, just when I had learned the jumpclone skills and was prepared to enter EACS, I learned that the service is currently down due to hardware problems of the founder. Now I have to grind standing for myself. And I learned more: the NPC corp I have the best standing with (Roden Shipyard) is the one with the least cloning facilities (null, nada, niente, zero). Fortunately, my second best NPC corp does have cloning facilities. So I’ll switch over and do missions for them.
Recent Comments