Operation Frostline, Day 1

The Frostline patch hit yesterday, which means that Operation Frostline is now live on servers and grids are now crazy big (update your bookmarks, everyone).

Bottom line, Operation Frostline is a mild remake of the Halloween event; this time we're killing Serpentis at the random sites.

I happened across a Frostline site in highsec last night while going from Point A to B to tend to my industry system.  I was in my Sacrilege, not the best for dps, but certainly not the worst against frigates and cruisers, so decided to check it out.  I was in a busy highsec system and expected the site to get swarmed, but I was the first person on grid, and began destroying the Serpentis.

It works very similarly to the Halloween event -- you land on the beacon to a locked acceleration gate and some frigates.  Kill the frigates to unlock - from memory there are 4 waves.  Gate unlocks, go to the 2nd room.  Partway through the killing a Navy Apoc showed up, but I didn't relent in my killing spree and he was having trouble hitting the frigates with his large beams (not pulse, beams) and warped away just as I entered the 2nd room.

Second room has some structures and a mob of cruisers.  From memory there's 3 waves of cruisers and then a single battlecruiser that actually drops the loot.  My dual rep passive tank Sacri tanked this room at 95% or better the entire time.  On the 2nd wave, a Tengu arrived but didn't shoot anything, he simply waited for the end 'boss' to try to scrape the loot.

BC spawns, we both dps him down, but I got can rights to the loot and the Tengu chose not to flip the can.

For my trouble, I got the Male and Female Serpentis shirts and a can of Quafe.  I convo'd the Tengu and offered to give him the Female shirt (Aba being male and the Tengu char being female) but he declined.

From his initial response, I'm sure he expected me to yell at him or something, but I wasn't going to get upset about a shirt on the first day of the event.  He declined the offer, we chatted a bit, and we went our separate ways.

From the way the dev blog is written, I would expect the Frostline loot to improve as the event goes forward, so I'll figure out what ship I want to use for hunting these.

Happy Hunting everyone.

Guristas Anomic Base Live

Vanguard deployed today, which means the Guristas Anomic (cruiser/BC sized) mission is now available from your friendly neighborhood lvl4 agent.

I haven't been able to get on SISI and play due to several consecutive family commitments, work commitments, work drama, and a (woohoo!) pending job change.  But that's the subject of a whole 'nother post.  However, while typing I'll say that things look crazy until well after EVE Vegas and I'm only moderately hopeful for a quiet holiday period.  And at the moment I have a head cold.  Bleh.

I'll chain grind some missions if I'm able and see if I can get the new mission to drop.  In the interim, here is some guidance from the forums.

• The SISI thread is here.
• This post seems to have a reasonable guide almost in the style that I would write it (Deimos).   Credit goes to Talsha Talamar.  
• This post is another approach (Vigilant) and a good guide.  Credit goes to Chainsaw Plankton.

Both posts are dated today, based on the SISI content but could (in theory) not represent the final live version.  Beware of surprise changes. :)

Pending a confirmation, the mission text is as follows.  Sounds like a fun scenario.

Anomic Base

I have a special optional and extremely difficult mission for you, we won’t penalize you if you decline it. 

The Wyvren-class Supercarrier Antero was recently stolen from the Caldari by a group of hijackers funded by the Guristas. They seem to have somehow double-crossed their employers, and now both the Caldari Navy and the Guristas are after them. Their Supercarrier is severely damaged, but still commands a powerful contingent of heavily modified fighters. 

I wouldn’t normally care too much about this ship, except that it just showed up outside a nearby repair depot demanding repairs and threatening violence. If they damage that depot I’m going to personally lose a significant investment, and we can’t let that happen. If you accept this mission, you’ll need to get over there and convince them that there are better depots to hold up than mine. There’s no way that you’ll be able to kill it, but if you wipe out enough of its fighters I’m sure they’ll get the hint. 

Only medium sized ships can gain entry to the repair yard, so don’t try to bring anything bigger. 

These rogue pirates have waves of heavily modified fighters and fighter bombers with strong shield tanks and small signatures. They deal all four damage types, with their modified Dragonfly fighters spewing Explosive, Kinetic and Thermal at close range, and their modified Mantis fighter-bombers lobbing EM damage from longer ranges. They always fly with Stasis Webifiers and Warp Scramblers fit. To save my repair depot you’ll need to keep destroying waves of fighters until the Wyvren decides to cut its losses and leave.  

A word of warning: these rogue pirates are extremely dangerous and have proven very capable of destroying capsuleer ships. If you choose to decline this mission or if you fail to complete it, you will not lose any standings. 

Declining a mission from a particular agent more than once every 4 hours will result in a loss of standing with that agent.

Guristas Anomic Base in Vanguard

The patch notes for Vanguard, which is due next Tuesday are available.

Two things of note for readers of Dog's Breath:

1. Guristas Anomic Base appears to be in this patch.  I haven't had time to go looking on SiSi, but if I have time this weekend will see what I can find out.

2. Navy Battlecruiser rebalance.  Changes are too long to list here, but I did notice that the Navy Drake is getting a little more tank (skill bonus changed from missile velocity to +4% all resists) and some additional drone bandwidth.

Happy Friday!

Gravity Well

Operation Gravity Well, the wardec plan of the Amarr Empire against the Drifters, has begun.

AMARR NAVY FORCES IN COMBAT WITH DRIFTERS IN KHANID KINGDOM
2015-08-25 15:00 By Lina Ambre 

NANDEZA – The Amarr Empire's Ministry of War has confirmed reports from independent observers that, within the last hour, elements of the Imperial Navy have engaged a concentration of Drifters in the Khanid Kingdom system of Nandeza. This action follows today's declaration of war against the Drifters by the Amarr Empire. It is unclear if the latest Drifter presence represents a change in their activity at this time. 

Elements of the Imperial Armed Forces continue to move into positions according to the war plan designated "GRAVITY WELL" by the Ministry of War. Activated within moments of the assassination of Empress Jamyl I, it now seems clear that the plan is a combined core systems consolidation and border reinforcement strategy that is presumably a planned response to a so-called "decapitation strike" by an enemy power. While the main fleet elements of the plan seem to have been put into place within hours of its activation, there are many auxiliary units and large numbers of ground troops still in the process of reaching their designated locations. 

On the home front, across all the worlds of New Eden's largest empire, the Ministry of Internal Order has been active both on the streets and on public GalNet casts. The primary propaganda theme has been to strike a note of iron resistance to a foe of unimaginable evil, with subjects exhorted to work and pray for the "Defense of the Throne Worlds".

Source.

I for one, welcome our new Drifter overlords, and hope they offer me good lvl4 missions in the future.  :)


What's Playing:  TOOL, Aenima

Aegis

Public service announcement:  Aegis patch has hit us today.

The patch notes are linked here.  There are changes to Drone Damage Amplifiers and Missiles.

There are therefore implications (perhaps bad ones) to your favorite burner fits, especially the Battlecruiser/Cruiser sized (Gila, I'm looking at you).

Fly safe, more to follow.

New Domi Model Preview

Confession time -- I've never flown a Dominix in anger.  I have to stop and roll my eyes around the room a bit and try to figure out if I've ever even owned one.  I don't think I have.  Mrs. Durden was always the Domi pilot and Drone Queen.  I was always more Caldari/Amarr based.

Anyway, there's a new Dev Blog up showcasing the potential Domi model.  It's pretty sweet.  Also in the works are Stilletto, Probe, Thrasher, Cerberus (shown), and the Gallente T3D.

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In other news, I finally defeated the Blood Raider Anomic Base mission on the live server.  It took me 3 attempts (thankfully with nothing lost but drones and some pride).  The setup I used is identical to what I'd posted from sisi, but I swapped a 3rd Shield Extender for the afterburner.

It did require some different tactics, and the frigates that accompany him seemed to have a lot tougher tank than I remembered.

I'd like to run him a time or two more on live and then I'll post an update and fit here.


What's Playing:  Tool, Sober

Yes, the New Icons Stink

I'm generally not a hater, and generally not one to fear change, so I tried to keep an open mind on the things I was hearing about the new ship icons.  Every patch brings out a wave of forum angst directed at CCP. It's usually a case of the 3 bears conundrum: The patch is too big, too small, and rarely does CCP get credit for doing something "just right." I heard the angst on icons brewing and shrugged it off as "business as usual."

So I was caught off guard when I actually didn't like the new icons.  "OK," I thought. "You'll get used to them." So over the course of the past couple days I did some explore sites in the Zealot and then ran some lvl4's in the Golem and ... The icons still suck. 

I find myself picking my primary targets not from the icon, but on the target's name. I'm effectively ignoring the new feature. I catch myself and try to force my eyes to the icon column, but they just won't stay there.

Now, a few of them aren't bad. The sentry gun, MTU, and accel gate are fine.  The beacon icon is OK, but needs to be a different color or something.

But the differences between ship icons are too subtle.  It is too easy to miss an important ship that might have a web or scram equipped, or a lurking little bastard that will shoot up my drones. On my screen, I have trouble telling between battleship, BC, and cruiser icons.The wreck icon is also particularly hard to use ... Filled or unfilled was so much easier to see.

And krikey, drone icons are supposed to be X's. What they've done to my little mechanical friends is just unnatural.

I agree with those that point out that making the UI easier to read by adding a huge variety of icons is a move in the wrong direction.  It's called an overview (as opposed to a detailed view) for a reason.  Making the overview more complicated while striving for simplicity is like saying I'm going to fix your flat tire by letting the rest of the air out.  CCP continues to talk about new player retention and getting folks up the learning curve ... How will this possibly help?

I am almost never on the bandwagon of rolling back features, but in this case I'd be in favor of a classic mode.

Please.

Workarounds on Patch Day

So I login to the laptop, and attempt to patch up.  Start the download an go off to do some shopping on Amazon, come back at 672kb of the patch complete and hung.

Hrm.  Not good.  Kill the process, try again.  Same thing.

I was reminded of this little trick.

In your main EVE folder there is an executable named RESCACHE.exe (caps for emphasis).  It will scan the shared cache file for missing and corrupt files and repair.  I had to do this on the desktop a few weeks ago and it worked fine.  Hopefully it will let me login so I can be a little social ingame.  I'm currently downloading 2+ gb, but that's better than a full reinstall.

Happy Friggin' Patch Day, and good luck to you.

:)


Edit:  Looks like Rescheck worked, and I am logging in.

Carnyx Patch Notes

>> Corporate SURVEY is still open.  Just a friendly reminder.

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Carnyx patch notes went up yesterday.  I'll grab some points of interest, but read the whole thing; big changes to Sov and module rebalancing (Shield Extenders, Armor Plates, and Sentry Drones in particular).

Burner changes:

• Burner NPC´s have had their faction standing penalty removed when killing them 
• Burner NPC now give out a security standing gain when killed.
• Frequency of Burner Missions offered by level 4 Security agents has been lowered.

I had stopped tracking my burner offers, as they seemed to have stabilized around every 4.5 vanilla lvl4 missions.  Looks like I'll need to fire up the spreadsheet again and find out the new rates.  I suspect the overall lowering is due to the increased number of burner types; perhaps they're shooting to keep it about 1:5 overall?  (Hopefully this isn't a nerf.)

Other misc:

• Always on the forefront of innovation, Sanctuary have introduced a collection of SKINs for the Astero, Stratios and Nestor. Head to the New Eden Store every Tuesday over June as these are introduced one at a time.

I haven't peeked on SISI at the skins (if they're even available to look at), but the SOE ships are some of my favorites.  I haven't spent any Aurum in quite awhile, but this might do it.  Will be interesting to see where they go with them.  A gloss black Stratios or Nestor could be really cool.

The patch is slated for this coming Tuesday, June 2nd.  Happy patch day!

What's playing:   Foo Fighters, Skin and Bones, My Hero

Anomic Base

Mosaic launches tomorrow!  (golf clap).  Time to get in for some last minute testing on SISI.

Short version:  I've run both of the new missions using the previous fits and think I'm about as ready as I can get for these to hit the live server.

I could milk this and make it into two separate posts, but meh -- I'll just make you click through to get the rest.

Stop the Thief, Now With More Orthruses

Or is that Orthrusi?

Anyway, was running Stop the Thief tonight, lvl4, and noticed that there are now Mordus Headhunters ships where previously there were Merc Moas (or perhaps Caracals).  See screenshot.

Nice little discovery in the new patch.  Pretty cool to get some of the newer sleeker hulls in action.

The Merc Lieutenants were still in the Moa hulls, btw.

Feeding the Animals

This made me laugh out loud at the keyboard.  From a post over at MassivelyOP:

At EVE Fanfest 2015, CCP took the story one step further with a trailer ... showing Drifter battleships harvesting capsuleer corpses and using them to rebuild their own bodies. Now players have discovered that this is actually happening in-game; If you die in a system with Circadian Seekers or eject a corpse into space, the body will be picked up and taken for processing. 

I read this and I exlaimed to myself:  THIS IS AWESOME! I HAVE GOT TO TRY THIS!  Like any good spaceship lunatic, I have a few corpses in the virtual freezer.  What better use for them than to feed the Jove?

And then I thought....  We had a stray cat once.  We fed him, so he stuck around.  We named him Frank.

What could possibly be the end result of feeding */this/* animal?  Only good things, I'm sure. :)

I read part of this article and explained this train of thought to Mrs. Durden, and we agreed that the classic rules from Gremlins ought to apply:

• Don't get him wet.
• Don't expose him to direct sunlight.
• Never, ever feed him after midnight.

This is just the beginning of the fun, I'm sure.

CSM X Members and Scylla Patch Notes

Congrats to the members of CSMX, as reported by EN24 and TAGN.

• Manfred Sideous - Pandemic Legion
• Cagali Cagali - Brave Collective
• Sort Dragon - DARKNESS.
• Jayne Fillion - Sanctuary of Shadows
• Steve Ronuken - Fuzzwork Enterprises
• Chance Ravinne - WINGSPAN Delivery Services
• Gorga - Nulli Secunda
• corebloodbrothers - The Volition Cult
• Thoric Frosthammer - Get Off My Lawn
• Sugar Kyle - Snuffed Out
• Endie - Goonswarm Federation
• Mike Azaria - The Scope
• corbexx - No Holes Barred
• Sion Kumitomo - Goonswarm Federation

It looks like Manfred and Sugar (both bolded here for emphasis) secured enough votes to be the guaranteed travelers next year to Icelandic shindigs.

All four of my endorsements (Sugar Kyle, corbexx, Mike Azariah, and Jayne Fillion) made the cut, so I am reasonably happy!  Good luck to all of them.

EDIT:  If you want an overview of the FanFest keynote, check out the summary at massivelyop.net (which is the successor to Massively).

The Scylla patch notes are now available.  I've done a quick scan for Anomic content and found only one correction of a typeo (meh).  Otherwise I don't see much groundshaking changes in terms of PVE and agents.  That being said, there is some content being added to the "Opportunities" system, which is the new player experience experiment.  I suppose that this framework could be expanded in time to include more content for legacy players, perhaps in the same dynamic way as suggested in my last post.

Drifter Spoilers

EN24 has a pretty good article on our new faction.

Spoilers are reasonably well marked if you just want to check out some of the screenshots and NOT read details from the test server.

Tiamat

If you've not seen them, the patch notes for Tiamat are up.  Looks like Tiamat will hit us in 2 days on the 17th.  (And while I don't play D&D, I did watch the 80s cartoon as a kid and will forever associate the name with the picture above.  :)  ).

I'm pretty excited to see the Lore behind Drifters (new NPC faction) get revealed.  This story has been dragging a little bit, but that's probably just my nerd impatience showing. 

I scanned the patch notes as usual for impacts to burners and other missions.  I'll paste in the Mission-centric section and put some emphasis on the minor change to Anomic mission text.

Missions

• A text issue in the mission Portal to War 1 of 5 has been fixed.

• A typo in the mission The Test Of Competence - Utrainen's Reports (1 of 2) has been fixed.

• A text issue in the mission Cliene Veine - Fixing the Problem (1 of 2) has been fixed.

• A typo in the mission: Evacuation has been fixed.

• A text issue in the mission: Balancing the Books 7 of 10 has been fixed.

• An issue with the completion requirements with the mission 'Not Gneiss At All' has been fixed.

• An acceleration gate is now named correctly in the Evolution agent mission.

• Typo in Industry career path description has been fixed.

• Typo in the Crimson Hand Supply Depot dungeon pop up has been fixed

• Some NPC have had their security standing boost lowered.

• In some cases NPC would get stuck on a object in Massive Attack, this has been fixed.

• Small Asteroid Cluster dungeon contained overlapping Dark ochre this has been fixed.

• Fixed a typo in agent text for mission 'After the Seven (4 of 5) "Ruse".

• The mission text for the Minmatar version of "Anomic Team" now includes information about the Mjolnir Rockets that the Burner uses.

Enjoy!

Patch Panic

Every patch, I have a little panic attack that Burners will somehow change, ships will get nerfed, rats will get buffed, or other ripple effect changes will upset the apple cart of my fit lists.

Based on the stats of this page, many of you are finding me via Google and most of those Google hits are in search of strategies and tips for Burners.  Although the internet as a whole gets tagged "use at your own risk" and there's a constant churn of old/obsolete data, I'd feel a little responsibility if by some inaction or some inattention I somehow led people astray.  The whole point of this mess is to help people, not get them on lossmails.

Right now, based on what I'm seeing on forums, there are two missions I'm worried about:
- Team Jaguar
- Single Serpentis Daredevil

However, I'd like to get everything else verified as well and see where we stand.  There was apparently a nerf to light missile launcher Rate of Fire (RoF) in the fall.  I blatently missed the change.  Missile fits in general may have more trouble with burners than other weapon types.

I did the Team Hawk burner mission last night.  I went into the pocket with a Crow first before risking the faction-fit Garmur.  I found that this mission was unchanged in layout and tactics and was thus still a kite-able fight.

I returned with the Garmur and melted his face.  No overheat, no reloads, no drama.

Now, the Team Hawk is arguably the easiest burner mission and by far the easiest Team burner mission.  So I'm not claiming victory yet.  But it makes me feel better that it was largely unchanged since the last time I'd faced it.

So, I will go into the battle report for that mission and mark it *** VERIFIED PROTEUS JANUARY 2015 ***.

Other missions will get a tag of *** WARNING NOT YET VERIFIED FOR LATEST PATCH ***.

Ok, enough typing. Now I need to go edit all my battle reports. :)

stop buying up all the recons lol

The post title comes from forums.  Had to laugh a bit.

And then I rubbed my chin.

And then I frowned a bit.

And then I went scrounging through my assets list and found my old Rook sitting in a hangar.  I knew I'd owned a few Recons over the years, but I'd done a big move back from Syndicate a little over a year ago and sold off some excess hulls.  Looks like I sold off the Lachesis but held onto the Rook.

The market will no doubt adjust shortly after the patch, but the sell price where I live for a Rook has gone from 140M to 200M.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out the dev blog from the 19th and read the associated ideas thread.


What's Playing:  Peach, Giving Birth to a Stone, You Lied

Bits and Pieces of Rhea

Rhea launched this week.  Other than not being able to find ANY of my station icons thanks to the new UI, I like it.

The new gfx engine kicks ass.  My Sacri looks all mean, like a ship named Sacrilege should.  Some ships came out better than others of course; my Astarte link ship now has a lot of brown apparent on it.  It's tolerable, but who paints a ship brown?

Dig the new Sacri render

The supernova (or whatever) is growing much more quickly now.  If you haven't seen it, check the sky where you live.  This forum thread is also keeping an animated gif of the star each day.  Will be interesting to see where this story goes.  I like that it's unfolding rather slowly.

I went looking for the new Paladin and Golem skins in the AUR store but don't see them.  Maybe they didn't make the cut for Rhea?  There is a ton of new clothes, I may need to play Ken-doll with Abavus and give him a new look.

The Guristas Worm burner popped for me last night.  I was tired, so I waited until this morning to take him on.  He's one of the more challenging burners for me at the moment, but I find that he's one of my favorites.  The need to maneuver and tackle before the fighting really starts makes a big difference.  As I jumped into the pocket I was vaguely afraid of ninja nerfs to my burner fits or burner AI, but it appears the Daredevil and Worm burner both went untouched.

We're getting ready to host some family, and have been scrubbing the house for out of town visitors, so haven't played as much as I'd like.  Hopefully next week I can do some more exploration.


What's Playing:  The Black Keys, the iTunes Sessions, Howlin' For You

Phoebe - Lots of New Stuff, No New Burners, Free Titans

This will be a jumbled post, so bear with me...

Part I:
New dev blog today gives the major features of the next patch (codename: Phoebe).  Lots of cool stuff.  I like the unlimited skill queue, obviously.

No new burners.  Expecting content for 3 patches in a row was probably too much to ask.  I'll be sure to poke Sugar sometime soon and see if we can get more info from the devs on how burners are being received by the players..

For PVE/Missioneers, the following statement is interesting.  The old agent UI is pretty stale, so looking forward to the new detail (if it looks anything like the sexy new Industry UI, I'll be VERY happy).

Mission Objectives Guidance

New information in the Agent Mission info panel will direct you to what you need to do next in your mission to complete it. An upcoming dev blog will go into details on this new feature.

Side note:  The new notifications and sensor overlay look sweet.  It seems reasonably obvious now that the EVE client is getting a major UI overhaul.  I was skeptical on some of this stuff (I'm an oldskool guy and still use rightclick for everything) but I like what I see on Sisi.

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Part II:  Free Titans

If you haven't heard, you can currently get free Titans on the test server (aka Sisi) to try out the new jump/gate mechanics for capships. And of course, blow the snot out of people with the DD.

Details here.  It's pretty simple - patch up the Sisi client (see this Wiki entry), login, go to the 'moveme' channel and type 'moveme' to get ported out to Syndicate 0.0.  Then type 'capitalships' and get free skillpoints.  Logout, claim your Titans at the login screen. Have fun on the cheaply seed SISI market, then go kick some ass.

If you choose not to get ported to Syndicate first, you can still use the 'moveme' channel after.  But one hint: BEFORE YOU ACCEPT YOUR SHINY TITANS.... make sure you're at a station that has all the items seeded for 100 isk.  Trust me.

This "testing" may go on for at least a little while, according to CCP Claymore.


I immediately went and bought enough miner2's to outfit an Avatar.  Damn right.

There might or might not have been some omber mined in highsec before I moved the titan (my alt's Leviathan is in the background looking mean).

Also bought a somewhat 'real' fit, at least with real guns.  I know nothing about capship fits, so went for a hull tanking, double armor rep, to maximize my time on grid before the inevitable end.  More on this in a future post.