Fuck level 4's

[lac]

Missioning in Eve is probably the most cheat-sheet intensive quest system in any MMO. Knowing what resists to fit, who will scram, what will aggro or what will spawn is paramount to your survival when entering a new level of missions during your first half year of playing. Especially so because of the gear loss involved and the fact there is no in-game way of knowing how hard a mission will be.

[Phred]

No prob man, ill give Phred the same if I havent yet.  kinda lose track of my donations...

Ya that'd be cool. Trying missions on a cruiser might be fun. heh. I've been ratting in asteroid fields but that's a bit lame because all the bulk miners kill most of them as they spawn it seems so I have a lot of time spent warping around looking and finding maybe 2 or 3 pirates. On the plus side the roid pirates are perfect for killing with a Frigate. A bit too easy actually. If that is the way missions used to be it needed a bit of a nerf. I'm playing as Phaeydra btw. Faeyd was a bit of a failure.

[spotd666]

.................I've been ratting in asteroid fields but that's a bit lame because all the bulk miners kill most of them as they spawn it seems so I have a lot of time spent warping around looking and finding maybe 2 or 3 pirates. On the plus side the roid pirates are perfect for killing with a Frigate. A bit too easy actually.................

You can make things more difficult/interesting by leaving your pirate wrecks in the belts.  Keep warping round the belts in killing rats until eventually some miner/newb steals some of your stuff.  Now you have a more testing target....and slightly better loot (T2 Mining Lasers, anyone).

I have used this process successfully to test various fits for my Suicide Tackling Kes.  Rats don't last long enough for useful test results.   ....but miners do, and even newbie frigates can last for 30 secs or more.....

Additionally this acts as a useful teaching aid for newbs and carebear miners, that while they are in the sweetshop to be very careful how they steal the sweeties.

NB  - This will also pull in a fair number of other testers eager to see how long your frigate is going to last against their BS.....:)

[bhodi]

It's the eve circle of life! :)

[VickeVire]

I must say it's pretty easy as a beginner. You pick a 'high pay' L1 mission and get blown to bits, then you SHOULD think 'hmm this was a bit harder than that other not so good paying mission'

1. Ask someone about pointers
2. Dodge 'high pay' missions until my skills are better
3. Search the net... (Warning, reading required!)

[cmlancas]

You must be an EVE god then. I had some problems last night when I got assigned "Worlds Collide" and got blown up in five missile shots before I could warp out.

 

[Morat20]

You must be an EVE god then. I had some problems last night when I got assigned "Worlds Collide" and got blown up in five missile shots before I could warp out.

 

Worlds collide is a fucker. If you don't already know you have to turn and burn through that room, you die.

[VickeVire]

If you get WC as you first mission ever that sure is bad luck... but I did learn very quick 'good pay' meant more planning/work and if I wasn't in the know I asked around.

[Phred]

I must say it's pretty easy as a beginner. You pick a 'high pay' L1 mission and get blown to bits, then you SHOULD think 'hmm this was a bit harder than that other not so good paying mission'

1. Ask someone about pointers
2. Dodge 'high pay' missions until my skills are better
3. Search the net... (Warning, reading required!)

None of these 3 were likely to help. I did search on the names of the missions. There are so many L1 missions I don't think anyone has documented more than a fraction of them. At the time, they were the first bloody missions I'd had outside the tutorial so I had no point of reference as to just how insanely hard they were. I managed to actually finish the second one today and every damn mission has been a cakewalk since then, sadly I'd like a bit more of a challenge in the missions but that's the price you pay for that CoH style of content design.

To give you some idea of how hard they were, picture groups of 4-6 pirates, clustered tightly enough that it was stupidly difficult to seperate them out, each rocket hit from which you'd take 25% of your total hp. With a group of 6 if they all agro you can kiss your ship goodbye very quickly. Often the first tic of armor regen didn't show up until I was half way into structural. I even trained up hulls 3 overnight so I could go out and get a resist damage nano which helped a bit.

From the sounds of the noobie chat the last few days I'm not the only one this has happened to. Now I know better if I ever get another mission like that I'd dump it back in the agent's lap where it belongs, but as a complete newbie I had no frame of reference other than the tutorial missions which were even more of a cakewalk.

I've even gpme bacll tp am inicus from an incursus I was using.

[TheWalrus]

I've gotten worlds collide three times. Each time I go "Oh yeah". Warp out, dock put on my afterburner and shield recharger, fly like a fucker to the gate and get to the last room where the guys are cake. Sucks. I've only bitten it hard once though, and been close the other times.

[IainC]

A few general tips for tough missions, apologies if this sounds like teaching you to suck eggs but they're noob tips that I wish I'd known when I started out.

Kiting: This works. If the bad guys are bunched up then spread them out. Warp in, align to something, start flying towards it and lock the nearest target. You can aggress anything that you can lock even if you're well out of your weapon range. Fire something at it until it notices (you don't need to hit or be in range) then fly away pulsing your AB as needed. As the bad guys are following you, snipe the closer ones and use your drones to thin their ranks down. Also if you can't kill them at that range then keep kiting them away from the rest, warp out then warp back in, the ones you kited away will still be strung out across space.

Tank: Whole articles have been written on this but for PvE, tanking is very easy as you're usually up against a known enemy. Firstly don't try and tank both armour and shields, it doesn't work. Pick one for your ship and stick with it. If you have a lot of spare midslots then shield tanking is usually best, lows are for armour tank. When talking about tank, three things are important: Resists, HPs and sustainability. Resists are the most important of the three, the better they are, the less damage you'll take and your repper won't need to work so hard. Remember that resists are separate for armour, hull and shields. If you're armour tanking, don't panic if your shields vanish in seconds as long as your armour holds up. Have your active resist gear running as soon as you hit the mission room and turn on your repper before your shields are gone. I was running a level 4 mission in my Domi the other day and I had the entire room aggroed at me. My shield lasted about ten seconds but once the damage was hitting my armour resists it barely made any impact at all - I didn't even need to have my repper running most of the time.

Drones: As a Gallente pilot these things will save your ass. Just get used to making them work for you. They are pretty stupid and require some degree of micromanagement. Create a group for your drones so you can order them all at once. Don't send drones to their deaths unless you need to buy time to get away, make sure the aggro is on you before you commit them. Focus the drones on your targets - don't let them pick their own targets - and they will destroy most things well out of weapons range (further helping your tank issues). Drones by default have a 20k range, but the skill Scout Drone Operation adds 5k per level, Electronic Warfare Drone Interfacing adds 3k per level and a Drone Link Augmenter adds 20k. The module may be hard to fit on a frigate but with skills alone you can easily have a 40-50K drone range - which should be more than enough for sniping L1 frigates.

[ajax34i]

My opinion is that, due to all the whining about how PVE sucks in this game (it does), and also because a majority of the playerbase seems interested in PVE rather than PVP, CCP decided a while ago (about a year and a half ago, when they revamped the agents and missions and added some more) to copy some of the features that other PVE MMO's have.  As a result, they decided to introduce "surprises" rather than just add HP to NPCs to make them harder.

So, there are missions where you're not supposed to fight; winning depends on speed and quick reflexes.  There are missions where you're supposed to just observe, and if you fight they are designed to outright kill you.  There are missions where you're sent to just salvage something but instead it turns out you have to fight (but nothing in the description tells you this). 

The majority of missions are still straight tank and spank, but with the random way in which missions are picked for you, you may get the tricky ones.

I did farm Worlds Collide for the kills/loot in the past, but what I did was I rushed to the last room first, looted the mission objective, took it to station, then went back (making sure I had a damn good tank) and picked my way through the earlier rooms, warping away and coming back as needed.  Sometimes you're only able to take one of them out before you have to warp, but if you do that when you come back the DPS on you is reduced a bit, and maybe you can take 2 out before you warp again.  But anyway, all of it was just an exercise, the mission was completed and I could have moved on if I wanted to.

[lac]

There are missions where you're sent to just salvage something but instead it turns out you have to fight (but nothing in the description tells you this).

There is a combat mission 'cargo delivery' which is disguised as a courier mission. You get jumped by npc's while picking up some quaffe. CCP was sneaky enough to lower the isk reward to that of a normal courier mission, making the death trap complete for a casual first timer.

[IainC]

There are missions where you're sent to just salvage something but instead it turns out you have to fight (but nothing in the description tells you this).

There is a combat mission 'cargo delivery' which is disguised as a courier mission. You get jumped by npc's while picking up some quaffe. CCP was sneaky enough to lower the isk reward to that of a normal courier mission, making the death trap complete for a casual first timer.

That mission says 'combat' in the mission type field of your journal though and the agent warns you that it *might* be dangerous.

[Endie]

There are missions where you're sent to just salvage something but instead it turns out you have to fight (but nothing in the description tells you this).

There is a combat mission 'cargo delivery' which is disguised as a courier mission. You get jumped by npc's while picking up some quaffe. CCP was sneaky enough to lower the isk reward to that of a normal courier mission, making the death trap complete for a casual first timer.

On the other hand, if you are blitzing missions for standing gains and storyline missions there are few things quite so sweet as getting three cargo delivery missions in a row: you fit an MWD (I seem to remember it's not in deadspace) and sprint to the warehouse, pick up the cargo and warp off.

[Murgos]

There is a similar one where you have to pick up some reports.  Only, when you get there all hell breaks loose.  I tried to loot the box that had the reports but I got the message, "You may not open this container while it is being guarded."  So, it's not true that you can blitz the pick-up in every case.

First time I did that mission I thought, "0.5m of cargo?  I'll use a shuttle."  I knew things were screwy once I realized there was no station to dock at so I turned around and got my combat ship but yea, if I hadn't been paying attention I probably would have got popped.  No big deal in a shuttle but if I had grabbed and indy thinking there was a real cargo I would have been pissed.

[Phred]

.

Kiting: This works. If the bad guys are bunched up then spread them out. Warp in, align to something, start flying towards it and lock the nearest target. You can aggress anything that you can lock even if you're well out of your weapon range. Fire something at it until it notices (you don't need to hit or be in range) then fly away pulsing your AB as needed. As the bad guys are following you, snipe the closer ones and use your drones to thin their ranks down. Also if you can't kill them at that range then keep kiting them away from the rest, warp out then warp back in, the ones you kited away will still be strung out across space.
.

As a gallente with rail guns kiting seemed to not work so well against missile boats as they seem to have about a 10 minle range. As gallente come a bit light on missile skills do you think it's worth training a few for missions where the only solution is a long kite? or save the sp and dump the mission?

[Tige]

As a gallente with rail guns kiting seemed to not work so well against missile boats as they seem to have about a 10 minle range. As gallente come a bit light on missile skills do you think it's worth training a few for missions where the only solution is a long kite? or save the sp and dump the mission?

I'm a big fan of kiting sniping.  Loot or buy some tracking modules (with scripts) and/or gyro stabs for a distance and damage buff.  It will allow you to really get some distance between you and rats.  I'm currently flying L2s and L3s with a Harpy (Calderi AF) .  L2s are easy and every once in a while I'll get an L3 Damsel in Distress or something like it that has a handful of shield tanked cruisers.  I can't break their tank so I take down everything else and kite them away from the mission objective, warp out, back in to recover objective and I'm done.  Once I turn in the mission the shield tanks disappear and I salvage the wrecks.  All this is done at around 60km.  I catch some missiles but with the right hardener or shield boost it has not been a problem.  Most of the time I just get the graphic of my ship getting repeatedly hit by missiles but no damage.

I'm of the mindset now to grind faction missions with my AF and skip Cruiser and BC completely while I finish training up all the skills that will help no matter what I fly.  I just don't want to spend all that time training medium skills if I'm not going to use them.   

[Furiously]

The problem with that is when you take large XXX specializtion, you have to go back and train everything you missed.

I was mentioning to Nerf, it's pretty amazing there is really only a 3 difference between the damage a well setup AF can do and a well setup BS.

If I had a full-time missioning group I'd be happy to fly a AF all the time. You just lack the DPS to break the tank on the BS's.

[IainC]

As a gallente with rail guns kiting seemed to not work so well against missile boats as they seem to have about a 10 minle range. As gallente come a bit light on missile skills do you think it's worth training a few for missions where the only solution is a long kite? or save the sp and dump the mission?

Drones.

Seriously. Those suckers will rape crappy L1 NPC frigates at well beyond their engagement range. As I recall you have the Gallente Special Forces build which starts you with Scout Drones 4 or so. That's 40k range on your drones. With some judicious kiting you shouldn't ever have more than a couple of ships able to fire at you at any one time and those that can should die pretty fast to your drones.

I wouldn't bother training up missiles just for missioning - NPCs can fire missiles faster than you can anyway (I appealed this as I was being hit by heavy missiles from about 120k range in a mission and was told that for balance reasons, NPCs weren't limited to the same ranges as players). Train up your tank fitting and drone skills so you can live longer and kill faster.

[Logik]

As a gallente with rail guns kiting seemed to not work so well against missile boats as they seem to have about a 10 minle range. As gallente come a bit light on missile skills do you think it's worth training a few for missions where the only solution is a long kite? or save the sp and dump the mission?

It's been said before (many times, most recently by IainC), but it bears repeating: if you're flying Gallente for missions, it's really drone boat or bust.

[Phred]

As a gallente with rail guns kiting seemed to not work so well against missile boats as they seem to have about a 10 minle range. As gallente come a bit light on missile skills do you think it's worth training a few for missions where the only solution is a long kite? or save the sp and dump the mission?

It's been said before (many times, most recently by IainC), but it bears repeating: if you're flying Gallente for missions, it's really drone boat or bust.

I need to study the problem a bit more, though it's hard to do while you are watching your armor drop like a rock, but it seemed to me the drones wouldn't attack without a locked target and getting a target lock on npc missile boats appeared to be a bit tricky while still getting away successfully without a face full of missles.

Also, the drones tend to ignore all commands once they are at a distance. Today I tried to move them from one target to another and even after I killed the lock on the old target they stayed on it until it was dead.

I played all day on my Gallenite and my Calderi today staying mainly on frigates trying to get a handle on why I was having trouble. One thing I wondered. Is anyone else getting weird video hitching where the screen just stops updating for a few seconds every couple of minutes? It was especially bad when enemy fighters flew into my in front of my ship view. I've turned off all the graphic effects I could find like turrret effects, and trails but it really hasn't helped much. It feels like there's a garbage collection thread running that steals all the cpu when it runs or something. I don't have too bad a system, AMD 3200+ Nvidia 7600 gt, 2 gig of reasonably fast memory and a new SATA hard drive running on an Nforce 4 chip set.

[IainC]

The base lock range on an Imicus is 35km. Even without skills like Long Range Targeting you're likely to be able to lock them well beyond their aggro radius.
You don't need to fly right up to them to target them and get aggro, if they're in lock range, they're aggroable. Fire a gun at them to get their attention then fly away and let them chase you.

Select all your drones - either create a drone group or use the 'drones in space' heading to command them with rather than ordering them one at a time - and send them at a bad guy. Drones often forget their orders so you need to keep an eye on what they are doing. Losing lock does not cancel their orders, only new orders or the target's destruction will do that (this is actually very handy when you're damped to hell but you already have your drones murdering the AFs that are scrambling you). I tend to find that if they're flying for a long time without engaging they'll often revert to AI behaviour, you may need to order them again as they get close to their target.

[Endie]

I don't envy the Gallente pilots the task of running missions with drones.

In something like the L4 version of The Assault, when you get it from a high quality agent (thankyou, Bhodii for pointing out the L4Q19 Kaala admin agent!) you have four pockets, with a total of 10 battleships, half a dozen BCs, a dozen or so T2 cruisers (how I hate the 250k dire inferno cruisers) and a swarm of frigates and T1 cruisers.  Since they are in four groups, this is a piece of cake: you never face more than 4BSes and a few support at a time.  But drop some drones and one of two things happen:

1) Everything in the room not currently aggroed now aggros your drones, blows up any of your slow-ass mediums you were dumb enough to send more than 30km from your ship then relaxes when they are dead or you recall their damaged asses, rendering their use expensive and fleeting.  Or,

2) Everything in the room not currently aggroed now aggros your drones, blows up any of your slow-ass mediums you were dumb enough to send more than 30km from your ship then aggroes you en masse when you recall them.  Gratz on warping out.

[IainC]

I really don't find that is the case. I run a Domi for L4s, before that I had a Myrm in L3s and Vexxor for L2s. As you can imagine I've been heavily into drones since leaving the noob ship behind. You so need to be careful about how you commit them, but I find that my medium and light drones never take damage ever from NPCs that aggro them from afar. Only my heavies are big enough and slow enough to hit. I can snipe AFs out of a cloud of unagressed NPCs using Hammerhead IIs without them taking any damage back.

The only ones that are tricky are the missions with reinforcement waves and for those I generally just pull my drones in until the reinforcements have aggroed me.

[ajax34i]

As far as finding targets to lock, easily, use the Overview, don't try to lock them from in-space.  I've re-sorted my Overview by distance (dunno if that's the default) by clicking on the Distance column.  Plus, I re-ordered the columns around so that Distance and Speed are next to each other, followed by Name and Type.  And then I just ctrl-click to lock whatever's closer or whatever seems to approach me the fastest way.

[Morat20]

I don't envy the Gallente pilots the task of running missions with drones.

In something like the L4 version of The Assault, when you get it from a high quality agent (thankyou, Bhodii for pointing out the L4Q19 Kaala admin agent!) you have four pockets, with a total of 10 battleships, half a dozen BCs, a dozen or so T2 cruisers (how I hate the 250k dire inferno cruisers) and a swarm of frigates and T1 cruisers.  Since they are in four groups, this is a piece of cake: you never face more than 4BSes and a few support at a time.  But drop some drones and one of two things happen:

1) Everything in the room not currently aggroed now aggros your drones, blows up any of your slow-ass mediums you were dumb enough to send more than 30km from your ship then relaxes when they are dead or you recall their damaged asses, rendering their use expensive and fleeting.  Or,

2) Everything in the room not currently aggroed now aggros your drones, blows up any of your slow-ass mediums you were dumb enough to send more than 30km from your ship then aggroes you en masse when you recall them.  Gratz on warping out.

I haven't run the L4 version, but while drones DO aggro the universe, the effective aggro range is really only about 15 to 20k (at least for Hammerhead 2s).

My L3 habit (Myrmidion) is to lock at 60k, fire off my popgun (2x250m rails) for a single salvo to aggro the group, then sic Hammerhead 2's on them while heading towards them with full burners. As soon as I make the first wreck, I select "orbit at 500" on it (not that it can do that, but it tries).

I'm generally left with a cluster of wrecks convienently placed for salvaging, and it takes 4+ merc cruiser to put me into my armor. (I have no shield tank, obviously). Now that I thought ahead and added two rigs (explosive damage resistance to armor and a +armor rep rig), it's really hard to overwhelm my armor tank, and that's with a single T2 medium repper. When I move BC to 4/5 instead of 3/5, I don't see any of the missions really bugging me.

My drones rarely get aggro, and when they do it's just recall and as soon as they hit the bay, pop the guys who shot them with my guns for a second, then redeploy.

[Endie]

I don't envy the Gallente pilots the task of running missions with drones.

In something like the L4 version of The Assault, when you get it from a high quality agent (thankyou, Bhodii for pointing out the L4Q19 Kaala admin agent!) you have four pockets, with a total of 10 battleships, half a dozen BCs, a dozen or so T2 cruisers (how I hate the 250k dire inferno cruisers) and a swarm of frigates and T1 cruisers.  Since they are in four groups, this is a piece of cake: you never face more than 4BSes and a few support at a time.  But drop some drones and one of two things happen:

1) Everything in the room not currently aggroed now aggros your drones, blows up any of your slow-ass mediums you were dumb enough to send more than 30km from your ship then relaxes when they are dead or you recall their damaged asses, rendering their use expensive and fleeting.  Or,

2) Everything in the room not currently aggroed now aggros your drones, blows up any of your slow-ass mediums you were dumb enough to send more than 30km from your ship then aggroes you en masse when you recall them.  Gratz on warping out.

I haven't run the L4 version, but while drones DO aggro the universe, the effective aggro range is really only about 15 to 20k (at least for Hammerhead 2s).

The aggro range for drones in the Assault certainly extends to 80km, as I had them attacking the nearest targets (40km thanks to those kiting NPC scum) and they were hit by an unaggroed group 120km away from me.

Doesn't bother me, as my guided missile precision means that drones are just bonus damage on everything but the NPC inties.  But I'd not like to try it in a dominix.  On really rough missions with multiple fast, tiny tacklers I have to aggro everything, warp in my alt in a logistics cruiser to shieldboost me, and then release my drones to kill the tacklers without getting popped.

[Murgos]

I stepped up to an L4 last night.  I decided to come in with a bang and did Serpentis Extravaganza, three rooms, 6+ BS per room including a couple of 850k Core Admiral rats in the last room.  I used a Myrmidon with a ~270 dps perma tank (2x med repper II, DC II, KIN & Therm active hardner, cap relay) and 4 250mm scout rails.

The first two rooms were cake, each group had independent aggro so all I did was target something, blast it, wait for aggro, send drones, repeat.  Dropping 550k rat BS's takes a while though as I am still using T1 drones, I have the skills for T2 just havent got to the store to get them (8 jumps  ).  No problems with unexpected drone aggro, though when it happens I just recall drones, get aggro and then relaunch.

The third room was a bitch though, right on warp in I got a buttload of aggro and my tank started dropping right away (for the first time all mission).  So I did the warp out and come back and get what you can in between method.  Frigs and Destroyers on first pass, Cruisers and BC's for the next two or three passes, and then once it was down to just BSs and the last BC or two I was able to tank em again so started working them down.

So, my tank is workable (and I figured out a minor change that will give me 330 dps with less power issues, 2xtherm/kin, med repper II, small repperII) but that last room took me over two hours to clear due mostly to my lack of DPS.  The 850k BS rats took upwards of 15 minutes EACH!  Fiddling with EFT shows me that I can get quick damage gains by training gunnery and dropping from 4x250s to 5 or 6 200's (about 50% more damage for two or three days training) and another 50% increase to drone damage but for a week and a half or so of training) with another very large gain if I jump from BC 2 to BC 4 (2 weeks +).

I'm thinking it's probably a better idea to just jump to a Domi and blitz training up to Ogre II's.

So, it took me about four hours to do Serpentis Extravaganza and I made about 18 mil in bounties and payout with an unknown amount of salavage and lewts (no big named items but lots of heavy blasters) so maybe another 10 mil there for an average of about 7 mil an hour.  Not bad but I think I can really cut the time down with some work.  Hideo Ah is 1 month and 11 days old  .

edit: my point in posting this wasn't to brag but because there were concerns about the usability of drones in L4s and also to talk about the issue of if the difficulty had been quietly increased to stupid levels.  My experience from 1 L4 is that Drones are uber and that even a fairly newb < 2m SP character can be successful in an L4.

[Reg]

I'm impressed Murgos. At this point I'm wondering if my character is actually bugged because every time I've ever done that mission I aggro the entire room the moment I release my drones.  I've no idea what I'm doing wrong.

[lac]

Kiting the rats away a bit before you unleash your drones usually works for me. I start shooting at 80km (or burn away as soon as I enter a room), I pop frigs and cruisers as they zoom towards me and let the drones go when a rat comes within 45km and I have 25+ km on non aggroing rats.
I almost never have drone agro issues and I only lose drones when I send them on one of those smartbombing bs without paying attention.