100 Posts and Going Strong!

So I opened up my blog’s dashboard today and realized that I have posted 100 times for the blog! This is pretty nuts to me. This really just started as a side project so I could keep track of my adventures in Eve. I didn’t really think I was going to be publishing it out to the larger Eve community. Now I have 100 posts to my name and over 20,000 visits so far and 168 followers!! It is pretty awesome, thanks to everyone who visits, especially you weirdos that follow the blog. It means a lot to me to have you guys read and comment here! It’s really what keeps me doing it. Here’s to another hundred!

100th Post!

New Pastures – More Combat

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to give an update of the in-game happenings for Vultirnus. After a lot of talk with the fellow corporation members and enjoying the new time I’ve been spending in lo-sec space, I’ve made the decision to leave my current corp to start a new one. I’m still very much aligned with the A-TEV crew, no hard feelings were expressed. This is simply a way for me to get more combat in during my time in-game, as well as a way for the A-TEV crew to recruit new members through a “gateway” corporation that I will be running. A big reason for the change is that everyone in A-TEV currently is on Euro time. This means a lot of the time I spend in game I end up alone, since they’re all asleep. I love my corpmates, honestly I haven’t had more fun in Eve than with flying with them, but sadly I just don’t get to do that much anymore. This change should help get me some US timezone players to fly with who will hopefully then become part of the A-TEV family!

The corp hasn’t officially been formed, that is going to happen tonight. I’ll post the name sometime tomorrow probably with a link to the open recruitment thread that will go up in the near future. For now Azx and I need to get a few things sorted out and settled and find a new home system. But we’ll all be seeing you out there in lo-sec soon hopefully!

Vult

Double Kill!

Shameless Unreal Tournament reference? Check.

I went home for the weekend and it was relaxing and great, but the whole time I was really itching to get back in the pod and go hunting. A lot has happened over the course of the week in-game, but I’ll get into more of that in the next Announcements thread I publish. For now it’s time to recap a great roam Azx and I went on last night.

Things started off the way they typically do on our roams. We met up at our favorite staging area in our Crucifier and Merlin and started cruising through some lo-sec systems looking for prey. Prey needs some context though, since it changes with every fleet composition you play. For us we were looking primarily for other frigates, or heavily turret based cruisers. This fleet has already taken down an Omen and I would very much like to see it run up against a Rupture or Thorax. While the blood lust draws us out time and again, we’re also out tonight to make some money. Clone pirates are top on our priority list, making us a cool million just for popping them and dropping some tags worth a few more in the process. But tonight things are dull. The belts seem empty and we come across system after system of pilots napping in stations.

After about an hour we’re starting to lose our focus and energy levels drop. We haven’t found any clones and the pvp targets are just as scarce. Finally we warp in to a backwater system and find a Magnate on scan. Magnates are not known for their military prowess so my guess is this guy is looking for data and relic sites. Ok well that and the fact that there are a bunch of core probes on my scanner suggest that. We buzz around the system trying to figure out where he might be. I launch a set of probes myself as I narrow in on which signature I think he’s working on. That’s the great thing about this fleet, my Crucifier has an empty high slot that we can fit a probe launcher into for just this sort of occasion. I get a hit in 2 scans and I’m off to see if I can catch me a hacker!

Sure enough the Magnate is hacking a can and I somehow managed to land within 3 km of him! I fire up the old warp disruptor and launch my probes while calling in Azx for support. The Magnate decides he’s not interested and warps away. Which is annoying, since I know I had a solid lock and disrupted him. Lame warp core stabilizers. Oddly enough the pilot of the Magnate deems his stellar performance worthy of mocking me in local. “You gotta be faster than that kiddo.” Something about being called kiddo by a guy flying a Magnate is…insulting to say the least. Luckily my quick wit came to the rescue! “Don’t know how much faster I could have been, seeing as how you were locked and pointed. Not much I can do about warp stabs.”

Good one Vult.

The hunt continues with us coincidentally following the Magnate through a few systems. We manage to find a clone so at least the trip has yielded some income. But just when we were about to give up hope, we find a Retribution ratting in a system all by his lonesome. A quick d-scan sweep and Azx is in warp to a likely belt and sure enough lands on our target! The fight is on and I punch the warp button to lend a hand. Azx’s tank is robust to say the least, but the Retribution is a tough nut to crack and can dish out a good deal of dps as well. I land about 20 km from the fight, lock the target and engage my tracking disruptors which immediately reduces the amount of damage Azx takes. But there’s little time to congratulate each other as another pilot enters the fray. A pilot from the same corp showed up on local as soon as we engaged the Retribution and sure enough an Incursus lands on our belt just as we finish taking down the first pilot. There’s not much he can do, the fit is a sad one, and he’s horribly out matched by our drones, tracking disruptors, and the Merlin’s tank-of-doom. He pops as well and the celebrating really begins! Retribution Kill, Incursus Kill, make sure to check out the killboard regularly! It should be heating up in the very near future.

Sorry guys don’t know why my mic still isn’t coming through on the videos, they definitely export with my banter!

A double kill to finish off what started as a horribly slow roam! Not too shabby. The loot is lackluster, but the kill mails are worth more than all the ships involved combined anyway. We haul the loot out and call it a night. Poor Azx always playing so late just to roam with me! Certainly appreciated, was a great way to spend a Sunday evening!

Devious Little Moa

Some more time in lo-sec today. Azx is around while most of the corp is out of town. We spend a fair bit of time looking around for something to do. The belts seem empty, nothing is very interesting from the probes. Looks like it’s going to be a slow day. On top of all that we’re too far from the trade hubs to blow some money on new shiny ships!

Unsuspecting Imicus

After a while we manage to find a lonely Imicus trying to hack a data site. I quickly probe her down, but she cloaks after seeing my probes I guess. Drat! I head to the data site anyway to hack it myself. Lo and behold our Imicus uncloaks in the site with me! She is racing towards the last loot box but with some quick math I give Azx a distance from myself to warp to. He lands about 10 km away. Needless to say he makes quick work of her.

After that things get really quiet. We both decide to log for a while and I head out for a long overdue jog. I grab some dinner and log back in many hours later. The less than exciting static connection is still up to my disappointment but I head into lo-sec again to see if I can find a fight.

My Pilgrim enters warp and before long I find a Moa ratting. A Moa is an awfully juicy target for a Pilgrim. I d-scan him down to one belt and decloak in warp to him ready to blast him out of his ship. I’m a hair too late though and he warps to the next belt. I give chase but can’t quite get him there either. He heads to a gate and jumps through with me in hot pursuit.

We uncloak on the other side and I see that he’s aligning to another gate. I warp there ahead of him hoping to get the jump on him on the other side, but he doesn’t follow. I warp back to 30 km from where I came from to find him at full velocity just flying aligned to the next gate. Smells like a trap, but if I can get him to attack me first, I would have the gate guns on my side and might get a kill before his friends arrive. You can even see in the video how long I hesitate before engaging, but engage I do! Sure enough local starts to spike and I start aligning towards the sun.

My drones are almost through the last of his armor but I am out of range of his point, and he is out of range of mine. Oddly we both manage to get out with our ships intact. It was a fun engagement and I’m happy to have made it out alive. Although a faction disruptor purchase may be in my very near future…

Fail of a Fight

I’ve been out of town for the last week on a work assignment. After getting back I’ve had very limited time to get into Eve. Lot of things I need to take care of in the real world before being productive in a fake one. So I find myself with some time today and decide now is as good as any to get some time in the pod.

The home system is very quiet with just our static connection and a relic site to deal with. All that can wait, I’m hungry for a fight and I’m not going to find one here. I grab my ratting Arbitrator and head out to lo-sec to see what I can see. I cruise through the belts for a while looking for clone rats but don’t manage to find anything more exciting than a few battleships. My security status finally jumps up to 1.0! Huzzah!

As I cruise around the lo-sec chain I find a system with one player in it. He has a suspect timer so my curiosity is immediately peaked. I can engage him on the gates and not get blown out of the sky by the security guns. He also happens to land right at the same gate I’m jumping through! Ho ho! Looks like a fight is on! I shed my cloak launch my drones and warm up all the combat modules I’ll need. He uncloaks and the fight is on!

But it doesn’t last long. His missiles annihilate my shields and I’m quickly running out of armor. I have my lasers and missiles firing and the drones seem to be doing good damage, sorta. Oh wait, they actually aren’t attacking at all. I’m trying out some new hotkey combinations and I must have hit something wrong because they’re not engaging at all. That’s embarrassing. I’m also now very much aware that I have a tracking disruptor that my whole tank is sort of based on, and that’s not going to help too much against this missile boat. Why exactly am I fighting this guy?

The ancillary armor repper does wonders! It somehow kept me alive for quiet a while. I’ll definitely be equipping those to my pvp ships more often! In fact the pilot of the Caracal even messages me after the fight saying how impressed he was with the repair unit’s performance. But even that boosted armor income isn’t enough and I lose my ship. No big deal, that ship was build to get destroyed and I’m glad to have tested the ship’s ability a bit, although maybe telling the drones to attack would have changed things slightly. Live and learn! Luckily no one was there to see it right?

Oh wait…
Video footage of the attack

If nothing else it’s good for a few laughs. I’m still working on the quality and stuff, but I think they’re fun to watch regardless. I’ll see if I can fix them as this experiment continues. If you like the blog be sure to subscribe to Vult’s youtube channel. I’ll be trying to post a lot more of these up in the future!

Good Fights and Some Lessons Learned

For those of you not from ‘MURICA!, I would like you all to know that this is the day Americans celebrate beating the Brits with loud noises and fire. It’s fun.

It’s also a day I don’t have to go to work. So I spent some time on Eve. Most of the time was spent ratting and hunting around in lo-sec. You can make so much money in there now while only risking a 20 or 30 million isk ship. It’s really pretty cool, and since you’re in lo-sec you can also come across some other players which can lead to some good pvp. In fact with the new addition of the tag rats in lo-sec, more players are hanging out in belts of low security systems where good fights can be had without the annoying mechanics of stargates, stations, and their associated guns.

Azx and I have been spending a lot of our time out there recently. We’ve lost a lot of ships, but never anything worth too much, and we can easily make back the cost of our ships with just a handful of the security tags the rats drop. We were cruising our way through some backwater systems hunting for this bountiful loot when we came across an Omen doing the exact same thing. We decided now was the perfect time to try our little fleet composition.

With just the two of us things get tricky. We can take most frigates simply because there are two of us, but you rarely run into another frigate that is willing to 2v1 on your terms. Often times you come across cruiser hulls in lo-sec who are soloing. So we needed a way to negate their dps, point them, and still hack through their armor. We came up with a pretty good solution I think. Basically Azx runs a brawling shield tanked Merlin with some blasters for a whopping 170 dps. It’s afterburner keeps him moving at a good pace even when an enemy ship warp scrambles him. I fly a Crucifier. Yeah it’s that Amarr frigate you never see in pvp. But I realized recently that it has a drone bay. I love drones, and I love tracking disruptors and the two go really well together in my fit.

Basically what we do is have Azx warp right in on the target if possible and immediately start putting damage on the enemy ship and point him. The warp scramble is important as it negates any MWD their ship might have, keeping their speed well below 1,000 m/s unless their an especially fast frigate. It also keeps them from getting to me, who is completely tank less with the exception of my two tracking disruptors and MWD. I sit at about 30 km and disrupt the turrets of the enemy ship while throwing my 100 dps into the mix. The result is, “hopefully,” an enemy ship that is slower than us who can’t hit us. The two tracking disruptors really play havoc on enemy ships as you can see in the first ever Capsule in the Void video!

I should warn you, I am still getting the kinks worked out of my recording system. It’ll take some time but I have the youtube channel up and running so it shouldn’t be too much longer now. This video just highlighted the fleet fittings I wanted to blog about so I figured I would post it a little before my videos were up to par. The audio too for some reason only picked up Azx’s voice. Which is too bad, because I am hilarious. Anyway you can see for yourself!

One interesting thing about the videos is it let’s you really go back and learn from your combats. For instance I definitely did not notice how long his drones were attacking mine or when he deployed them. Obviously it would be nice to pay more attention and catch that earlier in the future. Another thing we realized is I’m generally out of the fight and have a pretty good chance of getting away. Maybeeee we should store our tag loot in my ship before we run off to a fight. Lastly it shows the world what kind of friend I am as I willfully abandon Azx to his doom!

July Live Event!

I haven’t really used this blog to promote happenings in the game on a scale outside of my own corporation. But I think this is still a work in progress and the announcement today about the new CCP live event for July sounded really cool, so I’m going to see if maybe this becomes a thing. After all I’m a fan site and promotion of the game and it’s events comes with the territory.

Anyway like I said this even in particular sounds pretty cool, if for no other reason than I think it’s some good thinking outside of the box from CCP. For official details on the event check here. The idea is pretty basic. You are tasked with taking some screenshots of various landmarks of New Eden. Things like Caldari Prime, the CONCORD headquarters, or the Jita Monument. It might not seem overwhelmingly exciting, but I think it’s a really clever idea. Especially considering some of the landmarks are in lo-sec (I think?). Not to mention the fact that all the images you need to get are posted on a website. You can be sure some gangkers are going to setup shop around those landmarks and have some fun.

Check the site for official rules and the prizes list. They honestly aren’t too overwhelming of prizes, but considering the low investment of time and resources on this one you can’t expect a pirate faction battleship. Kudos CCP, I really hope to see more of these kinds of events in the future!

Stepping On A Hornet’s Nest

I logged on tonight and find a Cheetah on scan immediately! I have enough time to grab my oracle before he launches probes and I’m on my way to our C4 connection before he cloaks. I should have enough time to catch him as he retreats after scanning. Although once I get to the C4 wormhole I see that the connection is ready to collapse at any moment. I see a third un-scanned signature in the system and figure this Cheetah pilot is probably not from the C4, I bet that unknown sig is another wormhole.

I head back to my hangar and get back in my scanning ship. I head out to a safespot and throw my probes out over the system, quickly resolving a new wormhole. I bookmark it and head back to my tower’s warp in point. See, we have a bunch of warp disruption bubbles around our tower with a bunch of anchored cans sprinkled around to hopefully pick off snooping covert ships. And surprise surprise, our Cheetah friend just appeared on my overview. I watch him struggle in the bubble for a few seconds before our tower’s guns free his capsule from his ship.

Oh shit…

I chuckle to myself at the noob-ish fate of the enemy pilot. With his system’s wormhole discovered I grab my sniper ship and setup on station to monitor any activity from the hostile system. After a few minutes I haven’t seen anything and curiosity gets the better of me. Time to suit up the Anathema again, and see what I can see.

What I see is a big sign that says get the FUCK OUT OF HERE! A huge fleet is sitting on the hole, drones out, logis and interceptors at the ready. Holy crap am I in a bad spot. Thank god Bob found me worthy to spawn me a mere 4 km from the hole. I immediately jump back to my HQ system. A few hostile ships are already there. A bubble somehow is up already, I punch my MWD and pick a direction away from as many ships as possible. As soon as my cloak is up I switch directions, just in time as an interceptor zips by within 7 km of my ship. I align and warp away and breathe for the first time in a few minutes.

Dyin’ never looked so good.

I decide I should keep an eye on them for a while and warp back to 100 km. Unfortunately that bubble thing they put up, well it sort of sucked me to within 10 km of their fleet. I’m not so lucky this time. The bubble has me, my ship explodes and it only takes a minute for them to pod me. I have to say, as much as losing 100 million isk in implants hurts, the new death animation….is sick.

Prosperity In Lo-Sec

It’s been an interesting few days for me. Our HQ system has been really quiet. No ore sites, no data, no relics, a few anomalies but I’m not really supposed to be running those alone. So what’s left to do? Roam in lo-sec that’s what! And it was very interesting what I found there. I dare say the last few days I’ve spent in lo-sec have almost made me want to relocate there permanently.

To start things off, yesterday I had some crazy luck and managed to find three of the new security status rats in my lo-sec chain. They dropped a cool 120 million isk for me which more than would have funded the ship I was hunting with that day. Now overall farming those rats is a lot more time consuming and you generally don’t end up with nearly that kind of cash. But for whatever reason I’ve been doing pretty well with it so far.

I’ve managed to get into a couple scrapes here and there, but never anything serious. I usually just get my Oracle into the sides of a gate camp which is fun, but not entirely productive usually. I like to think I’m doing anyone else who has to pass through the area a favor but who knows. The FW systems are interesting. Lot of people moving around quite a bit, but they seem to be very timid. Just today I warped into a small outpost with a Punisher. I found a Rifter in the plex, and he immediately warped off. WTF MinMatar?! I thought you guys had a little more backbone than that? It’s a classic duel the Punisher vs. the Rifter!

Well after messing around in FW for a while, Azx logs on today. As usual we have little to do and decide to grab some small ships and find trouble. I decide to buy a Retribution and fit a 10mn afterburner to it and see how it goes. The idea being you can scramble someone thus killing their MWD propulsion while maintaining your AB propulsion. It seems to work alright, I think it would do much better against turret boats of small caliber. It seems to have some trouble trying to hold it’s orbit with that over-sized afterburner.

Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’

Anyway we zip into one of our favorite lo-sec chains and start hunting. We ended up in some backwater system with a faction Osprey. We see he has logistic cruiser friend, but when we end up more or less on top of him in a belt we decide to give it a shot. We just want to get in a fight really, winning is just a nice bonus. I lock the cruiser down and open fire.

The fight was weird. He didn’t have a web which led to a very long fight. He eventually beat us, although I managed to escape while Azx killed his MWD. Azx’s Merlin turned out to be an absurdly tanked little vessel. With two of the ancillary shield boosters, he managed to tank the enemy’s damage with almost no effort at all. Well at least until he had to reload the repper’s charges. We knew we weren’t going to win but at least we got to shoot at something. Azx zipped back to our hi-sec base to get a new ship while I kept hunting.

Eventually we found a fight and a half. A Rupture was in a belt by himself ratting. We decided to give him a real challenge, those little rat ships were never going to give him a proper fight. Things started a little rocky. Neither of us were used to flying these ships yet and we ended up overshooting our target a number of times. Azx blasted by the cruiser and went out of range of his scrambler just as I came into range after overshooting him myself. From the outside it may have looked like some really fancy flying, but we actually were just spamming the approach and orbit buttons praying to Bob that the Rupture didn’t flee.

Death of a Rupture

But as it turned out he was just as interested in a fight as we were. And a hell of a fight it was. I even managed to get a video of it, well most of it. I’m still not used to hitting the record button before a fight like that! I’m still working on uploading it as the file is quite large, but stay tuned on that front. Anyway the fight was brutal. I ended up with about 17% of my structure left before the MinMatar bastard finally exploded. It was pretty epic if I do say so myself. We exchanged GFs in local and Azx bolted with what loot we could grab. Finally a decent fight to get the blood pumping again!