I'm back in Eve

So I decided to start playing Eve again. Dinking around in empire has caused me to quickly realize that there's no money in it. Since my old wormhole cohabitating buddies have all since moved to null sec or quit I have a couple of choices. Either I can move to null sec and start pvping or I can try to settle a wormhole on my own. I don't have the money, the ships or the skills to be worth a crap in null sec so it looks like I'm in the market for a pos. Maybe I'll change my mind. There's more to come either way.

Finally found another wh

I haven't been doing much in game for the last couple of weeks. My wife had a baby so that's been taking up most of my time. Things are starting to settle down now, though, so a couple of days ago I started the search for another wormhole. I found a very nice empty C3 with a few anomalies, 5 belts, 3 vast ladar sites and a bountiful lader site pretty quickly. The downside was that it had 2 high sec exits, a low sec exit, a null sec exit and a C6 exit. I decided to suck up a few of the gas clouds at the very least since they were worth about 40 mil per site with very little work involved. So I parked my miner and started harvesting. Unfortunately, by the time I made it back with my hauler the high sec exit was gone. Of course, that was the only exit that I had bookmarked with my miner....and he was stuck inside with no probes. So I hopped in my cov ops and headed for the other systems that the hole exited to. All of the exits had popped. Annoyed but unwilling to give up I spent a good portion of the next day asking for help in local and scanning with the hopes of picking up such and such's heron on my directional. All day long not one person poked their head into that damn wormhole. Meanwhile I was still looking for another hole worth moving into on Grag.

To make a long story short I found another viable C2. It had a ton of anomalies, a few radar/mag sites and some belts. We set up our POS and settled in. I had to self destruct my miner to get him out of that C3. Oh well....that set of +4s served me well for a couple of months at least. Setup was uneventful. By then it was pretty late so I scanned down the system and logged excited about all of the juicy anomalies that I'd get to start clearing in the morning.

So this morning I logged on and rescanned the system. The high sec exit was gone but nothing else had changed.

So I hopped into my first anomaly and started pew pewing. Before I could even clear the first wave a drake and a tengu popped up on my scanner. Shit. I beat feet back to the pos, switched to my buzzard and started watching. Sure enough, they were already at the anomaly that I'd been clearing. They made short work of it and moved on to the next one. Then a myrm joined them. Of course, they were all members of a big pirate corp. With nothing that I could do about it I just logged. I fully expect to log in to an empty wormhole by this afternoon. I wouldn't be surprised to see them taking down our POS while they're at it. Hopefully they'll leave quickly. A lucky break would be nice every once in a while. Ever since I brought the baby home I just keep getting bent over and beaten up every time I try to do something in Eve. Maybe someone's trying to tell me something.

Almost there

Cloaking 4 finishes in 2 hours. I've already got my cov ops and a cloak waiting in anticipation. My wife is going to have our first kid any day now, though, so rl will be intervening with my plans. My CEO is also going to be leaving for a week so maybe the timing is perfect. Being out of the wormhole has certainly been a nice break. Life in empire is so much more laid back. There's just no money in it.

Already getting antsy

It's only been a few days but I'm already ready to find a new hole to call home. I keep finding myself docked in stations, staring at my screen trying to decide what to do. The money that I made in the wormhole was just so good that I'm spoiled now. With scordite being the best bang for your buck short of rare, null sec ore I find myself hesitant to waste time mining. 5-6 mil an hour at the most just doesn't do it for me. I've never been much of a mission runner so I'm stuck running level 2s. How people can stand to run enough low level missions to be able to pull level 4s is beyond me. I've been toying with t2 invention but I can't see how anyone can make enough money for that to be worthwhile. So basically I've just been running a few missions and then logging off out of boredom. I'd try some pvp but I'm in that horrible limbo where I've got enough money to feel comfortable but not enough to blow. Hopefully, I'll find something to do soon that keeps me occupied.

So we decided to leave for a bit

After a few weeks in the hole we had pretty much farmed it out. With three of us in a C2 there just weren't enough sites spawning to keep us entertained. One or two sites a day weren't cutting it. Every single one of the holes that our C2 static exited to were just as farmed out. C2 sites were getting entirely too easy and boring, anyway. With little else to do but mine we decided that it was time to move on.

We did have a crapload of ore so we decided that we'd rather refine it than haul it all out. To speed things up we bought a large pos and an intense refinery. The plan was to setup the large, get the intense refinery going and then get out asap. Then we were going to hang out in empire for a bit while we try to find a c3 that better suits our needs. With the large we'd have plenty of room for labs, production and adequate defenses. Everything was going great. We had gotten the large in the hole and we were starting to anchor it. Then we saw a tengu on the directional. We immediately warped back to the pos and sent a scout to check things out. Pretty soon another tengu, a legion and an onyx showed up. The onyx setup a bubble on our low sec exit and then things got interesting. Our scout accidently let that point be known in local.

Right away their whole gang started making ransom requests. They wanted 500 mil or they were going to blow up our pos. Oh crap...they already found the large. Since the large wasn't worth 500 mil we just kind of ignored them. Then they started trying to rush us into making a decision, talking about how they could have a dozen battleships here within an hour and how fail fit our pos was. Oh...they were talking about the medium. So at that point we were just stalling. The large had literally JUST started anchoring. We could either wait 15 minutes and then online the large which would take another hour or we could keep stalling, unanchor the pos and get it back to our hardened medium. We decided to go the quick route.

Meanwhile, we had convinced the pirates that we didn't even have 500 mil worth of loot in our pos and that they'd be very dissappointed if they went to all of the trouble of taking it down. I was in my apoc when they showed up so they had seen it. Since that was the most expensive ship they knew about they demanded that I load it up with as much loot as possible, take it to the nearest planet, eject and then tell them where it was. By the time they asked for it I had already swapped it for my bestower to get ready for the snatch and grab as soon as the large unanchored. My CEO was doing all of the talking so I don't even know if they knew I was there. He told them that I had logged off with it as soon as they started making demands. They bought it. At that point they started demanding that we contract them some stuff from empire. By now the large had unanchored so I recovered it. With nothing else to worry about we just ignored them and they eventually went away.

All in all it was a pretty exciting night. Rather than try to setup the large again we just logged and hauled everything to empire the next morning. Unfortunately, we had a bugged gun. We couldn't offline it which meant we couldn't unanchor the pos. By now our hole was critical and it had been nearing the end of it's life for a few hours. My CEO decided to stay inside and petition a GM. The GM responded surprisingly quickly, fixed the gun and we had the medium all packed up and ready to go. Unfortunately, our low sec exit had closed. He scanned down the next exit but, unfortunately, it was deep in low sec. It was, by far, the worst exit we had ever had....and he was in an itty V packed with pos fuel and a medium pos. Rather than risking it I convinced him to scan down the adjoining C2. There were over 20 sites for him to scan (we FINALLY got a decent neighbor >.<) but he lucked out and found a high sec exit on the first try that was only 7 jumps from our corporate headquarters.

So we made it out just fine. After doing a couple of mind numbingly boring missions I'm ready to find another hole. The sleepers are much more challenging. We've done a few c3 sites since we left. We just haven't found a hole that suits are needs. I'm seriously considering buying a medium pos and moving back into a C2 by myself once I get a few skills trained. I need to get a cloak for my scanning alt. I need to work on my tanking skills on my amarr pilot. I need to be able to fly a cov ops ship. I'm also thinking that I need to get into a cov ops transport but that can probably wait. Mining abc ore at your leisure is great but getting the ore out of the hole is way too much of a pain. Sleeper sites are great money but when they stop spawning then it's time to move. I just need to figure out a setup that will keep me busy for a while.

Yesterday was pretty quiet

What can I say? Not every day is action packed and full of excitement when you're living in a wormhole. Our neighboring C2 was, once again, colonized and empty of any combat sites. Our low sec exit was pretty deep into low sec. Since we had no need to do anything in K-space, anyway, we didn't find a reason to leave. I came home from work at lunch and found that a perimeter checkpoint had spawned. This was my chance to try out my shiny new Apocalypse. So away I went to see how fast I could knock it out.

I've got two accounts and two characters that I use in the hole. They're both pretty equally skilled at combat. One flies Amarr. Gragarius flies Caldari. For a while there I was running my Amarr pilot in a Harbinger while Gragarius flies his drake. I can not speak highly enough of the drake. If you're a newbish pilot just thinking about getting into wormholes then get into a drake first. The passive tank on a drake absolutely cannot be beat by anything that's within reach of a new pilot. My Amarr pilot in his Harbinger would have to warp out within just a couple of minutes of being targeted by sleepers. With Grag I can just ignore him and not worry about anything in a C2 breaking his tank as long as I follow the spawn triggers correctly. I did lose a Drake in the first week that we were in the system but it was right before an unscheduled downtime and the ship was replaced. Of course, now I wish that I hadn't even bothered putting in that petition because CCP took back my insurance payout and gave me a Drake that's in the middle of empire where I'll have to go out of my way to get to it.

Anyway, back to the Apocalypse. As usual I warped in with Grag and started chipping away at the sleepers. When I got close to the sirius towers I warped my Apocalypse pilot in on top of them so that he could start burning them down right away. The plan worked well and I had the site cleared and salvaged inside of 40 minutes. It usually takes me close to an hour when I'm solo. The biggest improvement of the Apocalypse over the Harbinger was that I could actually tank the sleepers. It still doesn't tank anywhere near as well as the Drake and by the time the site was done I had almost no cap left but with the Drake there it worked rather well. There's no way I could solo these sites in the Apocalypse, though. The sleepers neut so my cap would be toast long before I could kill everything. Those huge battleship guns can't hit the frigates, either. The Apoc is nice to speed things up but my Drake ended up doing most of the damage. I'm sure that if I devoted a lot more skill to my Amarr pilot that he'd be able to handle these sleeper sites easily by himself but he's my industry/mining character so that's just not feasible right now. After clearing the site I grabbed my Coercer and had everything salvaged and looted within five minutes. It yielded 8 melted nanoribbons along with everything else so I was happy. I'm not complaining about making 50 million isk in 40 minutes.

Anyway, back to work I went. I was hoping for another sleeper site last night but it wasn't in the cards. I got home from work and found nothing new. That same lowsec wormhole was still there, though. The real reason that I bought the Apocalypse was because we don't have another effective wormhole closer in the hole. So I fit 7 1600 mm plates and went to town on it. Within half an hour or so our exit was critical. I decided not to risk another jump. We had two untouched grav sites in the system, though, so I hopped in my Covetor to do some mining. Another corp member had already started on it the night before so I polished off the bistot rock that was still there and got a good start on the crokite before logging.

Sleeper Sites for Newbies

Being the born again newb that I am I had long since forgotten many of the things that I used to know inside and out over my long hiatus from Eve. While a lot of it came back quickly it's given me an interesting insight into what kind of questions a newb would have that other blogs and guides tend to gloss over. These are the people who I'm looking to help with some of my posts. Hopefully I'll be able to explain things from a different perspective that will make it easier for people who have no clue what they're doing to understand.

When you're scanning down a wormhole system you'll get a few different types of signatures. Gravimetric sites are asteroid belts. Ladar sites are gas clouds. Radar sites are combat sites with special cans that you need the hacking skill and a codebreaker to access. Magnemetric sites are combat sites with special cans that you need the archaeology skill and an analyzer to access. The other type of sigs are unknown. These can either be wormholes or combat sites. The unknown combat sites will show up at 100% signal strength as long as a probe is in range. Your ship scanner will also pick these sites up if you're within range of one or more. These sites are the bread and butter money maker for any wormhole explorer.

There are three types of sleeper sites that you'll commonly find in C2 wormholes. I've been in a lot of them and these are the only three that I've seen show up in class 2s. The list of possible sites gets longer as you get into higher class wormholes. The sites also get more difficult. The ones that you find in C2s are pretty easy to solo as long as you're aware of a few things. The types of sites that you'll find in C2s are Perimeter Hangars, Perimeter Checkpoints and Sleepless Data Sanctuaries. They all have static spawns. Here's what you can expect from each.

Perimeter Hangar:

These are the easiest combat sites. As long as you follow the spawn triggers you should be able to solo them pretty easily in a drake or an equivalent ship (other battlecruisers are not the equivalent of a drake when it comes to pve btw). If you can't solo these then don't even bother trying to solo anything harder. Killing the last ship in the "trigger group" will spawn the next wave of sleepers.

Spawn 1:
3x Awakened Patroller (Trigger)
2x Emergent Watchman

Spawn 2:
1x - Sleepless Watchman
2x Awakened Escort (Trigger)

Spawn 3:
1x Sleepless Escort
2x Awakened Escort



Perimeter Checkpoint:

These are a fair bit harder than the hangars. The two sentry guns hit pretty hard and they have very good tracking. They have a low rate of fire, though. If you can't tank the guns and all of the ships at once then just lure the ships out of the range of the sirius guns (100 kms), kill all but the trigger ship then go back in and kill the guns. Make sure that you don't lure the ships out too far or they'll boomerang back to their spawn point. Everything else should be pretty easy once the guns are taken out. The sleepless patroller hits pretty hard and he likes to kite. Make sure that when you see it spawn that you don't let him fly out of your range.

Spawn 1:
3x Awakened Patroller (Trigger)
2x Emergent Patroller
2x Sirius Sentry Tower

Spawn 2:
2x Awakened Patroller (Trigger)
2x Awakened Escort

Spawn 3:
3x Emergent Patroller
1X Sleepless Patroller

Sleepless Data Sanctuary:

These are the hardest of the three. They have three sentry guns which can make short work of anyone who doesn't have a rock solid tank. Follow the same strategy that you would in the Perimeter Checkpoint if you have to. Just make sure that by the time you spawn the Sleepless Outguard that everything else is cleared. It hits VERY hard and can take a real beating. It's also got ridiculous range. Then again, if you can't tank it while you're trying to get into range from 100km out then you won't be able to tank it long enough to kill it.

Spawn 1:
3x Sirius Sentry
2x Awakened Escort (Trigger)
3x Emergent Patroller

Spawn 2:
1x Sleepless Escort (Trigger)
4x Emergent Escort

Spawn 3:
1x Sleepless Outguard

Here are a few tips that might help you out. First of all set bookmarks. This is very important if your next target is well outside of your range and you can't tank them indefinitely. The entire time you're closing they'll be able to shoot you but you won't be able to shoot back. Bookmark a wreck or an asteroid or something close to your target, warp out and warp back to the bookmark.

If you wait too long to warp and you start to get in serious trouble then launch some drones. Sleepers will usually target new targets pretty quickly. This can be the difference between getting out with your ship and getting blown to bits right before you go into warp.

Watch your directional scanner constantly. Set it to max range at 360 degrees and hit scan every minute or so. If you see a ship that you don't recognize then warp to a safe spot. If you see combat probes then do the same. If you don't have a pos in the system then use your directional to make sure that your exit is safe. Other players are a much bigger threat than a sleeper site and if you've got a ship that's capable of soloing these sites then it will probably be worth more than the loot and salvage from one of these low level sites. I'll have more later.