After my disheartening excursion with a typical EVE Online corp, I’ve taken refuge back in my old corp, a modest affair from over two years ago which exists purely so that I can more easily share piles of junk-loot with an RL friend. He’s currently playing again, and both having long-since reach the point of well-rounded and competent Battleship operation, (as opposed to just having raced directly to ‘[Race] Battleship I’ in a short a time as possible), we’re giving Agent IV combat missions a go, and they’re turning out to be both tremendous fun, and extremely lucrative.
Although some badasses would have you believe these are to be carried out just like everything else in EVE, alone and in grim silence - lest you show weakness, we’re taking two ships along, and have quickly developed a pretty solid routine. He’s in a Raven and takes the lead, having configured his ship to absorb huge amounts of damage, and to be best suited for attacking other battleships. I follow in once everything is suitably angry at him, and follow along behind. My trusty Typhoon is mostly set up to deal with Cruiser and Frigate sized enemies, something he’d have trouble hitting with the larger weapons he uses. I also bring along a variety of modules to help increase overall accuracy and damage for the both of us. While my ship is also set up to cope with a fair amount of beating, knowing that on the whole I’m not going to be under attack much allows me to bring along more utility gadgets, and not have to devote all my equipment to staying alive. For when things get really hectic, I also have a Large Energy Transfer system I use to send surplus energy I’m not using to the Raven, allowing it to soak up even more damage.
The real test of The Plan came last night, with a Lv 4 Guristas ‘Vengeance’ mission. Consisting of three locations, the first two went like clockwork – a large number of warp-scrambling and webbing Frigates, ECM-using Cruisers, and heavily armed Battleship NPCs, pretty much all of whom jumped on the Raven as soon as he arrived. I turned up a few seconds later, and between us, we cleaned up, each picking out the targets we’d equipped for, and me helping keep his already formidable tank set-up running.
Step three consisted of more rabble, and also an NPC Battleship with a bounty of 2.5 million ISK which caused all manner of troubles. While it seemed unable to pose a serious threat to our Raven, it was self-healing faster than we could damage it, mostly because it was fast enough to stay well out of range of most of our weapon systems. My Typhoon was a bit faster than it, but it would of taken ages to catch it up. In the end, we went off and refitted, opting to abandon our previous strategy of ‘using a nut-hammer to crack a sledge’ and coming back with the Really Big Guns, which we don’t normally use because they have trouble hitting anything smaller than a moon, and I also grabbed my Afterburner, something I usually avoid due to it’s excessive power consumption threatening my tanking ability. An exhilarating chase then ensued, with the enemy trying to race away, all the while beating on the Raven, while I charged after him in an attempt to hit him with my Webbifier (A device that functions much like a Snare spell in other MMOs), before the pair of us proceeded to summarily dismantle his ship for causing us so much hastle.
A win for us! I don’t doubt that the thing could be done solo, but from what I saw, it must take hours to do alone, and would consist of a great deal of warping out to refit, heal, rearm, etc, or a hideously inefficient waste of spammed Torpedoes to get the job done. And it wouldn’t be as fun.
It’s a comfortingly familiar way of doing things…the Tank and the Healer, and I wonder if the addition of a few other ships to our little gang, in some of the other traditional MMO roles might not be a bad idea too, given the vast array of different tools a ship can be fitted with.
One or two fast Frigates, Destroyers, Interceptors or Assault Ships, working as fighter cover to keep the NPC frigates at bay. These small fry are a genuine danger, as they tend to Warp Scramble, in effect removing a ship’s ability to bug out if things go wrong, and can be a bugger to swat with Battleship sized weapons.
Perhaps a few cruisers working in the Nuker and DPS roles – geared exclusively for damage and sitting behind the tank, drastically reducing our overall time-to-kill from individual safety.
Dedicated ‘Healer’ ships; Cruisers and Logistic ships. Many attributes other than just Hit Points or Cap (‘Mana’) can be transferred – Buffs, in effect. A couple of Electronic Warfare ships ‘Mezzing’ and Debuffing would help too.
Battlecruisers sporting Gang Warfare Link Modules – the ‘Paladins’ of the piece, able to greatly improve stats for the whole team, and the ‘Magicians’ – Drone using ships in the ‘pet class’ role, able to pull out any number of varied and useful little helper mini robot-ships.
And of course, loot-gathering Industrials and Transports – the thing that slows our current mission hit-rate down the most is taking our lumbering great Battleships crawling about the area afterward, gathering up all the shineys. And while they’re out with us, they can be dropping fresh ammunition for the rest of the gang, during fights.
We managed well enough with two Battleships, and indeed, some folks do them in just one, but the possibilities are endless, and I begin to see visions of The Other EVE – epic combined-arms fleet battles of the like found on TV and in Film, rather than the methodical whack-a-mole of endless solo mission grinding.
And of course, it’s all good practice leading up to the real main event…group-based PVP. In particular, the end-boss chain-self-healing battleship mob was perhaps the closest I’ve come so far to what going after a well-fitted and skilled player in a Battleship must be like – a game of wits, attrition and having the right tools for the job, rather than just turning up and spamming Cruise Missiles at him. I may be wrong, of course, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
More gangmates means the sizable NPC kill-bounties are split between more people of course, but the rate goes up, and anyway, it does seem a shame to see all these great toys and then ignore them and go for a One-Fit-Hits-All-Badly Battleship strategy and lumber on alone. Besides, Level V agents already exist, but are currently not active. One day, there will be even more difficult missions, although I daresay when that day comes, the boards will still be full if ‘n00b – I solo’d in Ibis! Lol1!’ types even then.
I don’t mind – I think I’ve found something a little different, and a great deal more engaging, that I might be able to use…
(Incidentally, the Lv 4 ‘Rogue Drone’ type missions (in 1.0 systems) take us about half an hour or so, and seem to generate a huge amount of drone alloy fragments, which can then be refined into minerals, worth somewhere in the region of 30-40 million ISK, and which include significant amounts of Zydrine, Megacyte and Morphite; minerals you’d have to take your mining barge out in to the deepest Alliance dominated badlands of 0.0 to find normally. Bearing in mind that my previous mining corp paid me about 1.5 million for my weeks work of half-arsed mining in 0.6 space, I think perhaps I was mistaken…I am a Miner…I just don’t use Mining Lasers…)