Okay, so here's what happened. It was late, I was tired, and launched without doing any real homework, which at the Level 4 end of EVE Online's agent mission system, is just asking for trouble. I was bobbing along in a state of heady complacency too, having just come out of the end of a war that ended in a very successful manner, and all in all, I had that whole "I AM INVINCIBLE!" mindset - most uncharacteristic! Self-esteem? It burnsss us!
So I picked up
Enemies Abound 5/5, took a very brief glimpse at the briefing window, threw a few Explosive Armour Hardeners on the back end of the
'H.M.S. Hubris', launched and then the fun began. The first acceleration gate dropped me right in the middle of a Minmatar Republic Navy staging area of some sort, full of Tempests, Typhoon, Stabbers and fixed missile batteries (Mission Step No1 from the linked page). Hectic, but not insurmountable. Unfortunately, the Minmatar Naval ships I'd been sent against share a lot of the characteristics with the Angel pirates - similar ships. The more notable of these is a nightmarish split of their damage types between all four, making them very difficult to tank.
Tanking in EVE works lot like that in other MMOs - you need a number of things. Firstly, a high basic pool of Hit Points - Battleships are decent enough at this. Then a means to repair/heal yourself. Unlike in most class inter-dependency MMOs, in EVE that can comfortably be yourself, and pretty much everyone is their own healer. You need a lot of power/mana regeneration to cover that healing, in this case 'Capacitor', and most importantly of all, high resistances to the incoming damage. I understand this means that for say, a Molten Core raid, you need to bring along a special set of armour, with high fire resistance, along with trinkets and potions, whereas in other raid dungeons, nature or cold resistance might be a better choice.
EVE is not so different, and if you know in advance who the enemy is; Serpentis, Blood Raiders, Guristas, and so on, you know what damage type to expect, and what gizmoes to install to give your ship a higher resistance to it. A ship with an 80% Armour resistance to Thermal damage will take five times as much heat damage to breach than if it had none at all, effectively giving you five times the hit points. A general rule of thumb for these Agent 4 missions is not to even go into them with less than 80% resist in the relevant categories - that's how withering the enemy fire can be. Usually, you aren't allowed to use the super-fast Microwarp drives in them either, making evasion via speed out of the question.
Nope, you just have to hunker down, suck up the damage and hope that your own DPS can bring the incoming fire down to manageable proportions before you run out of energy to power all the repairing devices and resistance devices, and then promptly explode for 60+ million ISK of damage. A bit of a gamble, but I have done these before quite often, and so knew what to expect, or so I thought.
The 'inquest' revealed a catalogue of failures which led to the destruction of my Dominix, and the first was the nature of the enemy. As mentioned above, Minmatar (and Angels and Rogue Drones), do all four types of damage at once, which is frankly, a bitch, but most of it comes in the form of Explosive damage, which is great if you're a Shield Tanker, (whereby you use the outer, shield portion of your HP, along with shield-based devices and skills, to stay alive). Shields have a very high base resistance to this damage, making them easy to further reinforce. Against Armour Tanks though (Where the surviving is done on the second, Armour layer of HP), not so good. Armour is particularly vulnerable to Explosives, meaning that I have to use up a lot of the slots I can spare for resistance gear, just on getting that anywhere near manageable. (~75% or so...less than optimal). This left only two spare slots for the Thermal and Kinetic resistances, making those somewhat under 60%, and left with no slots spare for the Electromagnetic damage. My Armour naturally resists this very well, but still only at 60% or so.
Against Serpentis, Guristas, Sanshas or Blood Raiders, who all do only two types of damage each, (Kinetic/Thermal, Thermal/EM, etc) life is much easier and two hardeners of each type puts me in the safety zone quite comfortably. I hate Angels and Rogue Drones and I hate the Minmatar! Suffice to say, my tank sucked, when usually it's more than adequate, largely because of these split resistances gimping me in all the categories.
The first pass wasn't that great. I warped in as usual, locked a few targets, deployed the sentry drones and started plinking away at the Cruisers - usually the quickest way to remove the most significant part of the overall incoming DPS. The enemy Battleships do hurt, but take too long to quickly eliminate, and the enemy frigates don't really hurt that much, aside from sometimes warp scrambling you, removing the escape route if things go wrong. It's the large numbers of cruisers that are the easiest way to bring that incoming fire down to 'survivable' quickly - they're fairly vulnerable to the large-bore weapons you'd have on a Battleship, yet in packs do a lot of damage.
Normally, against a two-damage enemy, this works, and I can stay out there for quite some time. I have a fairly low DPS of my own, but it's a very energy efficient setup, based mostly on the drones. This time though, I got a few ships in and wasn't happy with the energy situation - having to suck up four types of damage with sub-70% resistances was wearing me down, so I bugged out and decided to go shopping, and do that big Tech 2 upgrade I'd been promising myself.
Big mistake, as unlike most missions, where the steps are either geographically separated, or wait until you've killed off the preceding lot, this mission had them on a timer, regularly spewing out of the gate that I was supposed to be destroying. To be honest, I hadn't even noticed it in the confusion. I took my time - it did have a five hours time-bonus deadline after all - and after having spent a further 40 million in Tech 2 parts for the ship, to give me even better resistances per module, I went back in there, only to be driven out again almost immediately! By this point, a huge number of extra ships had made their way into the area and all went berserk when I showed up. I may have slightly dented one before my armour gave way and the structure (the innermost, third and
very emergency, layer of HP) started taking hits. I fled, on fire.
Seeing that this wan't going to be a solo job anymore, I called in a friend, who has far more Skill Points than me, in his Raven, and we tried a few times to make any headway, but even with his immense and usually unbreakble Tech 2 shield-tank, he was having to do divebombing runs and flee almost right away. The last run saw me stay a little too long, trying to buy him time to pick off one ship at least, and pow! The destruction of my pride and joy, with the loss of all hands. Sucks to be a deckhand in MY fleet. Bobbing there in my pod (which NPCs don't ever aggro), I counted around 13 Battleships at this point, with assorted Crusier and Frigate escorts (And the Super-Frigate variety too, not the usual trash!), and only four wrecks, one of which was mine. We called it off at that point - to lose one's own ship may be regarded as a mistake, to cost a friend theirs looks like carelessness!
So mostly it was a basic 'RTFM' problem with the mission description. If we'd both gone in hard right away and tried to kill the stargate, we may have done it before being swamped. Mind you, those things have a
huge amount of structure HP, so we've have hit at least two of the waves, I suspect.
All in all, one for the '
Yawn. Sounds boring!' list, when it's next offered to me by my agent, and the worst part of it all, is that this is a five mission chain, all of which are against the Gallente and Minmatar Empires, not the Pirates, meaning faction hits for
doing your job, which take ages to recover from via rare 'Important Missions', (One every 16 normal missions) and no kill bounties, which make up the vast majority of the mission's total pay ordinarily. Instead, the naval targets drop dogtags, which you can sell to their opposing empire's navy for a similar amount of cash....or you could if they weren't
contraband where the missions take place! If the local customs people (who hover on most jumpgates perhaps 50% of the time) see you with them, they confiscate them, fine you and yet more faction hits. There may even be overall Security Status hits too...not entirely sure, but too much trouble for me, so I end up just leaving the bulk of the potential payout just floating in space. Too hot for me...
All in all, a bit of a waste of time, even if I could manage to solo it. Remember kids, Enemies Abound - Just Say No! It's all very well proving what tech level one's balls are, but in the time it takes to struggle through this battleship wrecking line of very low paid, faction-ruining missions, you could get three or four Rouge Drone or Serpentis Extravaganzas in instead... kerching!
(If your favourite agent is Gallente or Minmatar, I think your own version of this personal hell is called 'In The Midst Of Deadspace', and your agent should be similarly told where he or she can shove it, if they try to offer it to you.)
All is not lost though - I had enough cash left to get another Battleship, and going for the nearest equivalent to a complete change of 'class' in EVE there is, I'm buying a Raven instead of another Dominix. As a Caldari, this is a bit of a return to my cultural roots - shield tanking and missiles skills. More on how that's going another time.
EVE-Info: Missions : 4
In which we learn exactly what to expect when placing our 150 million ISK's worth of Battleship and Fittings in harm's way. Spoilers are bad, certainly, but not as bad as solo-single-box mining 150 million ISK of Veldspar. Forewarned is forearmed..