Saturday, October 7, 2023

o7, 25 or 6 to 4

 2023. I'm back blogging. I was back in EVE a couple times since I said I was quitting. It always turned out to be a temporary thing. It turns out that the last time I quit, I forgot to unsubscribe. So I came back to a great surprise, level five mastery of my favorite frigates, at last. So hey! Faction War stuff! I take everything back about EVE being too hard for me. I've right-sized my goals to mastering frigate-level combat in Faction War. 

I decided to focus on a ship at a time. First up, because I love its look, is the Minmatar Republic Firetail. I had a lot of fun fitting about 25 of them and learning to fly them. I found that solo dueling PvP in FW small or scout plexes is not the Firetail's strong suit, particularly. I've been told they work much better in groups hunting larger prey. 

So I saved the Firetail for fleet action and switched to the Comet for plexing, and this is more like it! I find with Gallente ships the deal is to close in and armor rep and hope. Just hope really hard. Sometimes it works. The gods of battle will decide. About 16 Comets in, I win Gudfites(tm) every so often, and I feel I'm getting the hang of it. Comets wind up cheaper than Firetails because I can make them myself in the Federal Defense Union LP store. Seems to me that rail Comet beats blaster Comet. Blaster comet punches up better. 

Since the last time I was playing around 2018, The Frog versus Squid war zone changed, from something like 60 Gallente worlds to 30 Caldari back then, to 30 Gal to 60 Cal now. Some of the war materiel that I buy for LP and sell for ISK does not get the classic 1000 ISK per LP ratio I've come to think of as my birthright. ;) That's the main difference.

The reforms made to the plexes last year are entirely to my liking. I went in a battlefield once and scratched my head at how those work. What with the optimal strategy involving the killing of your own side's NPCs. Gah. My immersion. It hurts.

The Rearguard-Command-Frontline thing? brilliant. I love it. It gives the war zone a kind of variable texture, like it says on the tin.

I'm less enthusiastic about the NPC pirates getting involved in the upcoming Havoc expansion. We already had variations in texture here with self-declared, player piracy. Perhaps when I start getting LP for some of these guys, I will come around to the idea. Here's hoping.