Last week EVE Online announced the new 3 part expansion to Revelations....Revelations II.

No points for originality in naming, but the feature list looks pretty awesome. The press release says (in addition to other stuff):

Revelations II sets the stage for the third chapter of Revelations to be released later this year and will feature enhancements for the most experienced players to the newest. It will introduce major challenges and complexities to the game, enabling players to engage in even more strategic warfare, providing significantly expanded content for exploration and offering more possibilities for sophisticated corporation and alliance management. In addition, it will include enhancements to EVE Online’s core technology to improve the player experience as part of CCP’s ‘Need for Speed’ initiative that addresses server and client performance issues through optimization of existing features and content. As with all previous expansions, CCP offers Revelations II as a free download to subscribers.

In particular, Revelations II enables greater opportunities for strategic operations between fixed structures in space by encouraging siege-type gameplay, enabling attrition warfare, opening up new tactical opportunities for smaller attack groups, improving the economic vitality of outposts and allowing individual outpost services to be attacked with precision strikes. New starbase tactics, for example, will be introduced that allow players to perform localized scanning for ships, jump between starbases owned by the same corporation and quickly bring capital ships into a battlefield – or prevent them from coming in. Players will also have direct command of starbase weapons, allowing them to control individual assets such as turrets and missile batteries.

The new Chapter also gives players more sophisticated tools for managing their corporations and alliances while providing transparency to ensure effective governance. Corporations will be able to take control of their finances using divisional wallets to categorize corporate budgets and a transaction log for each wallet. They will be able to search corporate hangars and remotely manipulate assets. There will also be detailed shareholder reports which list individual member ownership of corporation-issued stock.

For new players, Revelations II includes a fully revamped New Player Experience, which allows them to immerse themselves in the game and acclimate more quickly. The revised tutorial begins directly in space in Revelations II, within a private environment accessible only to the new player. For more seasoned players, the Chapter introduces Level 5 Agents, offering the most challenging Player versus Environment (PvE) encounters ever, designed for capital ships or small gangs, and involving facing major adversaries which require significant firepower to take down.

I have to admit the general attitude towards free expansion content is what keeps EVE installed on my machine. It'll be really fun to see how this works out for non-corp related advances!

It isn't often that an undersized battlecruiser can take on a battleship head-to-head, but last night in Eve I did exactly that. My corporation was engaging in a great battle in a Tier 4 mission and we were facing off against numerous battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers and frigates. Near the end of one of the battles I found myself facing down a lone battleship firing torpedos at me. With newly upgraded shields and skills, I was able to face down the beast and prevail with minimal damage to my shields.

Tier 4 missions are currently the cream of the crop in Eve. They have great bounties, great payouts, and they often require a gang of friends to complete. Last night it took 3 battlecruisers from my corporation to win through the first two stages of the mission. We're holding off on stage 3 for another night (it was 12:30am when we finished stage 2). But so far we've made nearly 4 million ISK in bounties alone, which is quite a good haul.

Tier 4 missions are dangerous and require coordination as well as knowledge of your ship's capabilities and those of the other members of your gang. Voice chat helps, though it isn't required as we were able to make it through using just normal chat.

Wednesday should prove to be quite a good bit of fun as we try to close out the mission and face down a named pirate (worth 850k ISK alone!) and his numerous friends. Well, tats all for now. Back to the good fight!

So I recently moved out to Aramachi to run level 4 missions with a new agent at the Aramachi II - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Testing Facilities. So far I have found my new Raven set up has been able to handle these mission with no major issues, there have been some sticky situations but overall I am very pleased with my set up for mission running. My current set up is (Going off memory here):

High Slots:
6x 'arbalest' cruise launcher I (This is giving me around a 9.2 ROF with my current skills)
2x e500 prototype energy vampire

Medium Slots:
1x xlarge shield booster II
1x Target Painter I
3x Mission Specific Active shield hardeners
1x shield boost amplifier II

Low Slots:
2x power diagnostic system I
3x Ballistic Control System I

As I said I was pretty happy with the setup overall though I need to work on my electronic skills so I can better fit items using more CPU (I often have issues fitting the NOS due to CPU shortages). However currently I am working on my Evasive Maneuvering V so that I can get in to Interceptors for an additional (and slightly cheaper) PvP ship option, so my training once EV V is complete will probably work a bit toward this rather then electronics.

Mean while on the corporate from Ivy League just celebrated their 3rd anniversary (3/15) at training new players. To celebrate this members will be touring around the Eve staging mock battles. You can go and post a Happy Birth day message here Eve Online Forum Post.

Tomorrow is Patch day for the Revelations 1.4 patch so I probably won't be playing much, but look for more later in the week.

So I'm logging in to run a couple of quick missions. Remember my level 1 agent? I've got her up to 9.99 standing now. Just a few more, she should be 10.0, and that's it for them.

You know how easy a level 1 mission is in a Ferox? Heheheheh.

So I'm reading through the listings of skills in the Market while I'm flying around. There are so many skills, I still find ones that occasionally are like "ooo, me want!" And what do I notice?

Skills for each type of resist, particularly if you're using passive hardeners.

Sure, they're not *great*, but resists are so important in this game, and even though I'm using active hardeners now, I've been planning on switching to passive. So I look at the pre-reqs for the skill, and I need Shield Operations 4.

Well, I need that ANYWAYS. It's an important skill - and I've only got it at 3. So though Weapon Upgrades 5 is still churning in my almost quixotic quest to fly HACs (despite the month of training Caldari Cruiser 5 will need first), I go ahead and switch to Shield Operations 4.

It'll be done today, and I can pick up those skills when I get home from work tonight. That way, I can at least have a bit more resists for those big bad Guristas Arrogators that I one-shot in my assault frig...

Just kidding. As soon as I get 10.0, there's a level 3 agent in the same station I can start using - so I may just skip over level 2 missions completely. Should I?

I knew Caldari Cruiser 5 was going to finish tonight. Unfortunately, I was a bit off in timing, and it's not going to finish until early in the morning. So I ended up aborting it and starting the train on Battlecruisers. Then it got too late, so I started Mechanic 4 and I'll finish up the other two tomorrow probably at some point, then start Engineering 5 before I head to Origins. Engineering will take quite a while; after it's done, it's just Mechanic 5, and I can train Assault Frigate.

But that's realistically probably 3 weeks away.

I had previously trained Caldari Cruiser to 3, then realized I could train Battlecruisers at that point, so instead of using a Moa I could go for a Ferox. I'm pricing out the Ferox, but I'm going to have to figure out how to equip it. My first instinct was "five x 250mm prototype guass guns" to start with, but that's going to quickly eat up all my power. (Though Engineering 5 will give me 50 more power, I'll need better; each gun takes 225 power, which means 1125 for 5 of them - and I'd still have my 4 low slots, 5 medium slots, and 2 launcher slots, though a lot of those use less power and more CPU.)

Given the power constraints, I'm thinking of maybe putting a couple dual 150mm railguns on there to help with smaller, faster ships like frigates. Then there's the launchers, of which I may need bigger ones than the standard TE-2100 bays I have now. There's also drones, and I may need to train Drones up one more point so I can have 3 out at a time. Then I'd have 3 drones - a Hobgoblin I (already have two of those, in fact) but with a 25m cubed drone bay, I'd supplement the Hobgoblin with two medium scout drones.

And not to mention if I need better electronics/engineering modules than I have now for the shields, warp core stabilizers, what have you.

Needless to say, I need money for all that. So I talked to my agent, and he had a mission for me - Worlds Collide again.

Sigh.

I snuck past the Guristas into their second wave, and made for their second gate. Unfortunately, there was a huge - uh - thing in the way, and I took a bunch of damage, though I managed to kill one of their destroyers for it. But I had to warp out, and the repairs to my armor almost cost me as much as the bounty on that one ship. I plotted to put in better resistances, but couldn't remember what kind of damage they do and couldn't find my list. A guildie said he always goes in the Angels way, so I decided to try that.

I darted back into the beginning and the Guristas were getting pretty close to my warp in point. No problem - I wiped them out. Then I flew back towards the Angels. They had a goodly number of ships, but most of them were wimpy - it was only their destroyer I was worried about. I made it to the gate first, though, and went on inside.

It wasn't quite the cake ride Ungulf had made it out to be. I found the acceleration gate and went for it. On the way there I killed about 5-6 of them. I did leave my shield booster on a bit too much, and found myself fairly worried about my capacitor. I still had power to warp, though, and off I went to the last part.

There were two bigger ships in the end plus the usual horde of small ones. I went after the two bigger ones first, no problemo, and then it was just cleaning up the trash. Having done that, I picked up the crew, picked up my loot, and returned them to my agent. He gave me the 139000 isk he'd promised, plus another 152000 isk for my timeliness.

That plus the bounties was not a bad haul, and I reprocessed and sold most of the gear, keeping a couple of pieces for my collection. I tend to reprocess things; I click "sell" to see how much they'd sell for, and then reprocess to see how much tritanium/etc. I'd get for them. Then I look up the minerals to see how much I'd get for them. Probably 80% or more of the time it's worth it to just break them down and sell them that way.

So that pushes me up over 300K for the run. That's...well...more than 1% of a Ferox. Sigh. Not to mention all those guns, launchers, ammo, what have you I'm going to need to buy.

What I really need is a better agent. No fear, I got a list of nearby ones here, and I'm going to work on that soon. I think also I'll be joining a corp soon...

I wanted to check on the status of some skills, so I jumped on for a bit tonight. Completed level 2 Caldari Cruisers, so I went ahead and started working on level 3. Given how busy my schedule will be for a while, I'm very tempted to just skip over cruisers and go straight to battleships - but I won't. I have to be honest - I want to be trained on as many types (sizes) of ships possible. Then I'm going to work on the other races.

None of my missions took me out of the system I was in, which was kind of nice. None of them were particularly challenging, though one gave me an upgraded shield recharger. It was nice to be able to do some relaxing ratting while working on other things.

I've mostly been ratting lately. Basically, I've been staging out of one base, just running combat mission after combat mission. It's not the most profitable thing to do, but it's consistent, it's short runs to the missions, and it's safe. For the most part.

The exception: the dreaded "Worlds Collide" mission.

Here's the basics: Angel Cartel and Gurista pirates are fighting - and trapped in the middle are some researchers. There are three stages to this fight, and you're warned that only a frigate can go through the first gate. That's not true, however; a destroyer can too.

First gate: you warp to the deadspace acceleration gates. There are two gates; each guarded by a half dozen to ten pirates. Usually you can make it through the gate at least once or twice (if you flee the next part) before you have to take on the pirates near the gate you're going through.

Second gate: Here's the hard part. You fly in and there are TONS of enemies, often "Dread" types. Today, for instance, there was easily pushing fifteen large ships. I had Gurista Sabotaeurs jamming me, Demolishers and Wreckers laying down a huge smack on me...I had to flee three times to repair armor and hull. (Total cost in repairs: over 100,000 isk. I could've done it cheaper by fixing it myself with hull/armor repairers, but that would've wasted time, and the enemies respawn fairly quickly.)

Finally, I fight my way through them, and it's through the second gate.

Last gate: Typically a ton of weak ships. No problem in this part, then you get the crew off the damaged boat. There is an acceleration gate here labeled as heading to "the war zone" - I've never explored it.

Still, despite the 100K in repairs - I still clear over 500K isk in profit. Next time I go in though I'll be carrying better resist gear for the damage.

I went ahead and trained destroyers. Following that, I bought one - a Cormorant - and kitted it out. It cost a lot of money, but I had a couple of back-up ships sitting in my hangar, so I wasn't overly worried about it.

So I fly around, and I blow up stuff real fast like on my missions. With 7 turrets and 1 missile launcher, it's not surprising. So after buying some new shield gear, and putting the 'Hypnos' Multispectral ECM I back in my hangar (since it can't be used a lot of times because it's considered area of effect, and is relatively ineffective due to lack of strengh), I decided to give that level 2 mission a shot again.

I flew back out there and it had reset. So I attacked the five guys that were there. It was a rough fight, but I won. I started reloading and repairing the shields, and the next wave came in. Same thing, but I'm a bit worse off. Then the next wave came in, and I only barely manage to get out of there before dying - my shields and armor were gone, and my structure down to 1/3rd.

The biggest problem was capacitor. With 8 weapons firing, and an emergency shield overload doohickey, my cap disappears fast. I flew back in and saw that they had reinforcements - I managed to kill one, then warp back out with only a little bit of armor damage taken.

Finally, I decided screw this. I didn't feel like doing hit and runs against elite fighters all night until I whittled them down from 12-14 of them, so I finally just bookmarked where the battle had been and cancelled the mission. Then I flew back out there and picked up the cans of the guys I had defeated to make up some money. I ended up in an Amarr Imperial arms space station where I logged off for the night.

Sure, it hurt my standing with my agent, but I just can't deal with it yet. I'll keep working on my skills and money until I can consider a cruiser or an assault frigate.