Eve – First Level 2 Mission

Reading up on a game and actually playing it are two different things. I had read that running missions for a corporation improves your standing with them (reputation in WOW) that leads to better contacts, better missions and more rewards. Actually understanding this while simultaneously trying to understand everything else at the beginning took a while.

So I settled into the Federation Intelligence division simply because they had an agent nearby that was willing to take a chance on me. Since I have looked into things a bit more deeply with a slightly more experienced (haha - 3 weeks experience) view. They have a range of departments (different mission types) and have agents that handle missions from level 1-5 (the highest).

By the end of my first week I was flying a catalyst and easily doing the level 1 missions – I had even run the Worlds Collide mission successfully and my rep had climbed to the heady heights of 1.76! Each mission brought in about 200k between the loot, rewards and bounties. I was working towards a quality -19 agent that would offer me a L2 mission. I took it and flew into a pirates nest and promptly got my ship knocked about, in fact there wasn’t that much of my structure left when the warp engaged. I clearly needed a better ship.

With my 7.9million ISK hoarded and generously donated (more anon) I looked through the possibilities and how these would suit my skill mix. The answer was the Thorax. She is a Gallente gun boat with nice large drone hold and five high level slots. Someone was selling one for a nice 5.5million not too far away. That was the cheap part! I estimate fitting her out set me back another 4million.

Moving from frigates (a destroyer is really a large frigate) to cruisers entailed a whole new slew of skills as the guns and drones are now medium rather than small. The price of them is considerably more as well. A meta level 3 (1-5, 5 being Tech 2) can set you back about 0.4million. I was encouraged to buy Tesco-own-brand for rather less.

5x150mm railguns, 5 drones and with fitted out for armour tanking my Thorax went back for those pirates, and was forced away again, she just wasn’t happy with volleys of about 8/9 missiles striking her. I then started really looking into resistance. It turns out you need Hull Upgrades 3 or 4 for the active tanking gear (+50% resistance when activated) and there is a penalty for stacking resistances (to avoid you getting 100% I assume). I suspect that my ‘base’ station will have a vault with different resistance armour hardeners for the different missions. However, with the right armour fitted my beautiful Thorax was a different beast and tore the pirates apart. Tonight she’ll be dropping the railguns for blasters with antimatter. With the right armour she get up close and personal – time to do some serious DPS!

For the record. The much diminished cash reserves were replenished by 3 things. John (6 million initially, 3 million seed capital for trading), Jane of Infinite Covenant (3 million) and the level 2 missions themselves. The three bosses had bounties of 45k on each of them and the 20 odd guards that took forever to clean up had bounties of between 12k and 19k each. That means each L2 mission makes about 600k (100k reward, 100k time bonus, 300k bounties and about 200k loot). As you can see, well worth getting to the level 2 missions.