Spikey

(Merry Christmas everyone. I wrote this the other day, and am just using a quiet moment as the kids are busy with their new toys to polish and post it. Hope you are all having a great day.)

I did something unwise. I spent several hours ignoring the wife and kids and undock in EVE.

Attempts were made to interrupt me regularly, but I pointedly ignore them. My son took that in his stride; with some give and take my daughter adjusted her usual routine to mostly accommodate, and my wife – well she starts with glaring and moves on towards seething.

Bugger the consequences, I had hit a brick wall hard and was in desperate need of some downtime.

I looked through my EVE To Try list, and settled on trying to use the new in game map to purposefully navigate, and play around with a Phantasm fit. I wanted to try using it to zerg High-Sec Anomalies. The idea is simple enough, you clear each site as quickly as possible looking for escalations and faction spawns before moving on to the next one.

My first fit I played with is this one:

[Phantasm, Play 01]
Damage Control II
Heat Sink II
Heat Sink II
Tracking Enhancer II
Tracking Enhancer II

Federation Navy 10MN Afterburner
Federation Navy Stasis Webifier
Sensor Booster II, Scan Resolution Script
Large Ancillary Shield Booster, Navy Cap Booster 150
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II

Focused Medium Beam Laser II, Imperial Navy Radio M
Focused Medium Beam Laser II, Imperial Navy Radio M
Focused Medium Beam Laser II, Imperial Navy Radio M
Salvager II

Medium Capacitor Control Circuit II
Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer II
Medium Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer II

Hobgoblin II x3

The Phantasm did a stellar job chewing quickly through the sites and was quite fun. I would just warp in, remain unmoving and single shot most things between 5 and 55km. Lock times were fine and I did not have to use the shield boost once.

While I don’t usually run them, I did test the ship against a drone site and found that was a bad idea. Even with the web the medium turrets could not hit the drone frigates without having to resort to manual flying and moving away from the spawn points. I’ll go back to ignoring those sites while flying this ship.

I went through 10 odd systems and ran 25+ sites in quick succession, getting two faction spawn and two Sansha Command Relay Outpost escalations into Low sec. I ran one of the escalations but the 1M ISK loot barely covered the cost of the drone I lost doing it, and I decided against doing the second one which was deeper into Low Sec. I also came across one of those “Unidentified Structures” which was half interesting to see for the first time. Overall ISK wasn’t great, a bit over 20M for my efforts – but this sort of thing is hit and miss on the rewards, and is more of a side line distraction.

The Phastasm in the Unidentified Structures site

I might keep that ship in my hanger.

While the new map looks great, in the end I had to resort to a Dotlan printout. I headed off in a direction I had not been before, and I just couldn’t get a wide and clear enough situational awareness at the constellation and regional level. It was however good for the immediate one or two jumps.

Overall it was a successful session. Now it is time to work out what it cost me with annoying my wife.