Where did you come from

I found my first, second and third Blood Raider Gauntlet sites this evening.

The first was while I was in that unarmed Interceptor – so had to ignore it.

The second was after I Jumped-Cloned back to my home base and went looking for them in my Gila. I searched through 15 odd systems before finding it. There was a Confessor already running the site when I warped in. I was content just to sit back and watch what it was all about – but the pilot warped out. I started clearing the remaining rats when another Confessor warped in, then out again, followed by yet another Confessor. When the last rat was cleared that Confessor used the sites acceleration gate. I followed to witness it destroy two rats before warping off. I cleared the remaining rats and structures but didn’t notice any loot.

I found the third site after flying back to my home system to park the Gila – but with only 30 seconds left before downtime.

I ran that third site when tranquility came back online.

For the two Hi-Sec sites I looked at, you warp to the beacon to find a handful of structures and an acceleration gate around 15km away from you. There are 5 Blood Raider Gauntlet Frigates (worth 30K each) in the site which web you. As you clear the spawn another 5 turn up, then another 5 when those are cleared. (A total of 15.) I cleared all the NPCs and Structures I could damage, but nothing was dropped.

The acceleration gate seems to be locked until all the NPCs are destroyed.  Behind the acceleration gate is a pocket with 5 Blood Raider Gauntlet Cruisers and a Battlecruiser. Once destroyed a further 5 Cruisers turned up. I cleared all the NPCs and Structures I could damage, but again nothing was dropped.

I figured it must have been the luck of the draw but I then noticed I had one of those Abaddon Blood Raiders Skins in my cargo hold. I am guessing it probably “appeared” after the battlecruiser kill, or after I destroyed one of the structures. I’m not sure as I wasn’t expecting to gain loot like that.

The Gila had no issues with tanking or quickly removing the rats.  The Confessors were certainly destroying the rats even quicker – so they don’t appear to have high resists or a lot of EHP.  Their damage however might possibly worry a Confessor or Assault Frigate.  I was probably taking around 300 Hits inbetween my Medium Drone Strikes.

Initial reports suggest the sites tend to be heavily contested.  That seems accurate at the moment.

Parking in Blood

CCP have released more detail of the Crimson Harvest event, which has just started and will run through to November 2nd:

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/the-crimson-harvest/

It is very much a theme-park type “special”, with cash shop goodies and bonuses, time limited loot in time limited PVE sites, and apparently some live action events. Just like other theme-park MMOs. I’m not entirely enthused with that approach, but people have been asking for more theme-park content, and I guess it is something they can reuse again. I don’t have much free time at the moment, but I will try to check some of this out in game.

(Wouldn’t it be interesting if using the blood raider cerebral accelerator had an impact on your clone in game after the event finished? Not a buff or bonus – but maybe occasional communications from the blood raiders.)

I’m still in the early stages of the Caldari Epic Arc. Glancing through the wiki it seems to have a lot more branches than the Amarr Arc did. The first choice I was given was doing a delivery into Null Sec, or a delivery into Low Sec, or what seemed to be setting yourself up for a possible double cross of the agent you are working for, then going back to doing one of the two deliveries. I might not have got that right; it wasn’t entirely clear to me.

My character has never really been a double crosser, so for something different I decided to do the Null Sec delivery. I grabbed the Warp Core Stabbed gun-less interceptor I set up to visit every system in Domain, swapped to a +2/go fast clone, and made my way to KFR-ZE in Syndicate.

This would give a kill report that I’d be embarrassed by

I waited until a week day to do the run, and happened to complete it just after downtime. I did not run into any other players in space, although had the discomfort of hitting gates multiple times and getting traffic control warnings and having to wait a few seconds for the next system to be loaded. Sitting a few seconds on a gate out of Hi-Sec can be uncomfortable. The only real concern I had was that the wiki suggested I could complete the mission remotely, but while it was flagged as complete in my overview and at the top of the mission description, the agent continued to report that I had not completed it.

It was not until I docked in the agent’s station that the Complete button appeared under the objectives (while the agent still reported I had not completed it.)  After 66 odd jumps I was pleased to see I could finish it.

Nice when a somewhat bizarrely fitted and individually focused ship turns out to have a practical use.