Life in EVE has been good lately. The top highlight being I finally purchased a Rohk battleship, and it’s a beauty. Currently I have it fit with six 350mm turrets and two t2 150mm turrets. The 350mm work great vs cruiser and battleship targets, while the 150mm along with my drones take out any troublesome frigates. It also has an active shield tank, using a named xl recharger along with a recharge booster. Once my skills catch up those will be replaced with t2 fittings. Speaking of t2, I just finished training to fit a t2 tracking enhancer and two t2 magnetic field stabilizers, giving the Rohk a very decent damage boost.
Overall the Rohk laughs at all level 3 missions, easily cutting through everything without any issue in keeping its shields up. As a very nice side bonus, I recently completed a ten part storyline sequence, ‘A Case of Kidnap’ I believe, and ended up with three hardwires at the end. Since none were very useful to me, I flew over to my favorite market and checked the prices. To my surprise two of them sold for around 25 million ISK each, with the third going for 20 million; a very, very nice payout indeed. The sale of all three instantly boosted my previously decimated wallet back up, allowing my to buy the above mentioned fittings along with paying back the 25 million I owed to an Alliance mate (Thanks again RJ).
Feeling brave, I decided to accept a level 4 mission to see how the Rohk would hold up. The first one I drew ended up being nice and easy (forget the name now), so after completing it I went for another. Sadly I drew Massive Assault, one of the tougher missions in EVE. Since our Corp’s main mission runners are on break right now, I had little chance in getting that one done, so I declined and asked for another. I drew Vengeance, another very tough mission. So that’s currently sitting in the Journal, unlikely to be attempted anytime soon. No way in hell am I risking my new toy only to have it scrambled and trashed in a mission.
Lastly, my main pilot is quickly approaching 5 million skill points, and I’m looking forward to making a breakdown post once I hit that mark, should be fairly interesting. As much as I’ve tried to stick to combat skills, I have strayed once in a while into other areas, and I’m curious exactly how many points have been placed in other areas.
Hardcore Casual 
Congrats on the new toy. New ships are one of the best things in Eve.
Since you’re so heavy on guns, and have less than 5 mill SP, I’m guessing that you’re light on missile skills. That’s unfortunate because the Raven seems to be like the “easy button” for level 4 missions. One word of advice for running solo level 4’s: watch the warp scrammers.
I run level 4’s solo and with corp mates frequently. I’ve lost track of how many, but I know I’ve lost more than half a dozen Ravens in the last few months. Oddly enough, I only lose ships when I’m flying with “help”. When I’m solo, I can be carefull not to take aggro from the whole room. When I have helpers, someone will eventually shoot the wrong thing, and then there’s rooms like the second stages in Worlds Collide, where the whole room will ‘auto-aggro’ if more than one person jumps in. :(
Losing ships is expensive, but it really gets the blood flowing when you have to watch the last of your hull go red and there’s nothing you can do. The real trick is to keep a backup ship all set up and ready to go, so that you can get back in there and loot your own wreck to recover what didn’t go ‘boom’ with the ship.
As for straying away from the skill training targets, maybe you’ll be better off if you don’t look at all the extra stuff you may have trained. I’ve noticed that picking skills to train is like having your own IT project where there’s a scope document you’d like to follow, but there’s nobody to manage the project.
I’m always careful with the level 4 missions, and check which ones have warp scramblers in them before attempting them. At this point, I really can’t afford to lose the Rohk, so I’m always over-cautious with it.
And yea, my missile skills are pathetically low, something like 100,000 SP total. I know the Raven is a great mission ship, but something about railguns and blasters sold me early, and I don’t mind having a slightly tougher time with missions in the Rohk.
Yeah, guns are fun, and the instant hits are great for those defender missile spewing named bad-guys. I like my Rokh very much also, but I tend to use if for “special occasions” rather than every-day wear and tear.
Speaking of skill points and training again: Had a great convo last night with a player I podded over the weekend. (his corp war-dec’ed us for no reason) Turned out that he was something like a 1 mill SP new player. Of course I helped him with replacing his ship, insurance, gear, etc. It was just pennies to me, but it was everything for him.
I guess he didn’t have anyone in his corp to answer questions and make sure he knew the basics. [b]He didn’t even have a medical clone to cover all his skill points.[/b] I felt terrible when I heard that, so I walked him through how to get a clone and helped him with isk for that too. I spent a couple hours answering questions the best I could and pointed him to some good out-of-game resources.
Every blog about Eve has posts about how overwhelming the new-player experience is in Eve. That guy was a perfect example of how hard it must be if you’re not lucky enough to find good advice when you’re new.
And along with the new player posts, often you hear a story similar to yours, where you end up killing someone and then helping them out because you realize they did not know any better. That’s another thing I really like about EVE, that you can give someone 5 million ISK and it means the world to them, but to you it’s a half hour or so of a mission or something. It’s great that the game works like that.
A 1mil player is crazy new though, considering you start with something like 900,000 SP points now. He must have been flying some mid-tier Frigate I take it? And why was he in an aggressive Corp that early in his pilot career?
He didn’t know what war meant. They were in the 24 hour waiting period when they recruited him to inflate the member count. That corp had only one player near a year old and the rest were less than 6 months.
Kinda a funny story really. We’re minding our own business, mining and missioning in empire space, when this guy joins our public corp chat. He says he’s looking for a good industrial corp and asked a couple questions. We were all nice and helpfull, then he says “That’s all I needed to know”, leaves the chat, and starts a war countdown. Now we outnumber his corp by 3 or 4 to one and nearly all of our players are capable of beating his best player, and a handfull of us could probably take on his whole corp solo.
After a brutal weekend of total hell death for the noob corp they withdrew the war. The part that I really can’t understand is why thier CEO would risk running around in a hauler full of tech 2 mining gear, drones, and a PACKAGED HULK, before the 24 hour cool-down period expired. He knew that we had spent the entire weekend camping around his home system and using location agents to track them all down when they were hiding. Unlike his brand new player, I somehow don’t really feel like donating isk to replace the lost Hulk or Badger II. LoL