Phoebe and Me, Pop Goes Another Wormhole, Wartargets

The Phoebe patch released yesterday, and I was really interested to see these "null sec data/relic sites" they said would now appear in C1-3 wormholes. I don't usually mess with our data/relic sites, other than to kill all the NPCs. Years of crap loot for lots of wasted time have made me pretty jaded towards them. So what I found was pleasantly surprising.

I scanned for the day and found I had two of the new sites! I checked Eve Survival and found the NPCs looked quite hard, so I added a plate to my Zealot, and logged in Firt as Wing Commander for the small boost his skills gave my tank.I warped on over to the site and found......

Nothing. Just a floating bunch of boxes. Well that was a buzz kill. I found out through some more Googling that they had removed the NPCs a long time ago. Well, rats. I was looking forward to killing stuff. Honestly, though, it wouldn't have really gone with the lore of wormhole space....these sites being thrown in to appease the wormhole masses do feel a bit odd.

What I didn't realize is how hard these boxes are to crack. I failed quite a few of my first data ones, watching them explode in frustration. Okay, this isn't going to work, I don't know too much about this mini-game. So I read up on it, found that there are rigs for both relic and data to boost your virus, and fitted out two Anathemas, one for each.

Next site was 100% easier. I highly recommend you fit these rigs. My first site netted me about 15 mil in loot, from me exploding most of the containers and the fact that it was a Data site, which means mostly research crap. Not to put research down, but it's mostly worthless. Next site was a Relic site, and it netted me 37 mil in salvage! Now we're talking!

So, in the end, I'm "pleased" with the new sites in wormhole space. I just wish they fit in with the canon of the place instead of just some sites that spawn other places. But, in the end, I'll be happy with more content, but I hope they can mold it to better suit the eerieness that wormhole space deserves.

So after this I ran two of the actual wormhole Relic/Data sites, and actually got some melted nanoribbons, finally! I believe I ended up with 12, so I was pretty happy with that compared to the previous drought we had been having. Then I turned my attention to mining.

Which means I needed to close wormhole connections.

I got busy closing the few we had, and the last was a K162 to high sec with 2 bil mass. I decided to forego the afterburner, and just jumped the Orca back and forth a few times. Hole was at half mass when one more Orca pass popped it, with the Orca outside.

Well, at least it was high sec. I opened up the B274 and I was only 12 jumps away.

Straight through the Forge. Argh.

As many of you know, I was wardecced by an alliance that apparently just sits around on gates near Jita waiting for people who are unaware they are at war, or just have no clue about the mechanics. Last I saw, there were quite a few of them near Jita, and my only "safe" route was straight through those core worlds.

Alright, I figured I'd approach carefully, they should just be on the main gates into Jita. I was wrong. About three jumps out, I found a wartarget in local, but not on the gate I came in, so I quickly docked up.

My corpmate Gnicklas is back, so I had him use his special powers to find information. This gent had taken part in a kill only two hours ago, on a freighter, with five other wartargets. All of them in Proteuses and Phoboses.

Frack.

I decided I had better scout some and left the wormhole with Forgotten and headed over to Jita in my pod to put together a cheap PvP ship. If it was just this guy, he might be in something I could get the jump on, but probably not, who was I kidding? I was looking to give them a fight, I need some PvP experience anyhow.

So off I went and fitted out a Maller with a 30k buffer tank that I was pretty happy with and flew over towards where Firt was docked.

I got to one jump out and found the rest of the wartargets.

One Phobos and a Proteus were sitting on the gate immediately after Firt's location, and immediately attacked me. I actually managed to get the Phobos into 1/8th armor with my little Maller, and it lasted a couple minutes, my buffer actually held out pretty well. But it was only a matter of time, and I exploded and warped on over to dock, only to be told I could not dock due to an aggression timer.

Now this is what I'm talking about, needing PvP experience. I've never fought anywhere with docking, or stations, or any of this other nonsense. I have to say I panicked a little, waiting for my executioners to land and end my pod. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to warp off quickly, and return once my timer expired.

So this whole getting Firt home plan wasn't going to work right now. I checked the Star Map and found I could go around, but would have to traverse a single low sec system. Not a problem, I can scout. Bought a shuttle and headed towards that, with my Orca in tow as I scouted. A single wartarget chased us up the pipe, but lost us when we turned.

I jumped into the low sec system to find a Drake sitting on the gate my Orca would need to use. That wasn't going to work. Oh, there's a cyno in system, I bet it's in use and they're guarding it. So I docked up and waited an hour, and sure enough, everyone had left. I got the Orca moving, headed to the next gate, and met a jump freighter coming in my from cyno. Bet he's glad I'm not a problem.

So I got around Jita, circled it, and made it home. Closed the B274 and got mining!

We've decided to switch to Procurers to mine instead of Hulks after looking at the yeild, cycle duration when boosted vs price of the ship, and I've never been real happy with using Hulks, other than their yield. Now, with the major changes to mining ships, having a 54k EHP tank on the Procurer matters more than the extra yield.

Here's my Procurer fit:

{Heavy Shield Procurer}

High Slot: One Strip Miner 1

Med Slots: Em Ward Field 2, 2 Adaptive Invul 2s, Med Shield Extender 2

Low Slots:2 Mining Laser Upgrades 2

Rigs: Core Defense Field Extender 1, Anti-EM Screen, Anti-Thermal Screen

Unboosted with modules running, it's 49,470k EHP. 54k when boosted by the Mining Foreman. I'm actually looking forward to getting jumped by some stealth bombers.

I got to work mining with three Procurers, swapping out to the Miasmos when I hit four full cans. We had started this site the previous couple of nights, but didn't get very far before we were interrupted, so I mined the rest of the ABC, and took down the Spodumain and Dark Ochre before calling it quits for the night.

Glad I decided to mine, because logging on today, the site is gone. So are all my gas sites, so I'm assuming someone warped to all of them. Means I need to get to the remaining ore site, pronto.

Forgotten Heathen out o/

Low Sec Mining

Well, I've been poking around low sec a bit to see what has changed since I was gone. The system I do PI in is very quiet, with almost all pass through traffic. So I was pretty astonished when I found a Large Spodumain and Crokite Mining Site!

Honestly, I've never spent much time in low sec, certainly never scanned out grav sites. Now everyone can see what mining sites are there with their ship scanner. These sites may have been there all along, but I thought it was a weird site for a .4 system.

So I decided, what the hell, why not mine it. I fitted out some Retrievers and a Miasmos with a cloak and got to mining.

And now I know why these sites are never mined.

First off, there's no security from people having to at least put out probes to find you. I'm not sure how loud or how hard the Wormhole CSM screamed about this change not going in, but I have to assume this has mostly ended wormhole mining. Cloaked ships could show up in belt with you and you would have NO warning. Not even spamming the directional scan button is going to help you there.

Second, since I normally mine in Hulks that are outfitted for max yield, these Retrievers were miserable. I had one Warp Core stab in the lows, so lost space for Mining Laser Upgrades. I guess I should have just treated the ships as expendable.

Third, since people can ambush you with no warning, I was jumping the fleet out to a safe spot every time someone came in system. This becomes tedious very quick.

I have to wonder, why was the grav mechanic changed?? Was this supported opposed to removing ABC ores from wormholes? I'll investigate.

Forgotten Heathen out.

Definite New Grav Mechanics

So we've been watching our grav sites very closely for the last few now, and I can safely say there's been some changes to the way they are operating. In what way you ask? I'll tell you!

In our entire time in wormholes, we have had very few of the "downtime spawn roids", asteroids that spawn in your "open" fields(those that you have warped to). And when I say very few, I mean like 5 total over our entire wormhole career. So it has been very interesting when almost every single day we warp in to find a new roid waiting for us. Not only that, but they are piling up! Lately, it is not uncommon for there to be two different spawn roids from two seperate days because we haven't been able to mine all the first!

And not just any roid, oh no. Up til now we've only had spodumain asteroids spawning as our downtime roid. But, about the time we started repeatadly having these roids spawn, crokite roids started spawning as well. 25-50k ones.

Shhh, don't tell the CSM! OMG more nullsec ores in wormholes! It'll destroy the game!

On top of these new downtime roids, we've been getting extra roids that spawn with the field. I've documented this over the past few months. Once, as readers will recall, we had a 250k spod spawn with the grav site. It, of course, promptly disappeared. But extra rocks with each site has been more than welcome.

Of course, there is alot of "are we done yet?" while you mine 90k spod. But it's also money in the bank. I'll deal with that while we can have stuff to mine.

So why, when the nullsec community obviously wants ABCs removed from wormholes, would CCP already have wormhole grav sites getting buffs? Obviously the grav changes have either been in the game, and were on some sort of lower setting, or they were already planned and on the table before any CSM whines were heard.

So what's going to happen now? Are these changes going to get reversed? Only time will tell. Hopefully CCP sees through the self serving bullshit of the nullsec CSMs and actually takes a look at it's own data. Or sleepers are going to mostly be the only thing found in wormholes again soon.

Mines of Madness

Well we finally got back into the mining swing of things the past couple of days. We had a Common Perimeter Deposit and we cracked it open. Lo and behold, it spawned with an extra 50k Crokite roid!

We knocked that and all the ABCs, along with mining a bit of some of the higher ores before calling it quits, happy that we got as much as we did out of the site.

Next day, I checked the site. Not only had most of the site respawned, but a 75k spodumain roid had spawned along with it! Again we hopped into our hulks and chewed through most of the site again, and called it a day feeling pretty darn good.

The next day, I warped to the site again....and found both spod roids had respawned along with alot of the high sec ores....so we hopped back into our hulks and chewed away at it til we couldn't chew no more. Suffice to say we had our mining fix for awhile.

Today this site despawned, to my dismay. I was hoping to see a continuation of events, but alas, it was not to be. Now we're left with a mining dryspell again.

Has anyone else seen this behavior before? I thought we were incredibly lucky to get the 50k crokite roid to start, but then the site partially respawning AND the 75k spod spawn. I've never had a site "partially" respawn. By that I mean it didn't respawn the arkonor, bistot or crokite. Everything else.

Maybe a new mechanic to make wormholes more profitable for the industrialist again? We'll have to see if this continues on a regular course. I'll be keeping track, that's for sure!

BTW: MEGA SPOD!

I noticed we spawned an extra spodumain roid today....and it's a MEGA SPOD!!!1!!1!

It's a 100k size roid, one of hte biggest I've ever seen in here. We tend to get Spods as the spawn roid if we ever get them, in fact, I don't think I've ever seen a different type of large roid spawn. I wonder if it's based on the class of wormhole. Anyone get any different sized huge roids?

As a side note, do not warp squad to zero on one of these monsters, unless you enjoy watching eight hulks bounce off to 20km away....