I read the patch notes for the 1.5 and they actually make me want to work on my rogue a bit, as well as checking out the new solo/duo dungeons on my cleric, and the PA stuff sounded interesting at 1st, until I read a thread where someone had compiled all the PA’s a cleric could get and at the end summarized what the whole kit’n'kaboodle got you, and the answer was — very little.  Not even a single gear piece of improvement.  And it would cost you over 92 million xp being ground out.

Now I’ll grant you that the final 5 levels of Rift cost about 2 million xp overall and they only take a few days to get, so even a casual player like me can probably get “all the PA’s” in about 3 months, but to what end really? 30 points to 3 stats is a nice boost, but it’s hardly a big deal, especially as these are considered by the game to be buffed points, so abilities that boost your stats don’t apply to them.  78 spell power is about an 8% boost to me with my not-so great gear, but if I played enough so that I could get all those PA’s in that time, I’d probably upgrade my gear to the point that I’d be looking at a 3% boost, if even that.  In short, these are things that I certainly won’t turn down when I receive xp enough for them, but there’s no incentive for a casual player to go chasing them either.

My Rift sub is on their 3 month plan.  I’d thought to let it renew for until the end of the year when SWTOR comes out, but… I think I’m just going to cancel it.  In my remaining time I’ll be able to go see the new solo/duo dungeons on my cleric and there really isn’t much else I’m interested in seeing.

This leads me to DDO, as I expect I’ll be enjoying its F2P goodness as my primary game for the next few months.  I’ve got my Warforged Artificer up to level 5 now, and it’s almost ridiculous how easy it is to play this character right now.  My dog pet sits at 122 hitpoints, which I can buff up to 173.  My character sits at 75 hp which I can buff to 126.  This is an insanely high amount for a level 5 character, especially one with a d6 hit point die.  Damage done is very high, so very few mobs get close to me to even try to get in a hit.  And next level I’ll get Stoneskin and Flame Turret, so my defense and offense both will dramatically improve.  Should be fun to experience as I move through it.

A friend of mine has been talking up Champions Online lately to me, so since it’s F2P I installed it to check it out.  When F2P you are limited to archetype power sets that the game selects for you, so you don’t get overwhelmed by choices right out of the gate.  The character creator is insanely amazing and I could easily spend hours creating a character if I wanted to just checking out all the options, much less choosing some of them.  I’ve tried the Fire, Ice, Blade, and Soldier archetypes so far.  The energy building mechanic is something I’m still getting used to, but it seems to work pretty well, and I like that if you’re paying attention to the mobs that you can block their high damage attacks.  I’ve barely made it out of the tutorial, though, so I can’t comment on a whole lot yet as I’m still feeling things out.

And to close…. EVE online recently released their Incarna expansion, which included the new “Captain’s Quarters” for you to walk around in with your new avatar.  Some enterprising soul(s) discovered that the looping video playing on the TV in the room could be customized by converting your own video files to BIK format and dropping them in the appropriate EVE folder on your hard drive.  Here’s what CCP had to say about it in their latest dev blog:

Now, most companies would have branded this as a defect and “fixed it” by doing checksum validations on the files or something equally boring. But not us. . . . [Instructions on how to do it all] . . . [K]nowing our players,  we are of course absolutely certain than none of you would ever, ever think of putting anything even remotely questionable on your screen, given the total lack of constraints and the rock solid moral high ground on which our pilots firmly stand…

I love their sense of humor.  Almost makes me willing to re-sub to EVE.  Almost.

Happy Gaming!

So yeah, I burned out and burned out hard.  I kept the account active thinking that if I just burned my skills up long enough, maybe I’d feel the desire to come back at some point.  But no, that desire never returned.

Even with that, I did have a goal to be able to fly a capital ship before I left the game, so back during the whole shitstorm right after Incarna’s launch I figured it was as good a time as any to pull the plug. . . but I was within 2 weeks of finally realizing that goal of being able to fly a capital, so I did re-sub after all.

Well.. now that training’s complete, I still don’t want to log in, and IRL cashflow issues are making me look for things to cut out of the budget, so… EVE is over for me.  My final skillpoint tally is to the left, as I’m sure you’ve already seen, and no you can’t have my stuff becuz I can’t log back in to try to give it to you anyway.

I actually had planned to contract my remaining assets to my corp and email them to let them know I was out and they could boot me,then move the character back to Jita and sell it to someone who would make better use of it, but I couldn’t be arsed to log in to take the couple of minutes to do even that, that’s how little I cared to log in anymore.  The game got its hooks in me enough to make me feel kinda sad about that, and yet, I can’t say why.  Other than a couple of smaller roams I did shortly after I moved to null, I can’t say that anything I ever did in-game was all that fun.  The game was always just too slow paced for me in PvE, and I’ve never been much of one to PvP.  It just doesn’t give me the rush that other people feel.

And so… thus ends the era of my time in EVE.

Since my last post, in Rift I’ve gotten my Guardian Cleric up to level 50 and my 2 friends also managed to get to 50 as well.  We’ve formed a “center” of groups in some dungeon runs with me tanking, 1 of them being healer, and the other being dps.  Our guild is the largest on the Faeblight server, possibly in the game, with over 2600 member toons, though how many actual accounts that is isn’t really known.  Still, even in the middle of the night was seem to have at least 40 people online at any given time and in prime time it’s usually pushing 300 online.  We’re so big that when a new member joins the pasted welcome announcement from the leaders actually includes the following warning: “Do NOT look at the guild roster with the “Show Offline Members” enabled — it crashes most computers.”

For myself, I’ve been through several T1 dungeons and a few T2′s also.  I’ve got my gear up to where T2′s feel pretty comfortable, at least as a support or dps role.  I’m not sure I quite have the stats to be able to heal a T2 yet, but we’ll see how that goes eventually.

I’m also working up a warrior, since I actually rather enjoy tanking, and while I do okay at it with my cleric, I have preferred the warrior style in the lower level dungeons in the past, so I’m working the warrior up in order to be able to be “more effective” at 50.  I started this warrior out in a pure dps mode for leveling, but as I’ve gotten higher in levels I found I was drinking a lot to regain health after only 4-5 fights and getting adds could be downright scary, so I left that build for if I’m doing dps in a dungeon (haven’t yet. . . ) and made a more tank-y build that can still dish out some decent hurt.  TBH, it actually feels like I do MORE dps with the tank-y build than the dps build, plus I can take on 5-6 mobs at a time without difficulty.  I have some minor self-heals from the Reaver portion of the build, use Paladin for the full heal every 10 minutes plus the +block skills, and then have 29 points in the Riftblade soul for damage output.  It loses health little enough that using the full heal once every 10 minutes is often enough to keep me in a comfortable zone, and I’m almost never drinking to restore health any more at all.  I also have 2 tanking builds for dungeons — 1 for the AE trash, and the other for single-target boss fights.  so far I’ve really only needed the AE trash build — it’s worked just fine on bosses also, but I have the other for just in case. . . .

On the EVE front, I’ve finished training Logistics 5 and someone actually brought a Capital Ships book out to my region, so I bought that and am currently working the 3rd level of it as a pre-req to being able to inject the Carrier skill.  The funny thing (to me) is that I have a skill queue with 212 days planned out on it right now, but I’ll actually be able to be in the Carrier with all the “required” skills to fly it competently in about 9 more days.  Nearly all the rest of the skills are taking things to level 5 in order to be “perfect” and that means two 48+ day skills, several 30+ days skills, and a smattering of 7-9+ day skills as well.  My corp has also asked me to start being a POS fueler since I can fly the Transport Ships.  That means I’ll be logging in at least once a week instead of just letting the skills burn.  I’m hoping that this, coupled with my ability to fly a carrier, will reignite my passion for EVE a bit more and get me to log in and join some ops and such.  Even though I’ve not played much in the past 8 months or so, there’s still something about the game that ignites my passion, so I don’t want to cancel out of it just yet.  Perhaps if I find flying a carrier isn’t as fun as I am hoping, but we’ll see when that time comes.

Finished all my pre-reqs last night except for I need the Capital Ships skill book and there isn’t one out in my region of null, and we’re in a hi-sec war yet again, so I’m not real keen on trying to hit up one of the school systems there right now.  so I’m training Logistics 5 to prepare for the triage module while waiting for the war to wind down, then I can go get my book from somewhere and it should be interesting to see how the jump to a cap ship changes the game for me.

With the Northern Coalition in something of a fail cascade now, I’m no longer “tucked safely in back” anymore, but now my alliances space is within just a few jumps of the front and some of our systems have been hit, such that we’re pulling some of our ship storage POS’s down.  The changes to the jump bridges means that the jump bridge POS’s aren’t in the same places anymore either, so I need to fly around and update my bookmarks.

I’ve also put duplicate ships or ships in the same class up on the market.  I’ve always been told to keep my footprint light in case I need to move quickly, but over time I’ve accumulated 2 HIC’s, 2 Logi’s, several interceptors, a few Drakes for ratting, and I’ve got my industrials/transports for PI on top of it all, as well as my fleet-fit BS’s — all scattered across 4 systems over 7 jumps. . . and not all of it in my alliance space for that matter. . . .   So I’m hoping at least some of it will sell and I’ll be down to a more manageable ship number soon.  Though if I get in a carrier as soon as I hope and can hook up with corp/alliance cyno people, then I can just carry everything around myself.  Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to have 2 accounts so I can have my own cyno alt, but meh.  I’m of the opinion that if you can’t succeed in a game with only 1 account then you’re not as social as you should be.

So anyway, there’s my EVE update.  Now moving on to Rift:

I’ve got some friends who I played SWG with, then we moved to EQ2 together, and now we’re all playing Rift too.  I told them when we started that I was Defiant on Faeblight, and they did make a few characters there, but they had another friend playing on Wolfsbane — Defiant also.  He had his own guild, so I moved over there and started working on a few toons with a Bahmi Warrior as my primary.  But Wolfsbane started getting hit with “queue to log in” syndrome, plus the guild was only about 5 actual people and we were scattered all over level-wise, so it folded.  My friends came back to Faeblight, but since they were Defiant already on Wolfsbane, they decided to go Guardian on Faeblight, so if I wanted to play with them . . . .you guessed it, I got to start over as a Guardian this time, in spite of having 4 Defiant toons, level 50, 29, 29, and 29.  Did I mention that each had crafting up to 280-300 out of 300?

So since I found I like the Cleric archetype best of the 4 Defiants I’d been playing, I made a new Mathosian Cleric for my main.  I decided to make it a “pure harvester” and figured I’d just dump mats to a crafting alt and let that toon make my armor, weapons, and jewelry from those materials.  Works well in theory, but I shortly realized that I wanted to make my own runes too since Rift’s Auction House is a big fat joke and you really can’t find much of anything useful on it, especially when you’re leveling up.  And since a Runecrafter more or less needs Outfitter to be able to get enough of it’s own mats to make runes, that meant I couldn’t really just dump Weaponsmith and Artificer from the crafting alt so. . . . the Defiant warrior got deleted.  I had another level 29 warrior on Wolfsbane, after all, so if I got the warrior bug I could just go log him in.  And thus I had 3 characters covering all 9 crafting professions — 1 to harvest, 2 to actually craft.

As an aside, it’s been pretty fun on the crafting alts leveling them up simply via crafting and the exploration xp granted from when I’ve had to run out to the various quartermasters.  These crafting alts were level 7 when they left the tutorial/intro zone and then ran straight to Sanctum.  They’re level 15 and 13 now — I need to quest out their souls for them sometime soon.   But that would mean playing them for more than crafting. . . . .  Surprisingly (to me) I’ve only had 1 death during all my various explorations with these low level toons, in spite of the roads not necessarily being safe in Rift.  Of course, I also haven’t tried to go to Stillmoor on them yet either, but IIRC it’s not a bad run from the Chancel of Labors in Iron Pine Peak, and I’ve got that portal unlocked on both crafters, so. . time will tell.

Anyway, we joined a small guild they found initially, but then that guild was a complete joke, so we ended up joining Gaiscioch after doing a run with a couple of people in that guild.  They were good players and we had fun chatting with them during the dungeon, so we expressed our interest in leaving our current guild and they immediately invited us.  It’s been a good fit so far — lots of guild groups and premades, and when I got 50 on my cleric last night I was immediately invited to a daily raid and got 11 plaques for just a few minutes of killing a single raid mob.  Plus I can start doing the T1 dungeon runs now and start gearing up more and seeing how it all works out.  It’s been a fun ride so far, and I’m looking forward to more!

Wow, what a week in EVE!

Incarna released to much disappointment.  No content update to speak of other than the new turrets (which actually are well received) and the Captain’s Quarters, and the CQ is being turned off in droves by players (including me) as being a massive resource hog that’s sometimes even causing graphics cards to overheat.  There was also the “Noble Exchange” added with its RMT cash shop and obscenely outrageous prices for vanity items that no one other than you would ever see in the game’s current state.

This comes on the heels of a leaked internal newsletter wherein arguments were made along the lines that RMT shop transactions *should* allow things like ships, ammo, and faction standings to be sold, in spite of CCP’s promises in the past that the NEX would only contain “fluff” vanity items like clothing for your new avatars, decorations for your quarters, and maybe paint jobs for your ships, among other things.

Tippia goes over it on her blog far better than I could, so I’m not going to try to reinvent the wheel and let you just go read it there instead.

What really prompted my to even make this post though, is that so many people are upset about it that the forum threadnaught about it is expanding faster than I can read it, and now people have taken it in-game to the largest player hubs, including Jita, Rens, Dodixie, and Amarr.  At justin.tv you can (currently) watch a live feed of the Jita protest — over 2000 people in local (about 700-800 more than normal for this time of day) and quite a few of them are trying to destroy the memorial at 4-4 (the major trade hub station).  I’ve heard reports that Amarr has over 1300 in local right now also, though I’m not at home to be able to log in to check.  This is an amazing rebellion by the players over all this.

And I’m also saddened to report than a good friend of mine — the one who got me playing EVE in the 1st place and just a couple of weeks ago said he planned to be playing for 20 years to come — told me today that he’s canceled his EVE account and is going to sit on the sidelines until this all shakes out.  I’ve been leaning toward pulling the plug myself for the past few months since I really haven’t played it much since last November and still don’t really have much of a desire to.  And yet, frankly since I am so detached from the game right now, this whole thing seems like a big tempest in a teapot to me, so if I do end up leaving, it won’t be due to any of the things that have popped up.

How’s that for an anti-climactic ending to a post?

Oddly, this might end up more or less sorting out for myself why I’ve always loved EQ2 yet couldn’t really get into WoW.  So here we go:

Missing things are:

• Appearance Slots — C’mon, how many games have these now?  I like my sets that I craft for myself and don’t want to break up the look.  The “level capped rainbow look” was a running joke in EQ2 before appearance slots we re added in.  Heck, even DDO has appearance armor anymore.  How could any game ship without them anymore is beyond me.
• Shared Banks — You allow 6 toons per server, yet each has an individual-only bank and has to mail anything to an alt?  Really?  EQ2 shipped with a shared bank 6 years ago. . . I know the technology is out there. . . . .
• Guild Banks — I’m still scratching my head at how such a polished game is missing this feature.  Especially since. . .you guessed it. . . EQ2 shipped with them.  Sorry to harp on this EQ2 thing, but um. . .Mr. Hartsman. . . you were THERE and saw how popular these features were and ARE in that game.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
• In-combat sprint — Granted there’s really no death penalty at all, but it’s still nice to be able to sprint past a mob or 3 in a high density area after it’s aggro’d on you.

Badly implemented things are:

• The UI  — It’s HUGE.  I’m told there’s someplace in the settings where I can scale it down, though, so I need to look for that.  Still… I’ve never cared for the WoW UI and this one is pretty much a straight copy across from it.  Your party window with its massive portraits and small health bars don’t help when I’m playing a healer either.
• The mounts — for the love of god, stop making me recast it every damn time I do something.  You had it right in EQ2, Scottie — make me lose the runspeed when in combat, but don’t make the frakking thing go poof and need a 2s recast just becuz a grayed-out mob looked at me funny.  An option a la EQ2′s recently added “don’t show mounts just let me look like I’m running fast” wouldn’t be a bad thing to add either.
• Player Faction on the PvE servers — EQ2 got this one right too, Scott.  It lets EVERYONE on the server play together.  We chose a PvE server becuz we don’t want to fight the other side.  If I want to play with my friends and I like my Eth while they like Dwarves, why can’t we play together?  Oh right, becuz you have your stupid PvP in my PvE server too.  Newsflash:  People who choose PvE servers don’t want PvP.  Even in “pure PvP games” like Eve and Darkfall something like 80% of all players never leave the non-PvP areas.  PvP is a *niche* and shouldn’t be on every damn server including the PvE ones.  And if you must keep it this way, at least let me add cross-faction friends so if someone logs on I can see that to know to switch to an alt in that faction so I can go play with them.  This whole “never the twain shall meet except across the point of a sword” is utterly ridiculous on a PvE server.

There’s more, but this is long enough and I’m actually itching to log in and play so. . yeah, the negatives really don’t outweigh the positives in any way shape or form, but. .. while I’m a fanboi, I can still say that it’s not “perfect” either

Old Main — Caldari Achura:

New Main:

Old PI Alt — Caldari Deteis:

New PI Alt:

And finally the old trader alt:

And her supposedly “innocent and demure” new look:

And there you have it. . . . .

They’re replacing the “lost skills” with a permanent 12 point bump to all attributes, plus any skill points allocated to the Learning section will now be in a pool and able to be re-allocated elsewhere.

I love it!  Personally, I have Learning to 5, Perception to 5/5, Intelligence, Memory, and Willpower to 5/4, and Charisma at 4/4, and I usually have a set of +5 implants in.  Even with that much trained, this change will still increase 4 of my 5 stats, and the loss from Perception is only 0.3, so it’s more than offset by the gains in the other attributes.

Add to it that I’ve got a little over 2.6 mill SP tied up in learning, and that’s suddenly a lot of training I can “skip past” on skills that I’ve been putting off due to having a longer training time on them due to lower attributes.  I haven’t planned it out yet, since I’m at work and don’t have EveMon here, but off the top of my head I could take 2 skill of Rank 5 from 4 to 5 and still have quite a bit left over to fill in some cracks.

I think this will help the game as a whole also since it will get rid of a fairly significant entry barrier for new players.  Kudos to CCP for this!

Still… considering how little I’ve actually played my SK as a tank since hitting 90, she’s actually rather decently geared.  I even went nuts a week or so ago and dropped a ton of plat on the level 88 adornments, so now when I’m in defense stance I have 63.5% mitigation, 63.8% avoidance, and over 18,000 HP.  I know that those numbers cane be pushed a lot higher too, though.  Even before the adornments, a friend had me tank the x2 in the Hole, and there was that level 86 x4 quest mob in there too, which I also tanked.  This friend is in a raid guild, so he and his guildies he brought along were very nicely geared up and thus when they buffed me up…. well, let’s just say I didn’t ever lose aggro, nor was I ever out of the green in my health.  In spite of the fact that we 1-grouped the x2, and we 9-manned the x4.  Mitigation was pushing 70% and avoidance was well over it.  I could actually have my Unholy Blessing reactive time out after 24 seconds and only have used 3 of its 5 procs up, so I wasn’t getting hit all that much, or that hard.  It was a fun time.

The x2 dropped a couple of healer pieces, that in spite of only being “Legendary” were still very nice.  The x4 dropped stuff we saw drop from trash mobs earlier.  It was a quest mob — the surprise was that it dropped anything, really.

I haven’t done much in EVE since the post about the big fleet prior to this one.  I actually went for a 2 week stretch where I didn’t log in at all, and this past week I’ve only logged in 3x, and then just to do my PI for the corp.  and I couldn’t even do that one of the times since Pandemic Legion has decided to start roaming the NC areas and so I had a couple of reds in-system with me.  They were reported as camping one of the gates, but I’m still not going to undock an unarmed industrial ship when 2 reds in T3 cruisers are in-system, even if it is just my PI alt with a with 1.5 million SP and no implants.  Why give out a free killmail?

I’ve actually started doing a bit more DDO.  I haven’t followed it all that closely, so I wasn’t “right on it” when the latest big patch was put out, but a corpmate in EVE (fellow blogger Toldain, actually) mentioned he’s got a guild on the Ghallanda server, and I actually hadn’t played on that server, so it was a good excuse to go work some favor for free Turbine Points.  Except they added the Half-Orc and Half-Elf races now, and even bundled they still were a lot more TP than I could get in any “reasonable” time frame, so I dropped a bit of cash in order to buy them.

The half-orc race itself isn’t any big deal on paper.  At the most shallow level it’s a dwarf with a bonus to STR instead of to CON.   It’s the enhancements for the race that really help it to shine.  The half-orc fury that grants a +2 STR when below 50% HP is fun, the aptitude with 2-handed weapons that adds a +2 to damage when using them….. it’s very nice on the Barbarian that I made.  I also made a cleric, since with no penalty to WIS a Half-Orc doesn’t have any trouble being one.  I haven’t spec’d him for 2H battle-cleric-ness though.  I can re-spec the enhancements easily enough if I need to, though.  I tried a bard, in spite of the CHA penalty, thinking it would make a nice “buffbot” but since I was already making a Half-Elf pure bard, I decided that a “horc” battle-buffer wasn’t going to be in the cards.

I also made a STR-based monk and am also going the Thief-Acrobat splash route to make it a 2H staff user to take advantage of the horc enhancement on that.  So far at level 4 (love that vet status) I’m doing a surprising amount of damage with the staff.  It helps that I was able to get a staff with the “stunning +4″ attribute.  It’s only a 3% stun chance, but for now I’m using the wind stance for faster attacks, so with firing them off so often, I still get quite a few stuns in without even trying.  So overall… I VERY much like the race, in spite of its lack of “flair” on paper.

I’ve also been playing around with the Half-Elf race and their “dilettante” feat.  It’s kinda weirdly implemented.  For example, a non-caster that takes the dilettante feat of a caster class can use the wands that that class would use, but not their scrolls.  Or the fighter dilly feat says it grants all the martial weapon proficiencies, yet it doesn’t grant the ability to use a longbow — gotta take the ranger dilly feat for that (which only grants the ranged feats, as well as a lesser bow strength feat).

Still and all, I’ve wound up with 2 toons that I’m liking so far.  The 1st is a pure bard that’s going the Spellsinger route, due to a preponderance of casters in the guild.  I took the fighter dilly feat thinking I’d use a longbow from the back, and perhaps even try to work in the Arcane Archer enhancements, but… no go there.  Once the bug that doesn’t allow swapping of the dilettante feat is fixed I may swap it to ranger, but as it is, I do okay with a scimitar and light shield.  Yes, 5% arcane failure chance from the shield, but I’ve only seen 1 failure so far, and in the low levels that 4 AC from the +3 shield is huge.  I also have a 2H sword that I use as well and it doesn’t have spell failure.  If I swap to ranger dilly I won’t be able to use it anymore.  We’ll see how it goes.

The last toon is a sorcerer that took the favored soul dilettante feat.  This allows it the use of divine wands for self-healing.  Yes, a non-warforged sorcerer with self-heals that doesn’t need UMD.  how cool is that?  I’m taking UMD anyway, since in the higher levels I’ll want scrolls instead of wands, but in the lower levels, the wands are a godsend.

I’ve also been talked in to installing xfire.  Most of the people in the Ghallanda guild use it for their voice chat, so I’ve got it now as well.  I don’t intend to really track my gameplay stats or anything, but I have noted that in spite of how much this post is gushing over DDO and the new races and character builds possible with them, EQ2 is still the game with the most /played time since I installed the app.  Go figure.

What have y’all been playing?

How wrong I was.  I went to bed at close to 5 am this morning — yeah, the op was about 6 hours long all told, and I’d logged in about 1.5 hours before that to do my PI and then jump clone to my pvp clone, which was a long way from home where I’d docked it after the last big op I was able to attend.  Fortunately a new jump bridge had been installed in the system that clone was in that connected quickly to another bridge system that took me within 5 jumps of home, so getting back was fairly quick.

The planned op was asking for logistics cruisers was pretty loudly.  I can fly a Basilisk so I decided that I would bring that along to help in that role.

I made it to the staging area about 15 minutes early, and so it was fun to watch local filling up and sub-caps ships warping and caps cyno’ing in.  I was in voice comms waiting for the fleet advert to go out, and once it did it filled we formed up a truly massive fleet.  According to the video posted below, it was the largest fleet in a long time.

We found out that we were forming up a bit early because we needed the time to be able to clear any defense fleet and to reinforce the I-Hub beforehand as well.  We titan-bridged out of the staging area, then had a bit of traveling to do.  But it was quiet, and there was no defense fleet waiting for us either.

The prior night’s op had dropped a “death star” tower in the target system to use as a staging area, so we formed up there.  A 4th POS had been scanned out, so we went and reinforced that.  It took a while, because even with a big fleet shooting, 45 million shield hit points takes a while.  Even so, we put it in reinforced in pretty short order. For funsies, system scanners were opened up and we found a few anomalies to kill a bit of time in and went and blew threw them in seconds.  I actually received 108,000 ISK in bounties for my share of it all.

The I-Hub became vulnerable, so we headed on over and we put it in to reinforced mode.  It had 75 million shield HP, but it seemed like it took less time to reinforce than the tower.  Go figure.

Once that was done, we took down the 1st tower.  This tower was doing moon mining on a dual Technetium/Promethium moon, so taking it out is a big hit to EV0KE’s income.

From there it was on to the 2nd POS, this one with 3 Capital Ship Assembly Arrays.  Intelligence had learned that a titan and 2 dreadnoughts were being built, so taking them out while under construction was a priority.  After this POS went down, it was on to the 3rd and last one for the night.  This one only had a single CSAA at it, but intel said that this one was also producing a titan.  This POS also had active guns and since it was so late and we’d been at it so long we didn’t take them out 1st, simply shot the POS.  As a result, I finally got to do logistics and repair people’s shields!  Finally got to do what I’d come along to do!  I just wish I’d thought to bring a sentry drone instead of my repper drones.  Then I could have been on the POS killmails.  Still… it’s known that I was there on logistics, so I’m not expected to actually show up on the mails.  And CSAA’s only have 50,000 hit points, so they popped *really* fast.  I honestly never managed to finish getting a target lock on any of them before they died.

All told, the FC’s estimated we did about 100 billion isk worth of damage in that system last night, and there’s still that tower and the I-Hub we reinforced that need to be destroyed, plus the loss of income from that moon.  I don’t know that I think we did quite that much — by my estimation it was more in the 50-60 billion range, but either way, that’s a lot of ISK.

Lag existed, but it honestly wasn’t bad.  We had some gate lag on the trip in when we were jumping 500 people through at a time.  Well, no.  The FC was good and had 1 fleet of 250 jump while the 2nd fleet was off at a planet, then had the 2nd fleet come in a minute later after everyone had made it through from the 1st fleet, and that helped a lot.  While we had 500 shooting at the 1st POS to reinforce it, I had a few seconds of targeting lag, and it was a toss-up as to whether my modules which I’d set to not auto-repeat would still do it anyway or not (though they almost always instantly accepted a manual command to turn off), and there was a few seconds of activation lag, but it was nothing at all like on my prior op where I was having several minutes of module lag in a smaller fleet.  I’d say that CCP’s lag improvements they’ve been working on (chronicled here, here, here, and here) have made a noticeable difference.  Still not perfect, but much better than it was.  WTG CCP and keep going more!

Anybody else up to anything in New Eden?

Update: Intel now says that we destroyed 3 titans in process as well as a supercarrier, plus destroyed storage holding the materials for 2 more titans to be built, so the damage estimate has been revised upward to the 200-300 billion ISK range.  Wowzers.  The Goonswarm has posted about this in the EVE Forums, and someone made a short video of one of the POS takedowns.  I can even see my ship in one of the clips in the video, but since y’all weren’t there I doubt you’d be able to tell one Basi from another.  Still, I was excited when I saw my ship!