The E8-4 Situation

The command deck of the Kinetic Regret hummed with low-level panic, as it always did before a major move. Captain Gobbins stood at the head of the briefing table, one hand on a steaming cup of Deathwish Quafe, the other gesturing vaguely toward the holo-map. Systems blinked and pinged behind him—none of them helpfully.

“Alright, folks,” he said, trying to sound calm, authoritative, and slightly less bitter than he felt. “I’ve got some news you’ll love. We’re moving. Again.”

A chorus of groans rippled through the crew. Someone dropped a datapad. Someone else just swore softly into a ration pouch.

Gobbins took a long sip from his mug and continued.

“Our new home is E8-4. Yes, E8-4. No, I don’t care that you just memorized the jump routes from MJ-5. That system is now dead to us. Forget MJ-5 ever existed unless you enjoy nostalgia and painful travel.”

He brought up a flashing icon on the map. “E8-4 is perfectly located to project fleets into the southern gates of our glorious, chaos-ridden territory. Which means—surprise!—we’re now a lot closer to the trouble.”

He pointed his mug dramatically. “Everything goes. Everything. From G-Q to E8-4. Subcaps, capitals, titans, your weird little loot cans, your awful decorator keepstars—pack it up. Set your deathclones to E8-4. If you forget and wake up in G-Q after a welp, that’s on you.”

Lieutenant Keleios Shizaru raised a hand. “Sir, what about Pankrab?”

Gobbins didn’t miss a beat. “Staged in E8-4. Standing fleet, too. So yes, you’ll be dying much closer to home now. Efficiency!”

He flicked to a new screen. “Seeders, move your junk. Market tax is now 0% to make it marginally less painful. No excuses. You want to restage a doctrine fit for 200 ISK less, now’s your moment.”

“Captain,” someone mumbled from the back, “what about the O-V Keepstar?”

Gobbins sighed. “Ah, yes. Some of our less-than-essential real estate is going away. For example, that charming yet utterly indefensible Keepstar in O-V? Unanchoring. Say your goodbyes. If you’ve got ancient, shameful assets still rotting there from the last war, please extract them and move them to 9P4 at least. Or don’t, and let them be someone else’s loot pinata. I’m not your mom.”

There was an awkward pause.

Then Gobbins finished, voice steady, a little smug. “Also, for those asking—yes, we’re in direct bridge and cyno range from G-Q. Just bridge, wait out fatigue, rinse, repeat. Use Ship Maintenance Bays for the small stuff. Logistics has made it very clear that if you complain about hauling frigs, they will turn this ship around and no one gets to go to E8-4.”

He shut off the holo-map with a flourish. “Questions?”

Silence.

Then from engineering: “Do we get a moving day pizza?”

Gobbins grinned. “You get a moving day. You want pizza, bridge it in yourself.”

Let’s Talk about the Single Button Assistant (spoiler alert, I LOVE it)

Blizzard recently implemented a controversial mechanic to World of Warcraft, where you can attack & cast abilities with a rotation by pressing only one button – but your global cooldown of abilities will be 25% slower thus you’re going to lose some DPS. For example, after looking at some parses, it was a 7% loss in dps on my hunter who uses GSE, an addon that does almost exactly this but also requires a lot of maintenance.

I LOVE this feature. I absolutely love it. This allows people who have disabilities to play. This allows people who are reluctant to try new classes because they don’t know how to play them, a chance to jump right in. Are people going to be rushing M+ with these? Probably, but since they do less dps, it’s going to be painful. Those who are interested in the min/max side of the game won’t use this feature, because it will be a downgrade.

More people in the game is a good thing. More accessibility, also good. Less barriers to playing new classes, amazing.

Don’t like it? DON’T USE IT. No one has to, it’s completely optional. Whether or not someone else is using it has absolutely zero impact on my gameplay – unless I’m doing a high level M+ and in that case I would expect them to be able to keep up with the group no matter what system they’re using, and if they CAN’T keep up in competitive gameplay then I might have an issue.

World questing? Looking for raid? Timewalking? Fantastic.

Does this mean I’ve wiggled my way back into Warcraft?

Well, yes and no. I’ve recently started playing on my EU account – the account that does NOT have all the mounts, pets, or other fun things that my main account has. Why? It has been something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. The time zones are more to my play style, and I have a lot of EU friends. I also gifted the account some game time and the shop sold auction house mount some time ago. While I can’t share bnet balance or gold between EU/NA, I can gift items to the account (has to be a completely separate bnet account). Of course it does make me miss everything I have on my main account so there’s no telling if I’ll actually stick with it (spoiler alert, I won’t) but it has been a lot of fun returning and it feels like a comfortable time to be back. I’m also excited about the future with player housing and all of that good stuff. I’ll just have to take it day by day, and see how things go.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Out with the Stratios (yes, already)

Found a neat C2 shattered wormhole recently, and decided to take the stratios out for a spin. Except I have no idea how to fly one, I’ve never flown anything that does armor tanking, and I haven’t used drones in a long time either (though I am maxed out on drone skills – the tengu that I adore doesn’t use any).

So I immediately warped to a bountiful gas site, and got pinned down by rats. Thankfully a wormlife freeport resident was there in their Gila, and they absolutely saved my ass. That was awkward.

After spending one entire day flying the stratios, I’ve already decided it’s just not the ship for me – and I jumped back to HS, grabbed my Tengu, and tweaked the fit a little bit. My main issue with the Tengu is always that I need to resupply ammo and the amount of space it takes, and I’ve decided that’s fine, I’ll just deal with it.

Maybe I didn’t need to fly something with quite so much bling, anyway. Hunters tend to look at a Stratios and decided it needs to die, immediately.

Anyway, back to the stratios. After clearing the C2 shattered rats, I stuck around to salvage the wrecks (using drones). A few seconds after the freeport resident landed on grid with his covetor ready to huff some gas, someone who had been in system quietly ratting away +1 friend showed up – and I immediately warped off. The covetor wasn’t so lucky. The visitors were in an Ikitursa, which I am not familiar with at all. I forget what their friend was flying, I think it was a garmur. Either way, I wasn’t about to stick around to look too closely.

I also saw my first Tholos yesterday, Wingspawn popped in as they were being chased out of a C13 by someone else. Unfortunately they did not make it, but it was still pretty neat to watch.

As always, fly your way! o7

Bling? On the Other Side of the Spectrum

I made a lot of posts about that helios that I love – but I wanted to try something completely new. Last year I worked at building my own Stratios, and while I have been able to fly it for some time I haven’t actually found a situation where I wanted to – until now.

I know that everyone out there has their own preferences on what ship to use for what situation, and those ideas rarely ever line up, but I saw someone looking for a fit to use in C1-C2 where they could do relic/data sites (the safe ones) as well as combat sites (but not relic/data combat sites as those are typically one level higher than the system they show up in). They wanted to be able to spend extended periods of time in jspace. One of the more interesting answers, was a stratios.

Why wouldn’t I just stick with the tengu? Well, one of the issues I have is it is a complete beast when it comes to ammo. I go through a LOT of it. It takes up a lot of room, and I get tired of running out during long stints in jspace, I usually have to re-supply after a bit of time. It’s also not fit for any sort of PVP, which is fine but wouldn’t it be nice if I could be a little scarier.

I’m using the fit above for light combat, I have a bunch of drones in the bay, and I swap out the web for a data/relic analyzer when needed. Of course that also means I’m carrying around a mobile depot, I’m also carrying around a mobile tractor unit, salvager, and some nanite repair paste. This is roughly 30% of my cargo space, which is perfect. I have max drone skills and I don’t have to worry about ammo.

I’m trying it out this week to see how I make due. This fit is a HUGE amount of ISK compared to the Helios, but I’ve been collecting ISK and doing nothing with it for so long now, I figured I might as well splurge a bit. What else am I going to use it on, after all.

I also just crossed over the 80,000,000 skill point threshold! I’m excited about that one. The next closest character I have is at 22,000,000 so this is quite a gap. Still, I’m happy with how things are going in game. As always, fly your way! o7

A new Mapping App Enters the Ring (Wanderer)

I love trying out new apps and web sites and things that help make EVE Online a little easier for me – so when I heard there was a new mapping app, I was interested. It’s called Wanderer, and it has (at this moment, at least) a pretty active developer but it IS still in development, so things might go sideways sometimes.

I recently started using Tripwire to plot out my adventures, it’s the OG as far as mapping goes (minus just using a good ‘ol pen and paper) but it can be a bit too old fashioned. It has grown on me the last couple of weeks and is my preferred method of mapping right now but I also wanted something different for my non-signal cartel characters. My feeling towards mapping programs also changes because I really liked Pathfinder – which is still running, but is no longer being developed (from what I understand). A bunch of instances that I was using have shut down, so I can’t host my maps there any more – and that was getting annoying.

Hence wanderer.

You can share your maps between an access list, you can turn out auto tracking, add tags, and any other number of map-like features. One thing tripwire does that I don’t think either pathfinder or wanderer have done is allow for map masks, I can see other signal cartel mapping if I have my own set to corp. This helps me in so many ways, I can’t even begin. It’s certainly a feature that wanderer should perhaps look at.

In any case, we’ll see how long I stick with it for. I’m not too bothered by some of the statistics not showing up unless you pay – I can either pay, or just use zkill or dotlan (or even the in game map) to see these statistics if that’s something I care about. In most cases it doesn’t make a difference to me, unless I’m hauling something expensive around.

Speaking of – I did take a hauling trip this week to bring some stuff into the Wormlife Freeport. More about that in another post.

Fly your way! o7