Blingu’s rise and fall

Last night, was a good night. I got to use my Proteus again! It has been with me since I started my wormhole adventure way back with Raka, and despite it surviving for that long, I haven’t used it as much as I would have liked.

But! Storytime!

Yesterday started with a little roam in null. I was supposed to get to a gate-camp the guys were doing but once I got there the null-bears had finally decided to fight and we had to move back home with our tail between our legs after losing a few of the fleet. Once back, the guys who didn’t drop fleet since it was getting late, decided to go out for a little roam again. As per usual these days we didn’t really find much.

We did have a frigate hole in our chain, in which there were a bunch of miners on scan, and even a few Brutix’ etc. We knew this thanks to the scouting skills of one of the guys. Supposedly they even put up a bubble on the incoming wormhole to their system. So they knew it was there, and they had eyes on it. We hoped to get a fight out of it going in, or at least piss off a few miners. Seeing as most of them really hate being disrupted.

We decided to go out there in interceptors.
The frigate hole was connected to us through a C2, we wanted to go through, grab point on a few miners and keep them pointed, our heretic pilot was a bit slower, so we waited on him in the C2. When you live in J-space, you tend to use d-scan more often than in k-space. Most of us do it every few seconds, and it works. We saw an Epithal on scan, it wasn’t at a POS, not at their Citadel, so we searched for it and found him at a POCO. Before you know it we had three points on it and started to shoot. A few seconds after first point, a Tengu pops up on d-scan, the Epithal has backup. Seeing that I tend to make bad calls, we killed the Epithal and engaged the Tengu. This is with four interceptors and a heretic. We didn’t even put a dent in the Tengu’s shield.

The heretic died and we disengaged, we didn’t want to lose more ships to this. Luckily the interceptors are quite fast and getting out of point/scram range was easy.
After that our heretic pilot wanted to keep eyes on him, hoping to get revenge. “I don’t care if it takes me all night I want my revenge.”
I put my Proteus pilot in the C2 too, keeping an eye on the entrance to our home.

Meanwhile the pilot out for revenge kept an eye on the citadel and we went into nullsec. Our primary goal wasn’t forgotten, we still wanted to do annoy the miners. But they weren’t around. All of them were just floating in their POS.

As we came back a Brutix landed on the home connection, it was 60k off the hole, 70k off my Proteus. I started slow boating towards him with my Proteus, one brave Raptor went ahead and put a point on him. Giving me the opportunity to decloak and make my way over there to point him too.

While all that was happening the Tengu undocked again and warped to zero on the hole.
We pointed him too tried to kill the Brutix, who jumped into our home hole once he figured out we’d kill him. Seeing as we still needed to have our revenge on the Tengu, we started to shoot him. We couldn’t scratch it, it couldn’t scratch us. This is where alts come in handy. We made sure that we had a few points on him while others shipped up. Seeing that we couldn’t kill him with the interceptors earlier, having one Proteus as help would probably not do much either. I shipped E’dyn into a Hurricane and in the end, due to Pilgrim neuts, Falcon jams and our DPS, we were finally able to exact vengeance on the Tengu that killed the Heretic. He was shiny and had an amazing tank, but no cap and a combined total of more than 4k dps means certain death. Even if it took more than 20 minutes that fight was pretty fun. Hooray for alts! If we didn’t have those on standby, we would not have been able to break him. Kudos to him.

The loot fairy was good on us too, we had 1b in loot drop on us, so we got out with 250mill each. I paid the guys with my liquid ISK and have the mods waiting for my next Jita run where I’ll be able to sell them.

After that whole fight we decided to go and play with the miners again. They were still POSsed up. In a small POS, with no defences…. Seeing that it was late and we wanted to have some laughs, we decided to go and poke it with a few bombers.

So juicy

So juicy

I have to say, it was the most exciting POS bash I’ve been in. Mostly due to the fact that they started to panic.
The skiffs were being packed up in the Rorqual. The Phoenix started moving and logged out. It almost seemed as if they knew their tower wasn’t stronted. Due to the moving around of ships, one of the online, AFK pilots was bumped out of their shield in his hulk. It died quickly, so did the pod.

Unfortunately, the POS was stronted, so I’m still not sure why they panicked. We might have to go back there tomorrow. Even if it’s just for a few laughs. Op success.

Bummer

Bummer

All in all it was a good night, just a shame I didn’t record it.

And on a little side note, to show that I’m still a noob. During the Tengu fight my point kept getting turned off, and I had no idea why. Turns out that instead of turning off overload, I had accidentally turned off auto-repeat. Yes, you can laugh, that could have cost us a Tengu kill, I’m glad it didn’t.

Stay tuned o7

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Past few days

It’s been about ten days since I last wrote. Which doesn’t mean that I haven’t been doing much, I just didn’t really find any inspiration to write.

Mostly because I haven’t been doing anything very interesting. Or at least not really.

Wormhole space needs patience if you look for targets, which is something I don’t have, I am not going to wait on a site or stare at a hole for hours on end. No way will I submit myself to doing that.

So I do relic sites or combat sites. Scan down holes in the chain, move from one point to the other.. Whatever I can do to keep me occupied.

I’ve been trading a bit though, and I made myself a bit of a profit in the past week. Nothing compared to what I see other bloggers get. Not even close, I wish I did, I’m actually jealous of them doing that but also glad that they know what they’re doing.

Because in general, I don’t really know what I’m doing, I just get lucky. Last Tuesday I didn’t really make use of the Skill Extractor/Injector trading. In hindsight I probably should have done so but I didn’t. I did however make about 600m profit in station trading by noticing a bit of a price change happening on one of the items I trade in. So that’s nice.

Speaking of the injectors and extractors. I have read the opinion on these of lots of people. Some hate them, others applaud them, and more are neutral towards it.

I am neutral leaning towards the positive side of them. This has mostly to do with the fact that I do use the character bazaar. I used to want ISK, so that I could use it to buy a character suiting my skill need, I wanted to fly everything out there (as long as I could afford it). I have since then gotten off this sentiment and even got quite attached to E’dyn. However, this does not mean that I would not pay ISK/Euros/Whatever currency you have. To get a bit of a boost in my skill points.

I have an industry alt with more than 3million in SP in mining. I haven’t mined in years, and I’m not going to either. So I got myself 10 extractors, extracted it all and gave it to my wormhole alt. I know that due to doing it like this I have lost about 1m in SP, but honestly? I don’t really care about the loss, because I didn’t use it anyhow, and now, I used that SP that was never going to be used again. To perfect my Tengu skills and to train up my Proteus skills. Meaning that now I can not only do more damage in a Tengu, I can actually fly a Proteus. With just a tiny injection of skills.

Running Sites Tengu“So pretty”

I shouldn’t look at them too much though. They’re a bit of an addiction. I get why, I do. And if I allowed myself, I would buy injectors. But luckily I don’t like losing ISK. So we’re safe from doing that. For now

Stay tuned o7

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First day in our hole

Two nights ago (Thursday on Friday), we officially moved into our own little wormhole. It took a while to anchor and online the tower, to set up the guns etc, but we finished around 2am. So all in all, a good night.

So yesterday was our official first day in our own little hole in space, our own little C2. It was a good day, a fun day, and content was had.

Not only, did we get our first official Corporation kills in the hole, we laughed a bit, and we made some ISK doing sites.

My little PvE Tengu

My little PvE Tengu, she’s a beast

I’m not sure if we’re going to top yesterday, I’m pretty sure we hit a peak there somewhere. That was one of the jokes that was made on TeamSpeak.

It started out, when logging in, with seeing a little Cheetah on scan. Nothing special, I tried tracking him down and failed there. When I was checking out one of our statics I noticed him warping back to the wormhole and off he went.

That could have been our first target, but alas, that didn’t happen. A few minutes later I noticed a Venture on scan. The same guy, had reshipped to a Venture, he was coming to mine our gas! Targets!

I told my friend and we were getting ready, I’m 90% sure that he wasn’t checking out D-scan because he must have seen us reship into a bomber etc (Literally only cloaky ship I got in there atm that isn’t a scanner)

I tracked him to a gas site and I was slowlboating my way to him cloaked. However, my friend couldn’t curb his enthusiasm and he warped to me, in his Heretic, while I was still 40km off the venture. The plan was for me the scram him, so we could also catch his pod with the bubbler. Unfortunately, he uncloaked me and I guess the guy was paying a bit attention because warped off into the sunset, never to be seen again. We miserably failed on scoring our first target. I will not let him down for this.

Half an hour later, while we were scanning down our sites, I suddenly noticed an Astero on scan. This guy didn’t rename his ship to something else so I could check out his Zkillboard, he already lost an Astero once, maybe we could let him lose another one.

Queue me training to D-scan his position, only to realize he was in a signature that we hadn’t scanned down since it arrived about 5 minute earlier. Good job on us there.

My friend took out his combat probes, and well, the Astero wasn’t paying attention to d-scan because he could pin him down. We warped in our cloakies to the site, and 26km from the Astero….

My friend de-cloaked due to one of the collideable objects in the site. The Astero noticed us, and warped off. Talk about anti-climax right?

Again, will not let him live that one down.

As you can imagine, I thought that would be it, the Astero wouldn’t come back. I was wrong. Imagine my surprise when 10 minutes later the same guy popped up on D-scan. He was in a relic site, and this time, we did have it scanned down.

I warped to the site, stayed away from the collideable objects and when I was 20clicks off, I de-cloaked, scrammed him, and my friend de-cloaked his ship and then warped in his Herritic.

Turns out, bombers aren’t that good to kill frigates. It took us ages, but, we got him, and the bubble made sure his pod didn’t escape.

I’m 99% sure that if he took out his drones, he could have killed both our bombers. Those things had no tank. But I’m also pretty sure that he panicked and just wanted to try and get away from us.

First kill! Yay us!

We had a static not far from Jita, which we wanted to use to bring in some more ships. And while my friend activated the hole on his Occator, he had travel control happen to him, and after that a static close.

I warped to the hole to see if it was still there, it wasn’t. There was however, a Heron, which either just got in, or wanted to go back to high sec and had the wormhole collapse right in front of him.

I don’t think he saw it coming, he definitely didn’t see me coming. I scrammed him, told him I’d get him home and then let our newest hole-mate warp in on his drake to get in on the kill.

Turns out the pod was worth about 200m. In a 41m Heron, that was an odd choice.

But we got a few kills out of it, I’m super happy with this move, and definitely looking forward to what else might happen.

Stay tuned o7

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End of chapter one

On Saturday we decided to leave the wormhole that we moved to a few weeks ago. This due to multiple reasons, the one that made the decision the easiest was the fact that it was turning into a huge ISK-sink. And only two people trying to make it work, isn’t easy in a C4.

The decision was made after I lost a Raven while rolling one of the statics. I didn’t mind the loss, not at all, it was beautiful and I didn’t see it coming at all.
We were rolling another C4, which at the time seemed inactive, nobody around and we figured it was safe enough to take out our Ravens to roll the hole. What happens is that you use the mass to get the hole to critical mass and after a certain amount of jumps through it, it should pop behind you.
“Bubble up!”
Cue the first jump, it went perfectly, we go in the other C4, MWD’s on (this is to increase our mass) and then go back out. Now once you jump through and back in, you get a timer stopping you from jumping for around 2 minutes, so you wait until it expires before going back through. 
I’m guessing that our first jump alerted the locals to what we were doing, because once I jumped in for the second pass, two Proteus’ uncloaked on me and scrambled me. I wasn’t too worried at first, I could just jump back through, if it wasn’t for the fact that they started to bump me away from the hole. I immediately alerted the other Raven to not jump through and asked if the ones in the hole could help me out. I could tank it for a while but there was only me and my friend, he couldn’t really do anything against two Proteus’ solo and my Raven only had smartbombs and neuts. I did do some damage, but not nearly enough to outlast it.
A few minutes later I lost my Raven, bounced to a planet in pod, exchanged “GF” in local and bounced back to the wormhole and into our POS. 
We talked about our wormhole life, decided to call it quits in the C4 and started moving out a few hours later, when our connections gave us a good highsec system to jump to. I also lost a pod while jumping back and forth, this time to a smart bombing legion (woops) 
The last of our assets got moved out yesterday and shipped to Jita with PushX and Red-Frog (got to love courier services). 
While moving assets I did lose another bomber to a gate camp in Aunenen, a system that’s supposedly known for its gatecamps. I did not know this. But after losing the bomber I went back to the highsec system I had my assets in, this time with a Cheetah, probed a hole, and got lucky with it’s other connections because one hole further there was a highsec connection 2 jumps from Jita. Which made it extremely easy to get the two Tengus I had stored in the system next to Aunenen back to Jita.
Who knew that wormholes could come in handy like that! 
Not only did I move out of the wormhole this weekend, I also joined another two bombers bar runs on my bomber character (Saturday and Sunday) and had a good amount of fun to make up for my losses, got a few more kills out of it too.
“I think they were mad we killed a Thanatos and Proteus”
Despite it being somewhat of an ISK sink I did enjoy my time in a wormhole of our own and am already thinking of going back to one, however, this time there’s got to be a better plan. Either ally with someone and join them in C4 or move into a C2. 
We probably should have seen those problems coming but it’s another lesson learned, and that’s what matters most, people make mistakes and we learn from them. 
Plus I’ve been losing a ton of ships the past couple of weeks so I’m finally learning how to not care too much about losing a ship, yay!
Stay tuned o7

First time Null and some more industry

It finally happened, I have joined a corporation in Null sec. After thinking about it for a few weeks, I decided to join a friend in Null sec. I joined Thursday, but due to real life I only had my first real interaction with Null yesterday evening. And I have to admit, it was quite fun.

I’m not that good of a PvP’er, not even close, and I’ve only done a few roams through low sec, only killing a few ships before. That changed last night, as I went out on a roam with the Nullsec corporation I joined and my friend as FC. They were all in interdictors, I was the only one in a T1 frig. 
The roam started great, only two jumps from our start base we came across a Talos, didn’t take too long for it to get killed and I actually had the final blow. What a surprise there, and it gave me a smile on my face. Operation success, seeing that I didn’t think I’d be doing much.
It was rather quiet for most of the evening, we didn’t think we’d be finding anything anymore until the comms started talking about a Tengu. One of our scouts found him and was trying to kite him, making sure that we could get there to kill it. It took a while but we did it, we killed a Tengu. Not only did I have my first null sec roam, it also made my killboard total go up with quite a bit, having a total of 1.34b extra in kills. Yay!
After finishing the roam I logged into my industry alt, only to notice that most of my manufacturing jobs were done. As is my habit, I had nothing in stock to put new ones up so I went to Jita to buy some of the T1 products I need in order to make them into T2’s. As I get there and check the market I noticed that there were only 8 of the T1’s in stock, and I needed 800 of them. Cue cursing from my end. 
Figuring that I’ll be needing a lot more in the future, I just bought 500m in material and let a friend ship them to the POS in his Charon (I owe him, he’s been my pet hauler for quite a bit).
I now have a few hundred of T1 products cooking in my labs, and today or tomorrow I’ll have to start writing down a bit again. Because chances are, that I’ve forgotten to get a whole bunch of products again. 
My spreadsheet-fu is seriously lacking here. 
Stay tuned o7

Saying Goodbye

Goodbye my old friend, I have neglected you for too long. I should have done more with you, I should have used your special skill set of talents instead of just letting you wither away in darkness, watching as you trained harder, waiting for the day that I’d finally take you out to help you fulfill your destiny.

But alas, it was not meant to be, I didn’t have time for you, I told you things like; “Later, we’ll hang out later.” All one big lie, a lie I told myself too, because I thought that I would make time for you. But I never did.

I bet you’re wondering what this means, why am I writing this. Well it’s easy. I had to make a very hard decision earlier. I decided to let go of one of my accounts, sell one of my characters and transfer another one. So that I am now working with only two accounts instead of three.

The third account had two characters on it, my trader and another combat alt. One I was training as Caldari, I wanted him to be able to fly in a SNI and a Tengu. But after long consideration, I sold him.
“Isn’t she a thing of beauty”

He was supposed to be my go to PvP character. An alt I could log on to in order to have some fun. An extra when I went out missioning. But I never actually used him. The only times I logged on him was to update his queue. No more, he is in someone else’s hands now. And hopefully that person will use him for his intended purpose.
“Who wouldn’t want to fly you”

My trade character will join my Indy’s account. And I might train my industry alt so she can do some boosting. Seeing that when I’m out doing L4’s she’s not far behind, salvaging the wrecks.

After selling the alt, I started thinking about the Character Bazaar, and how much I like it, and I bet others do too. In no other MMO are you able to purchase characters with you ingame money, characters that are stronger, better than what you play with. If you’re not happy with your character, or you want another one in a certain field but don’t feel like training him/her since it will take too long, you just browse the bazaar for what you want and deposit some ISK for it.

One of my long term goals when I first started playing was that I wanted the ability to buy a character I wanted with the ISK I made.

But seeing that I trained him myself, I don’t need to do that anymore. And yet, I still have the option. If I want another high skilled industry character, I can buy him or her. If I want a trader with a few months of training, I can buy him or her too.

You just need the money for it. I love the “freedom” this gives you; don’t like your character? Just sell him.
Or if you had the problem like me, if you know that you won’t be playing him anymore, you can turn him over to someone else and make a nice amount of ISK from it too.

I probably sold him too cheap, I wanted a quick sales and I’m not known for my patience. But I just hope that the person who bought him, will use him. Unlike me

Goodbye old friend. We had a nice run.

Stay tuned o7