May 2010 Character Review

263 days remaining on the Rifter plan. Perhaps not as much progress this month as I perhaps had hoped at the start of the month, but I guess that the way the cookie crumbles when you start eating into those longer skills and interleaving two skill plans at a time.

June is upon us and that means a few things to me. First and as I stated last month in the not too distant future this month I will be behind the wheel of the Dramiel, which I have been looking forward to for some time now. I really hope that it lives up to my expectations. I have two fitted and ready to go in the hangar but am doing a stirling job of resisting the temptation to fly them until I am properly skilled. The two that I have are both fitted differently, one with something of a controversial fit. There are two fits that I also want to try, the classic fit and I want to try an utterly bizarre fit that will need me to get Shield Upgrades V to fit. The latter will have to wait a while I think.


June also means that the Alliance Tournament starts this coming weekend. The Tuskers and The Bastards formed an Alliance for the purpose of entering. I have been doing bits here and there to help out with practice and will be cheering our team on from the bar & big screen TV in Hev V. Hopefully Mr Snypes ladies will be coming along to provide entertainment between matches. Good luck fellas.

Finally June will see the first true steps into bigger hulls and bigger guns as I start training for a Rupture. Minmatar Cruiser will be taken to V before I get into one of course and that will be the last skill on the plan that I train to avoid temptation to take one out for a spin.

Up to 14.7m SP now, and this months big gains are made in Drones, with some padding in Spaceship Command, Gunnery & Navigation. Drone skills should be fine where they are for a while, Navigation is nearly maxed out for me too. Next months gains will predominantly be in Gunnery & Missiles.



The main hangar is still well stocked, due to a further supply run bringing in a couple of new Rifter flavours to try and limited play time reducing my losses. I think I have around 55 ships in Hev right now with plenty more scattered about the universe.

Funding this are my hard working alt team. I don't know whether it's just me but this month station trading has been poor, bringing in 138m isk to the coffers which is well down on last month. I have "lost" an alt from station trading to being my prober which has an impact, especially as I have invested quite a bit of isk into his Covops, skill purchases & implants. Given time I should be able to get him to earn his keep. My afk miner is resplendent in a Hulk too which has eaten up a chunk of isk. Overall it's been an expensive month given the reduced level of income.

I should probably save the months stats update for following the MEME started by Romeo but I'll give a brief summary here as normal:
- Tuskers Battleclinic rank is all over the show lately, so we'll see next month when hopefully it settles down.
- Battleclinic is also broken at the moment, but Kirith is upto around 590 kills for 104 losses. I have been having a bit of a laugh with Slasher & Burst frigates recently so expect to see them die in a fire on Battleclinic soon!

100 kills!

Without further adieu I announce that i have reached 100 kills, pretty much all of them solo apart from i think two.

My fights today were pretty nice against a couple of Rifters who were well fitted. One player was older, and one younger than I which was dictated in the quality of the fights. Against the older player we were pretty evenly matched until low shields when i took the lead. Although i ended the fight at 50% armour I wasn't permanently running my repper as I didn't feel i needed to so I was rather pleased. The second Rifter I found waiting out his GCC at a Moon, he wasn't paying attention as I landed but i soon got his attention. He went down easy and I don't think i even went into armour. I snagged his Pod too and was about to pick on a Thrasher in system when another pilot destroyed it (the pilot of the earlier Rifter I had killed), he was in a Rupture this time and i knew he had a good fit so I stayed away and unusually for me utilised caution!

Although my application to EACS (see previous post) has gone in to get my jump clones it hasn't been processed yet so perhaps it'll get done tomorrow.

November Character Review etc

First, apologies for no posts for a few days.

I'm now a Tusker, granted I haven't been online for more than an hour or so since becoming one but OOG commitments have prevented this and it's something that I hope to remedy in the coming days, weeks & months. I have a lot of reading up and setting up to do. Setting up of channels, Ventrillo etc and reading up on the forums of anything and everything (within reason) that I can. I'll be heading back to forums after making this entry to keep on reading as I beleive that I should at least be upto speed before doing anything else.

Next, the eagle eyed amongst you will notice that my bounty has gone (/me sad panda). It happened the evening that I dropped my Tuskers application in, exiting the station I found it camped by a Devoter, Harbinger & Moros. The first time I managed to redock and in hindsight I should probably have logged off and tried later, but I tried a second time and was bumped out of the docking area and nuked to oblivion, my Pod was locked super fast too and again think I was bumped away from docking, in the blink of an eye I was back in Aralgrund station with no implants. Fortunately I only lost a cheap mix of +1 & +2's, but I can't afford to replace right now so it is irritating. Part of the reason I beleive I lost the Ship and Pod is that I was trying for the first time to use my desktop PC to play EVE after I had recently upgraded the memory. It just can't handle EVE aswell as my laptop and lags too much, thus I doubt i'll be trying that again for anything but safe runs on my hauler.

So, as I mentioned in a previous entry I intend every month to post a short character review on Kirith. Kirith to date after taking learning skills to optimal for the "Rifter plan" has been building a solid base of skills to support his Rifters, this is a plan that will continue to be followed so long as my willpower stands. It's massively long at nearly 440 days total but I don't beleive that Minmatar Frigate skills can be improved much/at all beyond that and the skills picked up will of course benefit hugely when stepping into different hulls in the distant future. Here's a pie chart of Kirith's skill spilt as at a few minutes ago:


Currently Kirith is training: Acceleration Control IV

Tuskers application accepted

I'm delighted to say that my application to join the Tuskers has been accepted! Tonight I should be able to get accross to one of their offices and drop in my offical paperwork.

Yesterday wasn't a tremendous day from a combat perspective. I took out a Caracal ratting pretty easy early in the day. His Pod went too when he failed to pay a ransom. Nothing great dropped from him though, but I was surprised to see a frigate size afterburner on a cruiser.

Later on in the day I lost a Rifter, I was set to ambush a cruiser (Scythe) in a belt when a couple of pilots from Arkane Dominion (AD) entered system. One proceeded to engage the cruiser I had been shadowing, Suspecting a trap by the AD Rifter & Drake tag team I attempted to interupt the Rifters attack on the Scythe but arrived just as it popped some 40km away. The Rifter warped out and I followed, half expecting to be greeted by the Drake aswell as the Rifter. Only the Rifter was present as I exited warp and landed practically on top of him so I engaged. However in a moment of stupidity I had my EMP & Gremlin ammo loaded from the Caracal in the morning but had reset my orbit range to Barrage. My DPS was very poor as a result and whilst his shields went quickly his armour didn't go as fast as mine as I adjusted range. My lack of a Damage Control on my "Gank" Rifter was a telling factor here and left me a little despondent of it's performance. I have slightly better feelings towards it now thinking back to how fast it sliced up the Caracal but it isn't really sold to me yet, but I still have two more of them ready and waiting for their maiden flights.

Chalk up first Rifter and Pod kill

I'm still training Clarity V but got another kill this morning just before downtime. Having just delivered myself a few more Rifters with my hauler alt I noticed on my way through the system an 8 day old player in a Rifter cruising the belts, lots of wrecks present in the belts too.

Logging over to Kirith after delivering the aforementioned Rifters I set off to see if I could track down this Rifter pilot, he seemed quite canny as on my first scan of the system and it belts by the time I had warped to the belt that he was in, he had docked up. Seeing a Magnate pilot warp into the system and subsequently into a neighbouring system I set off in pursuit, unfortunately they went straight to the station so I decided to head back from whence I came and see if I could find the Rifter pilot again.

While I was scanning the system for him he appeared back on scan and within a minute I had him pinpointed down to a belt. Deciding to warp to zero I landed 20km from him, whether he didn't see me or register the danger I don't know but I was able to close on him down to 8km before locking and scramming him, from now there was no escape for him. I worked my way through his shields, pleased to see that he was actively shield tanked, before long I was into his armour and soon after his structure. I contemplated a ransom but decided against it as I want my flashy -10 security status. Boom went his Rifter, I quickly locked onto his pod and blew that to smithereens too with just 4 minutes to downtime.

I almost warped to dock up but about 1 second before warping managed to cancel the warp, remembering that I had the Global Criminal Cooldown to wait out lest I be blown up myself by sentry guns!