Friday, April 4, 2008

New Home, New Plans

Just joined the Insurgency alliance and moved to Branch within the last week or so. At the risk of sounding like a Drone Regions bumpkin, all I can say is Wow!! It’s like moving from Springfield to Chicago. You can buy stuff from people around the corner, there are specialty shops set up by master carebears (alts I say…), and you get shot by random, angry people. Local and alliance chat are always buzzing with drunken humor. The entire place is filled with highly talented FCs and pvpers. Sure, there's your share of assholes, but I'm amazed by how helpful people were (being a girl helps). Did I already mention my fantastic shopping experience? It’s an awesome feeling despite knowing only a few in the alliance thus far – maybe I’m a city gal after all!

The only problem is that I can’t fly a proper fleet BS. Fo’ shizzle. I can fit a sniper Raven with cruise launchers and T2 armor tank, and I have a 80% success rate of running away from POS fire, but I get laughed at. I’d be lucky if I could target the primaries and secondaries in time, fire off a volley, and watch as 30 seconds later the missiles hit space dust. That, and I’ve been working on my support and leadership skills, so I haven’t had time to look into buffing my main for better ships. My belief is that if you can’t fit a ship properly with T2 mods, then it’s really not worth flying them.

I foresee staying in 0.0 pvp alliances for a long time to come (just my playing style), so I’m starting training for a full T2 fit battleship. The problem is, my main is Caldari and you know the saying for Caldari pvp success rates. The only viable Caldari BS platform for pvp is the Rokh. Scorpions get primaried so fast that it’s not even funny, especially in a laggy battle. Ravens… well… I personally hate flying them for fleet ops, but that’s all I can fly properly at the moment.

The problem is that Rokhs must have been designed by a male engineer who was half-Caldari and half-Gallente. First of all, it’s actually symmetrical in shape (and phallic-shaped as usual. Gawd CCP needs to incorporate some women into their ship design team!) Secondly, it’s built on a hybrid turret weapon system. I have a decent amount of skillpoints in missile launcher systems, but my gunnery absolutely stinks. Someone tell me if I’m missing anything in my planned training tree for a sniper Rokh:

- Gunnery V
- Large Hybrid Turret V (and all prerequisites)
- Large Railgun Specialization III/IV
- Trajectory Analysis IV
- Motion Prediction IV
- Caldari Battleship IV
- Blaster specialization for later

Total training time: 90 days

It would take me a good 3 months just to train up the T2 large railguns and basic gunnery support skills. Then I’d need to train up Caldari Battleship V, which takes another month or so. I could just train the gunnery skills first and slap on T1 best named guns for the time being...


Sigh… In comparison, I could get a Rorqual in 66 days. Or a badass T2 fit Apocalypse in 130 days. That, and I wanted to train up for the Nighthawk/Falcon, which follows a completely different training path. I could pimp my main for industry and my alt as a pure pvp character, but I am greedy and want all the killmails on my main…

What to do? Choices, choices…


Edit: OMG I just got publicly flamed on Vent for flying the only raven in fleet. TWICE! x_x That's worse than flying a drake. Guess Rokh is the way to go!

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Rather than training for hybrid guns, you could go for torpedoes and battleship 5, then caldari dreadnaught (that's my current project, with about 65 days remaining)

Or you could do what my CEO asked me to do over the past three months: Train up for Interceptors, HAC, Recon, Heavy Interdictor. Caldari are really great with the smaller support ships.

All the extra or what I call secondary skills, like weapons upgrades, electronics, navigation, etc.. that you need for those tech 2 ships are really nice to have since they help improve every other ship you fly.

Unknown said...

Oh I forgot to mention, that once you have one or two of the tech 2 frigs and cruisers, all the rest of them are really easy to get. Also, I forgot to add the electronic attack and stealth bomber to the list. They're fun too.

Will Coleman said...

Rule got over-run by MH - and they surrendered..

good thing you moved.

Bri said...

swift: yeah... my original plan was to train for caldari recons/HICs. but they follow a completely different path from battleships and my goal is to fly a T2 bs. after tonight's public reaming i've made up my mind to train for T2 guns on the rokh...

Unknown said...

I'm not sure, but I don't remember any Rokh in the alliance tournament. I'm sure there were quite a few Ravens though. It's funny how different people have different views about what ships are best. Sorry to hear that you got abused for flying a Raven. Do they not like missiles because of the flight time, or do they want you to do a passive/armor tank? When I fly my Raven in fleet I always get really high on the damage numbers compared to the other ships, and it's nice to be able to change damage types or use Friend or Foe missiles. There are + and - for every ship type, but it's not worth arguing with your FC's.

Anonymous said...

Hi Bri.
I'm Derekest, a fellow eve blogger. I was wondering if you'd be interested in a link exchange. You can find my blog at http://derekest.wordpress.com

Cheers

Anonymous said...

Hi Bri,

Ex EMDer here :)

I would definitely go for the Rokh skills but in my opinion I would go for recon first as it is very useful and always welcome. Rokh's are great but it is a very long time to spend for a ship that relies on one set of tactics.

:D

Bri said...

Derek: Added your blog to my blogroll.

Jareth: How's everything going? I'm actually very tempted to train amarr battleships atm, except that it takes forever to get the T2 large lasers. But I'm only a few days away from caldari cruiser V, so I'm definitely going for those first.

Anonymous said...

Hey Bri,

I'm still looking for somewhere to move to although I did manage to get all my stuff out to Tribute and Empire :)

I may just leave this char training for capital ships for a while I think.

Yeah Amarr looks fun - do a search for LordChaos in the Videos section of Eve forums. LC TNT or something. Includes EMD death in Mai - you will like it!

Cheers

Anonymous said...

I just read your new post - weird!

Amazing videos though aren't they!

TrevHead said...

I am in exacally the same situation as u r Bri. My Caldari main has bugger all gunnery skills (medium hybrid lv1 lol) and i am joining a northern 0.0 allience in a couple of days. (which is at war with u guys lol)

I think ill spend 7 to 10 days training to fly a crow and fly support while a wait untill i can fly a rohk. Plus i think ill be a ecm user aswell (not a scorpian tho ill just fly a bb or kitsune) Or use my minny pvp alt but i like my main and the alt is still a noob who has only just got the minium skills to fly a bs

Ill keep a look out for u when im flying about :)

PS damn those rohk r pricy up there. Good job this char is industrial aswell 0.0

 
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