Expanding my horizons!

[Morganti]

So I'm back on the Planetary Interaction train (6 toons working PI in a lowsec system with 3% tax). I actually have some logi and backup around here, so I don't fear bringing in a freighter to move my junk out now which was a big problem as PI materials accumulated faster than I could move it out in my old lowsec location. I've still got my main in lowsec doing some pvp type of things, but he'll be added to the PI train shortly. I look forward to the light upkeep isk boost that is lowsec PI!

I have one of my main secondary toons and an alt on one of my logi accounts hot and heavy into trading now which is a new thing for me. I'm using my other main secondary toon to go fetch big ships and bring them back to my base of operations while he trains for dreads. The only thing I don't like about trading is I can't tell how much money I have anymore :) Wallet + buy orders + stock scattered all across multiple regions = no clue of my total worth.

I dropped 5 bucks on a new account to make a salvage pilot since I moved one dps guy out to pvp and the old salvager into his dps slot, but I haven't been missioning much as of late (and from what I can tell I'm making much less money because of it). I want to give the trading a chance though, so I'm devoting more time to it than missioning (well, less actually than missioning, but you get the idea). This means my new toon and one of my logi toons (which is training for a carrier) sit idle doing not much of anything most of the time which I don't like, but I haven't found something for the logi pilot to do yet that wouldn't require screwing with his carrier training. If I decide to completely give up on the missions for the time being I'm going to clone jump both logi pilots to lowsec to give my main logi support vs random pirates.

As for pvp, I've managed to stay on the coat-tails of those better than me and we've either won all of our engagements or had a draw because of the enemy running/docking. I've actually made money from pvp rather than lose it (well, unless you count the cost of fitting and insuring pvp ships, then I guess I'm still behind). It's definitely not constant action (I haven't killed anyone since last week I think), but it is fun when I do get to murder imaginary spaceships.

So, going from making good money grinding out level 4's (and sometimes 5's) like there's no tomorrow to pvp/trade/PI feels a lot different, but I was ready for a change. We shall see if it's a change for the better.

[Meeo]

That is great to hear, i myself came back, activated all 9 of mine, and now i am going to add a 10th as well. I disabled all 5 of my WoW and 5 Rift accounts, and going to focus on Eve/F2P and other games. I am really tired of the gear roller coaster.

Just getting back is going to take some time to get acclimated to everything again, even with all the changes to the ships.

Also i highly recommend that you train Destroyers 5 and Battlecruisers 5 before the next expansion Destroyers 5 is a 6 day skill and BC5 is roughly a 30 day skill(+/- a few days). The next expansion will split these 2 out into racial skills. If you have 5 already you will be given all 4 racials of each skill at max skill. which will save over 60+ days of training at least.

Are you using a multi-machine setup or just using 1 machines for all your toons? i still i still have not setup ISboxer for eve i still do it all manually since i use 6 machines for eve.

[Morganti]

I noticed all the blog folks advocating training of destroyer/BC and all the racial cruisers to 3 for max skill point return when they do the skill changes. The latest I heard (rumor) was March for that to happen though. I have BC4 on all but my main (who has BC5) and Destroyer5 on everyone along with all racial cruisers at least to 3. BC5 is a little too painful to bother with right now for my short term goals, but I may do it on a few more of my alt accounts.

They did change TONS of ships in this last expansion and I have pirate buddies running around killing battlecruisers in the new mining frigate now. Lots of improvements, especially from the logistics angle where you don't need T2 logistics cruisers to provide useful logistics to your fleets.

I use a single machine for all toons. As long as you run clients for performance you'll be fine from what I've seen. I do use isboxer for pve missions, but thats about it. I don't find it terribly useful for the stuff I'm doing now, but if I decide to bring in more alts to pvp I'll definitely be using it there.

[Morganti]

So I had my first multiboxing cap kills last night, as well as my first multiboxing multiple ship loss (2 battleships). We had a core bunch of us lowsec guys on and decided to send scouts out to see what pirates were around that we could shoot at. The scouts ended up finding a POS bash in progress by some reds (2 carriers, 2 dreads, a bunch of BS's) that we titan bridged on top of. We had 2 carriers, 5 dreads, and 8 or so BS's so we quickly popped the carriers and a dread before we got counter-hotdropped by 9 more dreads. As our fleet came apart we managed to get the carriers out in hull, but we lost all of our dreads and I lost both my battleships trying to finish a dread that was at 10% hull. Just as they were trying to mop us up a Pandemic Legion cyno pops up and PL drops in god knows what and proceeds to wipe out everything they could (at least 4 of the remaining dreads were popped, including the one we had to 10% hull). My poor ceo had loaned out 3 dreads to members of our fleet, so he lost about 12bil in ships last night (my 500mil loss in refitting my T1 battleships felt paltry in comparison) but I've gotta say OMG what a rush!

This was my first taste of running 2 dps'ers in a big fleet having to switch targets and move and watch range and swap ammo and watch cap and whatnot. It wasn't horrible as I wasn't even in the top 10 targets for the enemy FC to call out (our battleships were all navy variants except mine I believe which were a Blaster Megathron and Pulse Abaddon) but it was still a lot to do. I'd imagine just like everything else it gets easier over time :) I need to find some smaller scale engagements to practice running 2 BS's and 2 Logi's in now.

[Meeo]

You could also try Faction Warfare area for getting targets, im not in FW, but i run their areas for a fight in solo/small gang pvp.

You very rarely get blobbed unless your getting dropped or a large roam runs through from 0.0.

[Morganti]

I'm in CVA, so NRDS. I doubt random FW corps are red to us.