Category: Apocrypha

Apocrypha 1.5 Downtime

Enough of all the DUST discussions, let’s focus on the upcoming patch (which is taking a little longer to deploy due to database issues). We’ll see what DUST will bring and what kind of impact it will have on the game.

Looking forward to:

– Small and med rigs. Sniper trashers, speedier rifters / better falloff. The list goes on ;). Also it will be cheaper to rig BCs, which is nice. Ships like a Myrm, Drake and the Cane are so much nicer when they’re equiped with rigs.

– Extra 5ok m3 Ore hold for the Orca

– Factional Warfare lp store. Though it seems the lp rewards for pvp kills are mediocre at best. I assume this is ‘prenerfed’. But running FW missions with the corp might give a lot more lps for goodies from the store.

– FW lag fixes. The ksequencer fix already worked very well for me, but not for all, and not for new players that didn’t know about it. Now that it will be built into the client, I hope it works even better, also considering they extensively tested it on the testserver.

– Mission Story Epic Arc – more content is always nice ! I’ll be starting the caldari arc this weekend I think, will keep an eye on the bug reports though. Hope it works right out of the gate.

Well that’s my summary of patch 1.5 :). Let’s hope the servers will be up soon !

Exploration Luck

This past week I finally found a few useful radar sites. The magnometric ones are very crappy. If you’re lucky you get 50k of bounties and a few salvage bits and pieces. The radar ones are handy though, you get the invention decryptors that you can either sell, or use for your own invention jobs. The gravimetric ones can be nice, as long as it’s not a small belt, the rocks are so tiny in there, they pop with almost one hulk cycle.

hidden_serp

As you can see below on the somewhat spooky image, I also found a large kernite / omber belt that we mined clean ! And when I say large I am not kidding. The omber rocks were of the gold and silver variety and all had 30k omber in them. The kernite wasn’t too bad either.

kernite_site

Now with Apocrypha 1.1 though, scanning has become a bit of a chore. The new sphere graphics literally make my eyes hurt after a while :(. That’s a shame, because the other improvements, like the id tag, are very nice. I hope they reverse that decision. How that ever made it past Q&A is beyond me to be honest. Just use it for a while and you’ll see that it’s not exactly an improment. Same goes for the POS shields by the way…

Apocrypha 1.1 Patchnotes

This is going live on April 16th ! Huge list of fixes and ‘enhancements’. The ECM change is coming as well. I am curious how that is going to work out.

Stealth Bombers are changed too :

  • Stealth Bombers have had their role refocused to be anti-battleship role. They now equip siege missile launchers and use torpedoes instead of cruise missiles which allow them to inflict large volley damage against big targets and gain the ability to equip a covert ops cloak so can warp around whilst cloaked. In addition bombs have been made cheaper and the bomb launcher can now be equipped in any of the bombers high slots along with other changes to aid them.
  • Stealth Bombers now gain a bonus to fitting siege missile launchers instead of cruise missile launchers.
  • Stealth Bombers can fit and use a covert ops cloak allowing them to warp whilst cloaked.
  • Stealth Bombers now have a 15% bonus to damage for racial torpedoes per covert ops skill.
  • Stealth Bombers now have a flight time and velocity bonus to torpedoes. The power grid and cpu fitting attributes have been adjusted for all Stealth Bombers.
  • The base velocity of Stealth Bombers has been increased.
  • Bomb launchers can now be fitted to any high slot on the bomber.

So stealth bomber become anti – battleship / battlecruiser. You’d need quite a few to take one down though ? I wonder if they’re going to be used more, to be honest I seriously doubt it.

There are a few sound fixes, but I don’t think that’s going to fix the real issue, which is that the entire sound system is seriously broken. I much prefer it, if they would just put the old sound engine back in. At least I could hear my mining lasers !

Patchnotes are here and the discussion thread is over here.

Update Oops, there is a fix to turrent sounds and the like:

Sound levels for turret fire, explosions, jumpgates and effects have had their levels adjusted and will be heard in all their glory.

Thoughts on Apocrypha I

Eve’s latest expansion is now more than a week old, and I figured it was about time to post my thoughts. The server lag seems to be fixed, after a bit of a rocky ride for the first few days, things appear to have settled down. The thousands of probes going up after this patch’ release probably didn’t help either ;).

Wormholes

Haven’t really been checking them out, except on the test server. I have been putting some T2 ships together and do my regular mining / invention stuff. What I do like is that people seem to loose an awful lot of stuff in there. Business is booming. Ships fly off the shelf, can’t keep my hammerheads and ogres in stock and so on ! From what I read on the forums, there seems to be too many grav. sites. Not quite sure who is supposed to go out mining there. One hulk loss and you’re set back quite a bit, even though theyre not as expensive as they once were. This brings up the next topic.

Exploration

Very much improved, no longer chance based, and faster now. Though it would certainly help a lot if there was some sort of filer, or an equivalent of the multiquest probe. At the moment I am not really interested in wormholes, and it’s very annoying scanning down a site that turns out to be wormhole instead of something I could actually use. Still not too bad though, but it could have been better.

Ui

Could say a lot about it, but someone on the forums posted a summary that seems to be right on the money: Ui getting worse every patch at the eve-o forums.

Skill Queue

Greatest things since uhm well ever in Eve. This should have been in long time ago, very handy and especially nice if you have some l1/2/3 skills to learn !

T3 Ships

Expensive toys for rich people ? Although the concept itself of modules etc is nice, I dont see what the big deal is, if they’re not even marginally better than a HAC or a BC. The production tree is daunting, so don’t expect too many on the market soon !

Graphics / Sound

Some improvements on the graphics, some weird stuff as well. The belt rocks are a very nice touch, laser beams from amarr ships and the mining laser look very nice. The sound sure took a nose dive though, it’s pretty awful. Station chatter is way too loud, gun sounds and mining lasers are barely audible. This is definately an issue that needs be fixed asap. Good sound is needed for a better immersion in the game to be honest, and I really miss the nice relaxing sound of my mining lasers !

Well that’s about it for starters :). This is part I as I am sure more will come up in the coming weeks !

Apocrypha Exploration Video

Someone in the corp found this video, it’s a great tutorial for those new to exploration in Apocrypha.

On another note: Servers are still unstable, lots of traffic advisories, but the market is booming. Drakes and Cerbs flying off the shelf ! Must be those sleepers :).

Another nice guide has popped up at A merry life and a short one !

Final post before Apocrypha

Thought I’d make one more post before the next expansion hits in a few days ! Already put on long skills for my characters so I don’t forget that. Bought two skill books for Morph (Minmatar Battleships and Large Projectile turrets) so I can use the queue to it’s full advantage once we can get back in.

The past week or so I have made my first steps into T2 ship production. Already made 2 kitsunes but you barely break even on those, so I shifted towards T2 cruisers. The first one I produced was a falcon, now I have two cerbs in the oven. Those will give a nice profit if they sell for the current market value of around 100mil. I bought some of the T2 component bpos as you can skim off some costs by making those yourself.

wormholest Furthermore I played a bit on the test server. I found a somewhat ‘easier’ wormhole, and found out again that it’s not very viable solo. I could tank the sleepers in my abaddon but not kill them. Smartbombs work well against the little drones though, even though they do try to stay out of range. Once I brought in Morph (Bela was in the abaddon) in an assault frig to get rid of the cruisers, all was well though. Very nice task for small gangs, like 2 BS and maybe a few assault frigs / HACs to get rid of the smaller stuff. And then fight over the loot afterwards ;).

The state of the expansion on the test server is still a bit buggy. Some weird things happened while switching ships in station and some other odd things. I hope the patch we will get on march 10th will be somewhat less buggy, but my guess is that it will definitely break some stuff and some of the new things won’t work properly. By the end of march things will be more stable :).

Hope CCP has some surprises for us in the storyline, come next patchday. Have a nice patchday all, and remember the waiting is the hardest part !

Another CCP wormhole blogpost

This one has just been posted, and it has a very scary ending:

So when you enter a wormhole system and see something ‘unusual’ off your port bow, proceed with the knowledge that some of the things you know about how your ship performs may no longer be true. Your ship drives may push you faster, your weapons may hit harder, you may find yourself with no shields or less effective armor… and just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, things may change again!

As if the sleeper’s AI wasn’t enough, you can even get buffs or debuffs in wormhole space ! Something that hasn’t been reported on Sisi as of yet. Is this one of the tricks ccp will keep up their sleeve ‘till launch ?

The darkness at the end of the tunnel

Apocrypha – I am in your wormhole

The first few times I tested Apocrypha on the test server it seemed to be in a very buggy state. They’ll never finish this in time, is what I thought. But today’s test got me a bit more optimistic. I could actually use the star map, put together a T3 ship and scan and find stuff ! Other people have already done tutorials on exploration and some of the other new stuff so I won’t go too deep into that !

caldari_t3bcaldari_t3

The T3 cruiser i put together was a Caldari missile boat. Passively tanked. It worked rather well, but didn’t have the firepower of the drake. This makes me wonder what exactly the point is of these T3 ships, besides the coolness factor ofcourse. It’s handy to turn the cruiser from a missile boat in a gun boat, swapping out a few modules, but I cannot see any other benefits. They don’t seem to be much better than a HAC. Or I am missing the point and / or didn’t set it up right.

I managed to scan down a wormhole. It’s not very easy to get the hang of placing the probes in a 3d environment, but once the red sphere shows up and then red and yellow dots, it’s doable. Some screenshots below :).

wormhole1

Once inside the wormhole space, all you see are a few planets and not much else. The onboard scanner revealed 3 sites though, each had 2 battleships in it. They didn’t mess around and had my shields to 75% in no time, so I warped out quickly. Another site had like 8 frigs and a few towers. I could tank them while being scrammed, neuted and webbed, but they tank very well and it took quite some time to destroy at least the scramming frigs. This escalates the site though, spawning 2 battleship and a handful of cruisers ! I didn’t mess about and warped out right away ;). A friend who was in a cov-ops in the wormhole space reported about 18 sites on the scan probes ! So plenty to scan down :). This obviously is a group effort deal, where you will probably need spider tanks and ecm to be able to deal with the sleepers, not to speak of other players who might drop down on you.

All in all exciting stuff ! Will definately be a lot of fun scanning and probing about, come march 10th (or a few days later as things setlle down) !

Skill Queue

Thanks to CK’s Tweet I became aware of the upcoming skill training que article on massively. It’s based on the dev blog called more queue queue. It looks promising and it’s definately better than just running out of a skill to train. There is a caveat though:

The solution, or compromise, CCP is going with is limiting the skill queue to a 24-hour window — you can line up as many skills as you’d like, provided they can begin training in the next 24 hours.

What I get from this is that you can que a skill as long as the current one is ending within 24hrs. This still forces you to log on, but on a time that is convenient for you. I guess they didn’t want people to sign up, set a que for 3 months and then come back ;). Ah well, it’s a lot better than having to set your alarm clock for 2:00 AM at night. Not that I have ever done such a thing of course !