However, looking at how often I’m seeing Harbinger’s show up on the Amarr Militia Killboard (on both sides of the killmails), I’m getting inspired to get back to specializing in the class and hope I can afford them. Command ships, due to cost, I’ll save for PVE, which leaves me with the Harbinger on my main and the Hurricane on my alt for small gang and some solo PVP in lowsec.

Let’s start with the Harbinger.

There seem to be really only two base loadouts for the ship: the Focused Medium Pulse (FMP) + 1600mm Plate (example), and the Heavy Pulse (HP) + 800mm Plate (example).

HIGH SLOTS:
In both cases you load out the highs with the laser of your choice, Tech 2 preferrably, and fit Scorch M and Amarr Navy Multifrequency M crystals to cover most ranges. If you have an extra high slot and room to fit anything, popular choices tend to be medium NOS’ or Neutralizers. Tight fit though depending on the lows and mids.

LOW SLOTS:
A bit more room for variation here, but not much. For small gang action, and keeping with the current trend in PVP thinking to focus on a heavy armor hit point buffer vs. any kind of self-repair capability, don’t fit a Medium Armor Repairer (MAR). Fit an armor plate (800mm for the HP variation, 1600mm for the FMP), a couple resist modules (EANM or plain old Adaptive Nano Plating II), a Damage Control, and 2-3 damage modules such as Tracking Enhancers (especially if you’re expecting small ship opposition) and Heat Sinks. 3x Heat Sinks gives you a hell of a gank boat, but the tracking mod could be nice for the small ships.

MID SLOTS:
This is where people get creative. You can toss on the “holy trinity” of PVP mid-slot modules: Scrambler/Disruptor, Stasis Webifier, and Cap Injector, with room for an afterburner or microwarpdrive, which is my preferred fit as something of a traditionalist. However, especially in Factional Warfare, you’re likely to see a heavy dose of fast small frigate-sized ships buzzing around. I plan to just rely on my Web and a drone bay full of Warrior II light and fast drones to take care of the gnats. However if I know I’ll be in a gang, I might drop the Disruptor and try out something else.

Here are some of the variations I’ve seen pop up on killboards of late:

Disrupt/Scrambler Combo Fit
Fit both a longer range 1-point Warp Disruptor (snag your prey) and a short range 2-point Scrambler (snag + kill MWD’s to slow down small ships). Swap out the Cap Injector to make it fit. In light of recent gameplay changes which enable the 2-pt Scrams to disable MWD’s, this can be a very nice setup to deal with small ships at close ranges. Leaves you running tight on cap though, which scares me in PVP.

Target Painter Fit
Drop the Web, propulsion mod, or Injector and add a Target Painter. Sometimes pair with the dual Disruptor/Scrambler fit on a FMP setup (better tracking) for the ultimate frigate-killing BC. I never thought of Painters outside of using them on missile boats, but the signature radius bonus does appear to help with any weapon, so why not try this I guess? Interesting idea, I may give it a whirl.

Tracking Disruptor Fit
Drop the mod of your choice to fit a TD. Best if you know you’re going up against BC’s and BS’s.

My personal choice to start with will likely be the Heavy Pulse/800mm Plate basic loadout to better deal with cruisers and larger ships, 2x Heat Sinks and 1x Tracking Enhancer (small ship counter), and a mid slot setup of AB or MWD (still playing with the fitting), Web, Cap Injector, and try out the Target Painter idea for a while. Again, a drone bay full of Warrior II’s or a split of Warriors and light ECM drones. With the TP fit, I’ll let other ships in gang do the tackling in exchange for being able to deal out more damage against a wider range of ship classes. I may get smoked a lot, but should be fun seeing what happens.

What do you think? Any better suggestions for good Harbinger fits, or philosophies on the mid slot loadout?

As my main, Furious, had never left his solo corp in the Amarr Militia, I had a ready supply of random PVP awaiting right from login. I have to say, factional warfare is more fun now than when I first tried it out last year, and with the coming addition of more and more ex-0.0 PVP heavy corps, and general tower-grind fatigue, I think we’ll see more good fights with better ships on a daily basis across the Bleak Lands.

Until this week, my last PVP kill was a YEAR ago, so to say I am a bit rusty is a raging understatement. Nevertheless, I had a ready supply of far too expensively fit ships and a general need for destruction, so I undocked from my adopted home station in Huola, fired up Militia chat, and looked for someone to shoot at me.

To my delight, I didn’t have to wait long. In a quick 40 minutes in space, I got in on 5 kills – and lost my cherished Dark Wing Duck 1 (a Vengeance). The beauty of the night was getting in the final blow against the guy who held the same killmail position on my own loss, just a short while later. It also gave me a chance to stretch the legs of my Sacrilege heavy assault cruiser. Brutally expensive to replace, but hell, since I own it already it’s a sunk cost. May as well go use it.

The second night was less successful. Lost an Arbitrator, not more than 10 minutes after I bought it, to a gate blob, helped kill a pirate Maller, then promptly lost a Crusader to my own stupidity while trying to escape a gate camp.

Furious’ compadre, Daniella, also back in action earning some passive ISK income after a long break, cashed out a quick 300 million ISK worth of datacores to refill Furious’ coffers.

All in all, a fun way to jump back into EVE for a couple nights. Next up, starting to use (and no doubt lose) my favorite ship of all time, the Harbinger. Two are already fitted out and waiting.

The war, if one can be called that, operates with specific battlefield areas. The prize being a change in sovereignity on a map and nothing more. It is almost like ritual warfare.

…

In contrast, the Gallente are not as interested in map changes and I know many a Gallente pilot, for example, in Oulletta (which ‘fell’ to the Caldari Fascists) happily living and shopping and flying in what is now classed as hostile space. There is no discernible change in environment. Not even the service charges of stations change to reflect the will of the fascist provosts.

Votrian’s post in in character, but translating that out to the broader EVE world of factional warfare, he raises a point that’s been nagging me since FW first launched: where’s the consequence?

FW was created by CCP for a variety of reasons – make lowsec matter and get pilots populating the systems again, provide an easy entrance point into PVP for newer players and longitme carebears alike, and so on.

To that end, it seems a moderate if debatable success. Despite the standard trash talk from longtime 0.0 inhabitants, the fights I’ve been in during a couple stints with the Amarr militia have been a blast – frigate and cruiser fights galore, minimal gate camping, short trips to where the combat is, and much less prep time than the mega fleet fights dreamed of out in nulsec space.

But it’s Votrian’s point about the lack of any practical impact on the change in Sov in lowsec systems that I think highlights the problem with FW: there are no consequences beyond bragging rights. When a system is “captured” nothing happens to the stations or their services. You can still dock/undock as you did before, regardless of faction alignment. The gaining faction gets zero enhanced benefit from those stations, and the losing faction likewise takes zero real hit in access, service or market prices, etc.

Contrast that to 0.0, where change in Sov in a station system has a massive impact on everyone involved – station services and market access can be denied, docking and clone rights revoked, and so on. The gaining corp or alliance now has a safe dock up, a revenue generator, a fitting station, a local market, manufacturing and research slots, etc. The losing group not only loses all that, but risks having large quantities of valuable stuff stuck in the station, perhaps for good (I know I have some interceptors and T2 lasers I’ll likely never see or sell again, which hurts).

Because that doesn’t apply in FW, you can see what impact that has on how the players in the various militias behave. Reread Votrian’s quote above – the Gallente FW players for the most part don’t care about the territorial war aspect of FW, they’re just in it to kill some ships. Who “owns” the system they do it in is largely irrelevant, just bragging rights that aren’t worth much anyway.

If you started denying station services, market access, cloning and docking rights to the Gallente (or at least increasing the fees prohibitively), I bet they’d care again and EVE would see a renewed interest in the shifting borders of lowsec.

>A poem by Spectre, something of an ode to small ship gang combat (and great photo!)

>Mynxee over on Life in Low Sec outlines the dream situation for a low sec pirate. Watch out, I’m betting she’s flying some shiny new ships now!

>Tony at EVE Weekend Warrior demos how to run Massive Attack (Sansha/lvl4) in a Nighthawk, with video. Tony – I do love that ship, I may never fly a Raven again.

>CSM campaigning is started up again, and Caldari Piratess weighs in on the need for some representation from the dark side.

As for me, not much playing time as I am running through some RL training courses and such. I’m also skilling like a madman with the new skill queue, but that’s not really “playing” EVE. Anyway, catch you next week.

10. Don’t F**k with a Mining Barge

I even love the New Age-y soundtrack. This ended up being part of a bunch of other videos of mining barge ownage, such as this.

9. A Pirate Sing Along

How can you not love the song and little bubble captions?

8. Haulers Kill Vagabond

In line with #10, this one is a favorite just based on the voice comm laughter alone. The guys are seriously stunned into hilarity that they manage to lock down and kill a Vagabond with some haulers.

7. Absolution Command Ship in Action

Why? Because I just love this ship and it’s nice to see someone out using it as intended.

6. “The World’s Greatest EVE Video”

The production values on this are just mind-blowing.

5. A Taste of Tortuga

One from Seleene and the old Mercenary Coalition crowd it seems. Very nice production values, shows off what everyone wishes an EVE fleet fight would actually look like.

4. Pirate Engagement in Low Sec

Just lots of pretty things blowing up.

3. Death of the First Titan

Included mostly for it’s historic value.

2. EVE Hell

Great action, hilarious side bits.

and of course…

1. Concordokken!!

It’s less PVP than it is attempted PVP. And it’s less a video than a sketch cartoon. But really, this one wins for the endless amount of LOL’s I still get whenever I watch it. The veldspar/can-looting hauler at the end is just icing on the cake.

So what are your favorite EVE PVP videos?

So with the news that the latest EVE expansion, Apocrypha, would include a limited queue, I started to get all nervous and excited. How long would it be? Would it offer EVEMon-like training plans (pick a target ship, skill, or weapon and just queue up all the skills you need to use it)? How would they balance the player-base asks with the best needs of the ingame community?

Well, I’m liking what the dev spit out on this one – it’s just a nice compromise, being able to queue up skills so long as they start within the next 24 hours. Perhaps it’s greatest immediate benefit is that it alleviates “Skill Panic” – that sense of concern when you realize your skill is set to finish while you’re at work, or sleeping (I would *never* set my alarm to wake up and change a skill…I loves my sleep a bit to much, thanks).

But for me, the best part of the new skill queue is it allows me to “clean house.” I’m a bit of a skill whore and an unfocused wanderer to boot, which translates into an accumulation of loads of level 0 or 1 skills that struck my interest at some point or another. Both my main and alt have a hanger and skillsheet full of the damn things. So when my alt finished up a long train (Advanced Weapon Upgrades 5, one of those “oh Lord, I know I should but do I REALLY have to??” skills) this past week, I set my plan in motion to wipe out those 0 and 1 skills using the queue.

I set the filter to only find skills that could be completed within the 24 hour period, and just started loading up. Mining 1-3? Check. Shield/Armor compensation skills? Check. Random industry, research, and drone skills I may never use but nevertheless bought? All to level 2 or 3, check. I even opened up that ISK-trap in my hanger, the “SKILLZ” station container, and started “injecting” (got to love that new term…) away. You should see my skills history tab, it looks like a mad n00b with too much ISK just went to town on any skill he could find laying around. Which isn’t that far from the truth, except my alt has about 40 million skillpoints so she’s at least an advanced n00b by now.

The SKILLZ container is near on empty, and my alt can now do any number of marginally useful new things in EVE. I can’t wait for my main to finish a 25+ day long train this weekend, so he can start cleaning house as well.

UPDATE: Just ran across this handy video which outlines the queue:

While my serious playtime in EVE happens on a juiced up Vista gaming tower, my daily computer of choice has long been a MacBook Pro. So when the OSX client came out last year, it gained a permanent spot in my OSX Dock. Once the lagging performance and crash issues got worked out, it even became viable for (non PVP) play.

The only downside? No Premium graphics. Moving back and forth between my Mac and Vista systems was a tiny bit painful as a result – while the gaming itself was still fun, the immersion brought on the by stellar (pun!) Premium graphics pack was just unbeatable.

So now, according to Macworld…us long slighted OSX users at last get the full graphics in all their glory!

Mac support of “Premium” graphics was promised, and was ultimately delayed while CCP Games and its Mac development partner, TransGaming, addressed numerous underpinning issues. The release of Apocrypha—which will be a free update for all users—marks the official introduction of Premium graphics support for the Mac (it’s already been in a public beta on CCP Games’ staging server).

I’d heard rumors about this but haven’t been actively following the Dev Blog. Oh…so nice!

I love a scifi universe with a well developed backstory that allows for an infinite variety of offshoot stories, adventures, and so on. EVE, being a vast sandbox, set up just enough backstory and then turned the playerbase loose to build out their own running story, shaping the universe along the way. It’s like a vast give and take between the players and the keepers of the EVE canon at CCP, and it’s been an absolute wonder to watch it all unfold.

The players are driving so much of EVE’s evolving world, and filling out it’s backstory in so many ways: the shifting and endless wars of deep 0.0 space which tell of vast empires, massive battles, and deep conspiracies; heroics of individual pilots and corporations, who through their own exploits, roleplay, or sheer personality become fixtures in EVE lore; and written fiction contributed on numerous blogs, corp forums, and the official forums on Eve-Online.com.

Most of those storylines are told from the perspective of the immortals – the pod pilots who rip up the stars in massive ships. I’d love to see (and maybe tell myself) more on the “average Joe” characters, the guys who do the shit work repainting shattered hulls, adjusting the massive spotlights on Amarr stations, or helping wipe the goop off the immortals when they emerge from their pods after a day of fresh destruction.

Kind of boring? Nah – Those guys have got to kick back at the station pub after a hard days work, talk trash about the pod pilots, and generally lament (or celebrate?) their lot in life. Thousands of great stories there which you see on occasion in the forums or Chronicle, but are a key part of the background tapestry that could be the lore of EVE.

I admit it, I have an issue with Shiny Ships. A problem in that I ignore all EVE conventional wisdom and train for, buy, and fly ships that just look pretty even if I have no real use planned for them. Some of them do have actual utility – like the Sacrilege, which is just a joy to fly in small group PVP (the five whole times I’ve been involved in that, mind you). And the Pilgrim, which, though often derided is at least handy for sneaking precious cargo through 0.0.

Or the Nighthawk I just bought for my alt run level 4 missions. Yeah, the Raven was doing just fine, but why run missions the smart, sensible, and fully-insurable way when you can fly a sleek black ship with high resists and lots of blinky lights? Oh yes…it’s a sweet ride. Load up a permatank and some Fury heavy missiles, grab a beer, and enjoy the light show of bad NPC guys going “boom”.

However, more often than not, I spend loads of ISK on something shiny that has no real value to my current playstyle. I kit it out, rig it up, and fly it around for a while showing off to the local residents of my home systems like I’m cruising the El in a tricked out Impala. After a while the novelty wears off, buyers remorse sets in, and up on contract it goes.

The Falcon I bought for my high-sec mission-running alt is a great example. As is the Zealot I once flew around Amarr for a couple of weeks, running level 3 missions just to see the shiny laser lights in action (even though my Harbinger or Drake were a fraction of the cost and more than effective at the task). Or even just skills and time – I spent the past few months training my alt to fly the full set of Minmatar ships just so I could one day hop in a Sleipnir. You know, just in case.

But nothing is quite as representative of my obsession with all things bright and shiny as the purchase of a Damnation. Coming from a lover of the whole line of Amarr ships, I’d have to say the Damnation is the best damn looking bird of prey traversing the skies of EVE. It’s black. It’s got loads of blinky lights. It’s got an unGodly monstrous tank. And it does the damage of a moderately wet noodle.

Now it IS quite useful – tank it up, install some armor-boosting gang modules and a pilot with the Armored Mindlink, and drop it in the middle of a large gang or fleet, and the Damnation is a powerful asset to any group. I’m just saying it’s not particularly useful for my needs at the moment, which largely involves mission running. Nevertheless, it’s a Shiny Ship. 250M ISK or so later, I had one up and running and tagging along with my alt’s equally shiny Nighthawk on level 4 missions.

It tanked like a monster, taking full aggro in several missions, which was nice. But the Nighthawk can basically take full aggro on its own, so what I needed was a companion ship to do some damage. As I mentioned, that just isn’t the Damnation, by *any* stretch of the imagination.

So, a few missions in, and the Damnation is parked in my hanger awaiting my someday return to PVP. For now, I sprung on a well-equipped Apocalypse with Mega Pulse’s to churn out some nasty damage and compliment the mean tank already on my Nighthawk. So far, so good – the two split aggro enough to be virtually worry free when it comes to tanking. And the Nighthawk’s solid damage output combined with the monster damage from the Apoc’s pulse lasers rip through NPC battleships like there’s no tomorrow. So at least I can keep using one bright and shiny ship when I log on now, even if that beautiful Damnation has to wait out her time in the hanger until I can find something useful for her to do.

Now my main is almost trained up to fly Gallente command ships….more shiny please!

Screencap by empeekay on Flickr