Azual Down Under

It's a long time since I had a holiday - too long. By the time this post goes live, I will hopefully have landed somewhere on the other side of the world, in the mysterious land they call Australia.

I'll be away for three weeks, returning on 20th November. I have a few more articles in varying stages of completion (including the next part of the faction cruisers series covering the pirate cruisers), however none of these are really polished enough to go live just yet, so expect no more blog updates until I get back.

To keep you going in the meantime, I do have a little alternative reading for you!

Know Your Enemy - Navy Cruisers

Faction cruisers may be t1 in name and skill requirements, but they are far stronger than their t1 counterparts in terms of performance. As with the faction frigates, there is a clear divide between the navy cruisers (belonging to the four empire factions) and pirate cruisers (belonging to the npc pirate factions). To begin with, we're going to look at the navy cruisers.

New Battlecruisers and Balance Changes

It seems that the preliminary stats for the four new racial battlecruiser have found their way into the singularity cache files. There's also an unverified (but plausible looking) list of stat changes which surfaced about the same time. Obviously assuming these are genuine, they're still very early drafts and subject to change. That said, they give you an idea of where CCP is heading with the winter expansion.

Edit: Looks like the stats are confirmed as genuine, but as expected are an early build and by no means final.

Know Your Enemy - Logistics

The Logistics ships are the ultimate force multipliers; there is no other cruiser (except for perhaps the falcon) which provides a greater boost to a gang's effectiveness. These ships are the healers of eve, providing your active tank so that you don't have to and doing it well. While a local active tank might tank a solo opponent or with a bit of bling maybe even a small gang, a pair of logistics ships can keep you alive indefinitely in the face of otherwise overwhelming firepower.

Rifters are Red, Merlins are Blue - What's RvB and is it for you?

My recent post about the RvB gang night reminded me of an article I've been meaning to write for some time. Those of you who have been following the blog for some time will remember I took a brief break from Agony to try out some of Eve's other PVP opportunities. It ended up being much briefer than anticipated, such that I only ended up trying one of the avenues that I'd been hoping to delve into, and even that for less time than I'd hoped. That avenue was RvB.

Know Your Enemy - HICs

As their name suggests, Heavy Interdictors (also known as HICs) are the larger cousins of the Interdictor class. Where the light interdictors were fast and fragile, the HICs are slow and tough. Where dictors typically had bonuses providing additional damage output (although they weren't always fit to use it), HICs are designed far more with tanking on mind, with offensive power usually being an afterthought. However, it isn't simply the hulls which have changed - the way in which each class provides its interdiction capability is also very different.

Quick Tips - Dock Bookmarks

This is a fairly basic one, but it might be of use to some of you. You know occasionally when you warp to station and have to power a little way before you can dock? Usually it's only a few seconds so it's no big deal, but what if there are hostiles on station and you're in something especially slow or fragile? Ah, that could be more of a problem.