Another case of D’Oh

I think I mentioned it before: The anti-seizure medication I have to take comes with a number of rather annoying side effects. Among them: Nightmares. A particularly bad one woke me up in the middle of the night and falling asleep again was impossible for a while. So, gaming it was.

After having spent a lot of time annoying the Sanshas I decided to leave them alone for now. My next goal is the northwest, where the Serpentis Corporation runs their shady business operations. Remembering my previous mistake I made sure this time to actually tank for the Serpentis damage profile: Kinetic and Thermal.

Within a few jumps I scanned down “Serpentis Narcotics Warehouses“, a 3/10 DED site and perfect to test out my new fit. Everything worked out well and even the loot fairy was on my site. A drop of roughly 90mil of loot made me a happy explorer. A few jumps later I found a “Serpentis Corporation Hydroponics Site“; eager to collect more loot and confident that I could take the damage easily, I took the gate.

It wasn’t until I reached the last pocked when I realized my mistake. Out of habit I had added an active tank, which is alright when you fly with your wormhole hunter but less than optimal when you do combat exploration. Willow always compensated for that with a cap booster, but that one has been replaced with a relic analyzer. And while I did tank quite nicely I knew that my time was very limited since my cap ran out fast. Of course I had to warp just when I had the boss in structure, leaving my drones behind.

Now I am sitting in station, annoyed about my mistake. My market alt has bought all the modules I need to fix the current fit and I am waiting for the hauler to drop it off. Better luck next time. I think I can go sleep again.

Blood Raiders Psychotropic Depot

One of the things I hardly ever did so far was running the higher DED sites. Within the Eve lore DED stands for Direct Enforcement Department, Concord’s police division which tracks down and attacks criminals. DED sites are rated by their difficulty from 1/10 to 10/10, with 10/10 being the most difficult. You have to scan them down and the more difficult ones are in Low-Sec and Null-Sec. They have the potential of dropping valuable faction loot and blueprints.

So when I scanned down a “Blood Raiders Psychotropic Depot” in Karan (Aridia) I decided it might be a good time to give one a try. Checking Eve Uni’s wiki I learned that it is rated 5/10. I wasn’t sure whether my Stratios could handle it but after some encouraging words from a friend it didn’t seem impossible.

The site consists of 3 pockets. The last pocket contains a ship (the Exsanguinator) which might drop faction loot. The composition of the rats can be found here. Bottom line:

• 1. pocket: lots of ouch
• 2. pocket: lots of ouch
• 3. pocket: dayum….so much ouch

I usually fly a rather cheap active armor tanked Stratios (less than 20k EHP). It costs less than 400mil Isk and I break even with one or two evenings of exploration. So I knew that I had to be a bit more careful. The first pocket did not decloak me when landing. I slowboated away until the closest ship was about 60km away from me. I then decloaked, launched my sentries and took care of everything headed towards me. While rather slow, this method made sure that I never went into deep armor.

The second pocket has several sentry towers at the outgoing gate but from I read you can just ignore them (I killed them anyway). While using my sentry drones approach I noticed two pilots constantly jumping in and out of the system. Since my site has to be scanned down and there is no way to fly directly to the second pocket I wasn’t too worried. But I still kept an eye on dscan and not surprisingly one of the pilots soon launched probes.

Once the 2nd room was cleared I decided that I had to change my strategy. All sites I had checked mentioned 3 webbing towers upon landing plus a substantial amount of alpha damage. So I launched my Mobile Depot and swapped my medium armor repper with a 1600 steel plate. I am quite happy that I did that since at this point I noticed that I tanked at all for EM damage, the main type of damage of the local rats. I had simply forgotten about that. A few moments later the error was corrected. 60k EHP should be enough to survive the first seconds.

Just when I scooped up the depot an Astero landed on grid and burned towards me. In addition local started to spike and I saw a Legion, a Stiletto and a Vexor on grid. Not sure what the others were flying but I didn’t want to find out. But I also didn’t want to give up the site. So I took the gate.

Instantly upon landing I got redboxed and webbed. The Exsanguinator was 40 km off me and that was the only thing I cared about. The thing with these sites is that you can kill the boss and then just warp off. Return to the site after 2 min or so and the rats will have despawned and only the wreck remains (hopefully filled with loot). I launched my medium drones, bookmarked the site and started to align out. Local was now at 7 pilots and my armor started to melt rather quickly. When the boss finally popped I was at 5% armor and instantly warped out.

I am not sure if the others entered the room but I doubt it. They would not have been able to handle the damage. As soon as I landed I messed up big time: I launched my depot and decloaked. Not the best idea when the enemy might have combat drones around and to be honest I have no clue why I did that. The depot seemed to take extra long to online and when it finally did…I dc’d.

I hate my ISP. Of course it is Comcast. Over the next 5 min I spammed the launcher button only to be greeted by an error message. I worried about my ship. I worried about my loot. When I was finally back I was alone system. I refitted and started to warp to my loot bm. The can was still there! And so was the loot:

Time to finish: 50 min

Cost: 4 Infiltrator drones and a heart attack

Loot:

• Corpum B-Type Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane
• Corpum B-Type Medium Energy Neutralizer
• Corpum B-Type Energized Kinetic Membrane
• 18th Tier Overseer’s Personal Effects (guaranteed drop), ~42mil Isk
• Total worth: ~ 550mil Isk (Jita sell)

Not bad. Might do this more often.