Ready for an Odyssey

One of those posts sitting in draft for a long time, but I figured I'd better get it out since Odyssey is now here.  I've moved back out of RVB and am looking forward to some playing around with the new mechanisms.  But first...

RVB vs. Brave Newbies

The war between RVB and Brave Newbies was a interesting step up in intensity from the usual Red v Blue.  Podding was certainly in the offering, though I neither was podded nor podded anyone else.  The scale in terms of number of ships was higher than the usual Red Standing Fleet takes on Blue Standing Fleet, and the size of the ships notched up.  Generally when I was around we were overmatched by BNI and we played raiding style attacks.  That particularly seemed good for our higher-skill pilots who reveled in diving in solo or in small groups to attack BNI formations.  I think I got a bit carried away with that myself when I drove my Tristan in to attack a Thrasher who appeared to be trying to get away.  Yeah, that didn't work so well.  My usual Thorax did do well, even if I did manage two lose two of them in rapid succession when we were contending with a large BNI defense fleet.

I had gotten used to active tanks for PVE and buffer tanks on the small ships I'd been using for PVP, particularly shield fit ships like Thrashers and Cormorants.  But with the RVB/BNI war there was a call out for bigger ships to get in fleet so I threw together a Brutix.  It feels so wrong to put together a Brutix that is going to ignore its active tank bonus.  Unfortunately the fleet I joined up with didn't end up seeing action before I had to logoff.  It would have been my first fleet action with serious Logi support - I had offered to buy and fit up a Exequror to use my newly trained remote armor repair skills, but the FC was only looking for T2 logi.

Out of RVB


In anticipation of doing a lot of exploration with Odyssey I've dropped out of RVB.  I've spent a bit more time with my industrial alt recently, in part due to IRL demands and in part because I wanted to get somethings done.  In particular I've rolled off a pair of new battleships for Jakob before the mineral needs jump with the new release.  I'm not sure if I'll end up using those for missions (or how fast I'll get bored of that) or just resell them at a profit.  I am tempted to grind up some standings at least to be able to make my own jump clones instead of switching back and forth to Estel Arador.

Exploration, ho?

I'm sure there is going to be a swarm of people trying out exploring.  I'll probably need to find some new exploration grounds.  Alternatively, this sounds like it might be a nice time to join the mob that will be sweeping lowsec looking for tag and combat.  I'd rather not let my security standing drop below -2.0 (and thus banned from 1.0 sec systems) so I think some ratting is going to be in there somewhere.  The recent fun with RVB/BNI and RVB Ganked has brought my sec status down a bit more - though to be honest it has been a long time since I had a positive sec status.  Neither a full pirate nor a full law-abiding high-seccer - I think I like that range.