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Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Escalation

Escalation is the term used when a combat exploration complex sends you on an expedition. As I mentioned yesterday, that Provisional Sansha Outpost I got the day before yesterday escalated. "Things" however got "busy" as they say. So I logged on tonight and with 43 minutes left on the next leg, jumped in my trusty Wolf.

Off I went to the first location Eszur. This site I soloed myself. But it took me enormous amounts of time and T2 ammunition to kill the T2 rats. I get lucky and one of the pilots agrees to help me out having never done an escalation before. I also get lucky in that I find the trigger item for the next leg and kill it to get the next leg.

The next leg is all the way over in Molten Heath low sec 15 jumps away. I set our destination and, after picking up some loot, head for a pit stop in Rens along the way. Normaly my Wolf is buffer plated (a nice 400mm plate stuffed in there), which with the resists provides a nice tank for those PvP situation this wolf is actualy kitted out to handle. however the rats tend to chew the plate to shreds so I decided for the next one I'd use a repper instead of the plate. So I drop off the loot grab a T2 repper and go on my way repping as I go with the plate still in place because of the current damage from the first step of the escalation.

A quick pit stop in Teonusude to switch out the plate for the repper and put the AB back and it was on to the 2nd escalation. We land at the gate, which is occupied and proceed to start killing the mobs. This is when I notice that one of the mobs is a True Sansha! After killing a few more mobs we kill it and loot it before finishing off the mobs. This is where I get a low-grade slave alpha implant as the best drop from that one. We continue killing, warp in the plex, more killing and get the next stage of the escalation.

We make our way to another spot in Molten Heath and find ANOTHER True sansha. This time I almost buy it as two of the frigates at the warp in point were of the warp scrambling type. Some quick "kill the T2 frigates frist" followed by some great DPS from our AFs and I manage to survive with 40% structure left. Ok that was close. More NPC deaths follow and we get a low-grade slave epsilon implant.

At this point, being late in the evening (and having gone thru the proverbial boatload of ammo) I decide to call it short before going into the dead space and trigger the next escalation. If I'm lucky the rats at the gate will re-spawn overnight and be available to kill tomorow (oh please let there be an other True Sansha). Then I check the market for the two implants. OMG. I'm able to sell off both implant for a combined value of 95mil and split the take with Jim who came along for this little jaunt. Yes I know that if I put it up for sale the Epsilon would go for more but you never know when something as pricy as that will go and keeping track of when who you owe what to a month or so later was not a great idea. So I sold the implants and split the take 47 mil each after taxes.

Those True Sansha realy made the evening worth wile and gave a definite boost to both our wallets. As I commented: well you'll be able to buy yourself two more AF for this evening's work. So far this line of plexes has escalated 3 times. Hopefully it will keep going.

3 comments:

Benoit CozmikR5 Gauthier said...

A Low Grade Slave Epsilon. I'll be damned! That's the same implant I had you check the price on when I got lucky in Berta in my early Bozo days.

Nice catch man, and yeah, I'm starting to want to do some exploring :)

Carole Pivarnik said...

Ahhh, escalation sites are fun to do...made quite a bit of ISK of the goodies they tend to drop. Makes you wonder what those long arc missions are gonna be like that CCP is working on. And what unstable wormholes will bring us...

Letrange said...

@cozmik Yep, just watch out it's a bit of a skill hog especially for someone who doesn't have a lot of science skills.

@Mynsee I may, may go for that signal skill (Rank 8 - ouch) to level 5 so that it finishes on the 9th of March. We'll see where I'm at when it's time.