So, I took my 2nd stab at scanning yesterday. 1st attempt was in a 0.5 system with pretty low traffic. 1st scan attempt at lowest strength gave me 3 warpable hits and 1 weak hit. I bookmarked the 3 good ones and launched more probes in order to pinpoint the last spot. I'm faster now than on my 1st try, I guess, but I'm still not "quick" by any stretch of the imagination. That said, I put a couple of scan strength rigs on my Anathema and started using Sister's probes for their innately stronger scan, and I think that helped, becuz I was quite noticeably (to myself) faster.
Anyway, the final hit turned out to be a 4/10 Guristas plex.
I don't know max ship sizes or anything, so I decided to go in with my Vengeance assault frigate. No mids, but you don't need tackle in PvE, and it's got a great armor tank, good damage and range with T2 lasers and Scorch S ammo, it's decently quick with an AB, and it's cap stable even with the armor repper and AB running too.
So... I decided to hit the 4/10 1st. I warped in and there's a whole lotta ships there, but nothing bigger than a cruiser. I don't know how the aggro mechanics work or anything, but when a bunch of ships auto-aggroed me I targeted them back and went to work. With the Scorch I've got about a 15 km optimal and 18 km effective range. As I was mocing in to range though, a lot of missiles started coming in from the cruisers. My shields melted, which is not unexpected as it's an armor-tanked ship, but then even with the repper on the armor still seemed to be dropping rather precipitously.
As this was my 1st "real combat" in an armor ship, I got worried and decided to warp out. But by the time I aligned my armor was already going up faster than down, so I tried to cancel the warp but was too slow. So yeah, I warped back in as fast as I could and, well..... it took a while. The frigate all popped in 2-3 volleys, but the cruisers took some killing. I tried getting in closer and switching to multifrequency crystals, but with my AB on and orbiting at 3km in order to get a 5km orbit inside the MF's optimal I was outrunning my own tracking. I tried closer orbits without the AB on also, but still didn't seem to hit much, so I ended up going back to about an 8km orbit and using the Scorch. I was still inder their guns and going 890-ish m/s made it so that even light missiles were only doing about 11 damage to me. Even with 8 cruisers trying to kill me, I was sitting at full armor the whole time with the repper on. That was kinda nice, really.
After the ships were all gone I switched to the MF again and took out the structures. Nothing dropped in the 1st room, but I didn't really expect it to either.
2nd room was more or less the same as the 1st, but destroying the structures netted me a nice Pith-C Kinetic Shield Amp and an 8th Tier Overseer drop.
From there it was off to the other combat sites. 1st one had 3 or 4 small waves and they died easy and the structures didn't drop anything. 2nd one had many waves. They just kept coming. Finally a single ship appeared -- faction spawn! Dread Guristas Killer. I got 1000 faction heavy missiles off that ship, plus a semi-rare DG tag. Woot!
And the 3rd site was crap again. Ah well.
Headed back to base and got into the Anathema again, and scanned a different system. Got 2 hits I had to scan down -- a hacking site and an archaeology site.
Back to base and equipped a Drake with a codebreaker and an analyzer and headed out. Hit the archaeology site 1st. Opened 2 containers -- 1 was empty and the other had some crap salvage in it. Then on to the hacking site. Opened the 1st container and 3 frigs spawned. I had full heavy missiles on, but with a TP I still 1-shot each of them. 1st container was empy too :'( 2nd and 3rd containers had datacores, decryptors, spare parts, electronic links, and. . .um. . something else I don't remember . . . in them. It was a fun morning. Not as profitable as running L4's would have been, but it was more fun, so.. . .score this one a win!
2 comments:
That is about how scanning is for me too. It’s not quite as good of money as running a lvl 4 mission. It just has a bit more variety and a small chance at an officer spawn. I do like the recent changes to make the easy combat sites pop up automatically on the first scan.
Interesting that you had to rig your ship and use sister probes. I have been probing in my BC with no bonuses and just normal probes and haven’t had trouble tagging stuff. ~Centuri
I wouldn't say that I "have to" -- my 1st ever attempt at scanning was in the Anathema, but unrigged and using regular probes. I know that a lot of my slowness with it was due to it being my 1st try, but it still took close to an hour to pin down the WH to lowsec that I found, and it required *6* probes out and all at the 0.25 AU range.
On this foray, my skills are now all at the 4/3/3/3 rather than the 3/0/0/0 I think I was at. Might have been 3/3/3/0, but. . anyway.... I decided to do what I could to the ship to make my scanning easier -- thus the rigs. Add the higher skills, and... I found things a lot faster, only needed 4 probes and never had to make the range less than 1 AU either.
A corpmate is using an unbonused BC and scanning just fine also. I may get to that point in a Drake or a Hurricane, but I'm not that confident yet -- it's all really new to me still.
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