I went through lots of different WH’s with a Venture during my first WH experiences and made a few millions thx to Gas clouds as well.
My next ship was the Astero during Capsuleer Day XIX event where you got Smuggler Cases each for 1 million. Made lots of bucks. Now returning to EVE again, I went to WH’s in the same Astero:
A lot of Unsecured and Forgotten sites or simply: nothing at all for the Astero. Not one Ghost site after many hours.
As I understand, my targets with the Astero rather are C1 and C2 WH’s because otherwise, despite looking nice, the Astero is too weak. Do I miss something here or do I need a bigger and better ship to deal with guarded sites? Good potential sites within WH’s for the Astero seem to be very rare.
All this boils down to this question:
How to make more money with the Astero?
Hey mate, sounds like you just had bad luck. Plenty of Ruined (relic) and Central (data) sites to be found in WH space. With any dedication you can easily pull a couple hundred million a day out, with a lot more possible if you get lucky (have pulled over 500M outta a single Sansha WH before). The sites you are looking for can be found in C1, C2, C3 … and shattered C4s. Astero is a fine ship for it, all I fly, but needs to be properly fitted for your mission. And if all you want to do is scan, hack, and gtfo when someone like me decloaks on you at a can, then a CovOps fit is probably better. Astero is for fighting as well as explo.
Yeah, had some bad luck incl. a destructed Astero but made quite a profit. Though, my feeling tells me that the ISK/hr rate is not as I expected after returning to EVE right into the Astero.
I struggle to see any reason to continue riding the Astero instead of “just” a Heron.
Regarding C3’s: After dozens of WH’s (I mean it, a lot of them) I never saw any unguarded sites there to hack. Never. Relying on C3’s unguarded sites seems like wasting time. Went with the Heron to Nullsec and made 120 millions while at the same time, I’d be still hopelessly scanning WH’s in search of rare sites in C3’s.
What would be the next level after the Astero? Loki for a Minmatar? Is a Loki able to enter more dangerous sites?
Again I will say … you must have just had a bad day wth C3s … Just scanned dwon two relics in a C3 no more than 5 mins ago. The advanatge of Astero to Heron, apart from PV Pperspective is the CovOps cloak . As to the Guarded Data and relic sites … from a hacking perspective thier cans do not drop that much, the better loot comes from killing the rats … can a T3C run those … properly fitted I would guess so, but I don’t do those site and use T3Cs for hunting/fighting so not the best to answer there.
From my experience, Astero is fine for the stronger and faster scanning as an explo frig. WHs — C1-3 only “Ruined” and “Central” sigs, Nulls — everything but L5 sigs (which you won’t scan in Heron anyway).
My regular explo night looks like this. I pop a couple of boosters and start from either Signal or Noise filament jump no nulls, where I look around. Then 1 of 3 scenarios happen:
not much activity — I proceed in nulls and loot is actually juicier than WH. Quite often I crack 5-10M cans there, but there are not that many sigs in nulls, unfortunately.
I proceed, but sigs are sh1t and I turn to a first C1-3 wh, then more likely I come across a system with 2-4 esplo sites (Ruined/Central)
too much activity, I use one more Noise/Signal and the cycle begins.
The session lasts as long as boosters work and my back lets me which is normally 2 hours. I never get back without 50M in my hold.
Based on my experience, it is possible to find very nice pirate (unguarded) relic sites in WH space, the Sansha ones being especially lucrative for those yummy in tact armor plates!
That being said I tend to find clusters of them, and not very consistently so I can understand this being a bottleneck if you are flying an astero and looking to make relic/data sites your primary income source. I tend to view them as an added bonus when flying my covops and doing necessary scanning and mapping, though perhaps others with more skill and perseverence would challenge this.
If I’m focusing on relic/data sites I like you find I make more isk / hr in nullsec. I think this is because it’s easier to traverse a large number of systems quickly and there tend to be fewer sigs to scan down in each system. If a system doesn’t have the right type of sigs, I can move on very quickly to the next gate in nullsec. In WH space, I not only have to find the relics amoung often many other sigs, but I also have to scan down my exit to the next system.
Perhaps moving on to another ship that can do both combat sites and relic/data would widen your options for content when exploring WH space. A well fit T3C / Stratios and a mobile depot in the cargohold to switch to the right tool for each job might be both more lucrative and offer more variety of gameplay
