I just have a quick question. After playing EVE on and off for 6 years, of which most of it has been spent mining, I was as normal mining in a belt when 4 blood raider punishers arrived and with in a minute my hulk was space dust. Now I use drones to keep pirates in check and don’t normally have an issue but these particular rats seemed overtly powerful and after searching Google I couldn’t find any reference to them. They are even too much of a match for my mission frigate… just wondering if anyone else has seen their ilk and what they know of them?
Are they common? Is this recent? They are more powerful then anything I have encountered in high sec… hitting for 200 damage a shot…I just don’t want to invest another 250 mil ISK into a hulk to find out that this is a new norm.
This is the new norm if you are in a system with a Forward Operations Base (that’s why these special Blood Raider/Guristas NPC spawn) and if you have bad standings towards Blood Raider Covenant.
Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) are new content in hisec. They come in two flavors: Gurista and Blood Raider. If these bases spawn in your hisec system you can expect pirate mining ops and raiding rats (you have now experienced those). These rats will destroy your ships and will pod you.
How do you find these ships/bases? Set your overview to see them: In the overview settings go to the Entities category. Scroll to the very bottom and include all ships that begin with this character: . Next, open the structures category. Select the structure that begins with this character: .
Only NPCs that begin with can be seen on your Directional Scanner.
Finally, the FOB can be found using combat probes. Open the probe scanner window and create a new filter. In the structure category include only the structure. It is really easy to scan to 100%.
. Next, open the structures category. Select the structure that begins with this character: