Need help with L2 missions

New Citizens Q&A
1

Hello,
Recently I swapped from L1 to L2 missions, with Omen fitted with T1 stuff. At first it was fine but then came Recon (1/3) and before I managed to warp out the remaining half of my armor and full structure were gone and the Omen blew up. With the rest of my money I bought Maller, (thought it would be more tanky, I wouldnt mind trading dps for actually making the missions) got through Recon missions and now I am stuck at L2 Technological secrets. I just take too much damage. For the mission I fitted the Maller like this:

[Maller, Railx’s Maller]
Extruded Compact Heat Sink
Extruded Compact Heat Sink
400mm Rolled Tungsten Compact Plates
Medium Automated Carapace Restoration
Prototype Energized Explosive Membrane I
Prototype Energized Explosive Membrane I

10MN Y-S8 Compact Afterburner
Tracking Computer I
Medium Capacitor Booster I; Cap Booster 800

Heavy Beam Laser I
Heavy Beam Laser I
Heavy Beam Laser I
Heavy Beam Laser I
Heavy Beam Laser I

[Empty Rig slot]
[Empty Rig slot]
Medium Ancillary Current Router I

Infrared M x5
Imperial Navy Multifrequency M x5
Standard M x5
Optimal Range Script x1

Downtiered fit of what I found as a good Maller fit.
I hoped that swapping 2x EANM for explosive membranes would do the trick, but no. I warp in between 8-10 Thukker ships, set Keep distance at 10km to be at optimal Multifreq range to start kiting, but before I get there, shields and quarter of armor is gone and even then I take too long to kill and turrets miss often (still new to transversal kiting). Moreover, even when chugging the 800 boosters, Heavy beams and armor repair use Capacitor kinda quickly as well, usually have to keep AB off, seems like a poor choice of lasers on my side. Sometimes I manage to kill 1 ship, sometimes not, but then I have to warp out because I can´t afford to lose the last ship I have.

2

You’re about to get a lot of opinions and advice from a lot of people - hopefully I can assist!

Let’s go through things in some semblance of order.
A Maller can handle any level 2 missions. There’s nothing wrong with your choice of ship. It has a bonus to resistances and damage per level of Amarr Cruiser skill trained. If you’ve only got it trained to Level 1 then get it higher. Level 3 will give you 10% more damage (the same as another heatsink) and 8% better resistance to armour. Higher is better.

The fit is a sound concept. However use Meta guns such as the Heavy Modulated Energy Beam I. It is almost the same as a T2 gun, just can’t use advanced ammunition. Heavy Beam lasers are long range weapons with poor tracking - which makes it hard to hit small targets. Try Focused Modulated Medium Energy Beam I in their place - they trade a bit of range for better ability to hit small ships. They are also easier to fit.
Train your turret skills: Motion Prediction for better tracking, Sharpshooter for better range, Surgical Strike for more damage. Training up levels of Medium Energy Turret helps with damage as well.
The tracking computer can take a tracking script to help hit small ships. Or leave it unscripted for a mix or range and tracking. Don’t be afraid of using Standard Crystals or longer range ones.
You are an Amarrian pilot train Controlled Bursts. It really helps capacitor usage by turrets.
The Maller is a tanky brawler - it’s normally pulse laser fitted shorter range, heavy damage better tracking.

The general “use Meta modules” rule applies for all things, but you’re largely doing that already. There’s a list of good basic skills - the Magic 14 - that improve all ships, both by giving more CPU, PG and capacitor as well as improving speed and capacitor usage.

Try a Capacitor Recharger in place of the cap booster. The Standard Crystals use less capacitor than the Multifrequency ones (or any other crystal). Another alternative is to put a Stasis Webifier in a place of the tracking computer, slowing a target down makes it easier to hit. Webs are reasonably short range, but are more effective that improving tracking.
Capacitor Stability is over rated - killing targets quickly makes less demand on your repairer than just sitting there soaking damage.

Flying. Skills ≠ Experience.
The Maller is a brawler rather than a kiting ship - the Omen is a better kite, but we are where we are. Engage at range, start killing the small stuff before it gets too close. Use Orbit at whatever optimal you need. You are going to struggle against small fast ships that get close. You can carry three light drones, take them and use them on stuff that gets too close - that’s why you’ve a small drone bay. Acolyte I or similar will do (they are fast) but it’s your call on drones.
Watch your range - Energy Turrets have very little falloff. If you are “just missing” you’ve probably gone out of range. Flip crystals - it’s fast - or close range.

“I can’t afford to lose the last ship I have” - I know that feeling, at this point saying “only fly what you can afford to lose” isn’t going to help. I remember saving for my first cruiser: an Arbitrator. Be careful, plink the targets at range. Don’t be afraid to warp out, repair and let the capacitor recharge a bit and go back in, the NPCs don’t instantly respawn. Some Level 2 missions are harder than others. It’s worth looting wrecks - it’s all income. You can’t fit a salvager on the Maller, but salvage can be a reasonable income as well.

It’ll come to you. Don’t get disheartened, Eve is a very deep frustrating puzzle box. Feel free to contact me in game - it’s easier to answer questions in real time as you think of them.

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3

@Railx If you read through the description or you can read up on it here:

In this mission you do not have to kill any ships at all; you can just burn to the acceleration gate, activate it, then when you reach the 2nd pocket the mission should be completed.

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4

And that, @ISD_Sakimura, is a much better answer than mine was!
I’d assumed (ha!) That the mission was typical “kill all” level 2 mission since that’s what the OP was trying. Yep, that one’ll marmalise a cruiser.

Lesson: read the instructions carefully.

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5

Recon series is a fairly special series of missions. The reason you are dying to it is because you are not following the directions which it gave you.

You don’t kill the ships in recon except if you are being webbed, kill only what is webbing you. The ships in recon spawn quite OP and increase in numbers rapidly once you start killing them. Don’t kill, just go for the objective.

Not all missions are based on killing stuff, or at least not killing everything, you should read and check missions before you do them. try these 2 sites if you can’t make sense of off text description the agents give you in the game, but they are on / off sometimes inaccessable EVE-Survival: EVE-Survival and http://wiki.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?title=Category:Missions alternatively, there is always youtube https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eve+online+recon+mission

As far as your ship and fits go, it is also very dependant on your skills. You will have a very hard time no matter what if your skills for your Energized Explosive Membranes and Afternurners are very low for example. It won’t matter much if you double or single fit them.

Reactive Armor Hardeners are some of the best modules available in the game, but to be effective you need to have mostly level 5 skills for them, including all their related support skills, otehrwise they will eat too much cap, not give you full resistances and take too long to switch between damage types. So stay away from it as a new player.

Recon missions are all about tank and movement, not about killing the NPCs, and are not the only missions of this nature in the game. It may be the case that you simply need some of your skills a bit higher. You are dying due to mechanics, not your ship or fit.

If you are omega, and you are having too many difficulties, then get a Gnosis. Fit it with Micro Jump Drive and a second propulsion mod of your choice, eitehr AB or MWD, and armor tank. But in general cruisers are far more then sufficient for L2s. L2s were designed to be completed primarily with destroyers at all applicable level 3 skills and tech I equipment. So if you are in a cruiser you are already overkill.

So this is your first time you have to deal with actual game mechanics, other then jsut shooting stuff. I very highly recommend you familiarize yourself with something called transversal velocity. Make sure it is enabled on your overview, so you can ta least see it, go to youtube https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eve+online+transversal+guide check out some videos, then practice.

6

Thank you all for your answers and advice. It really is a complex game and a lot to soak up. Some of the skills you mention I already have - Cruisers and Motion prediction, Sharp shooter all to 3. Gonna add the surgical strike and perhaps more - if they are some Skills for membranes I certainly don´t have them, I´ll try to look them up - I have just Hull upgrades, Repair system and Mechanics from armor. I will certainly swap the lasers and perhaps the lenses to deal with the Cap a bit and fill my gaps in the Magic 14.
Gonna have to train dealing with Transversal velocity as well, I expect it to take a bit of practice though.

As far as the Recon missions go - I eventually found out it is not about killing and managed to pull through. The missions I got stuck on now are of killing type though.

EDIT: After training Explosive armor compensation to level 3, swaping turrets to one you proposed and swapping 400mm Tungsten for 800 Tungsten did the trick - Cap compumption went way down, with the aditional skills, the resistance actually work and the additional buffer is nice. I just didn´t know that there were skills for resistance membranes till now.

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7

You’re going to have lots of those moments- that’s pure EVE, right there. Whether your consider it a bug or a feature will dictate how much you enjoy the game :wink:

That said, you deserve props for asking questions, trying to understand where and why you were having problems, listing to input, adapting, and getting through it. If that’s how you are approaching the game, you’re going to do very well and have a good time, so keep it up!

EVE is deep. Like, crazy deep and complex at times. But keep looking for opportunities to learn and grow, ask questions and seek help when you need it, take losses in stride, and the community will be here to help you out.

o7

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8

Try pulling more range, getting good hits is important and range makes that easier even if you have to use lower damage ammo. Lv2 ships usually have pretty low HP so just a few good hits should kill most of them making the incoming damage that much less. Also looks like around 40km damage should mostly stop since it looks to mostly be missile damage, and since you are moving away from the missiles that can make that range even less. NPC Ships

also consider active hardeners, +50% resist is a lot better than whatever a t1 energized gives.

Lastly I’d drop the 400mm plate all it really does is slow you down, an extra resistance mod will likely do better for EHP purposes.

As for recon you can technically do it in a shuttle, but I’d suggest the fastest frigate you can use, warp in 1-2 MWD cycles and you should be at the gate ready to warp out.

Maller has a pretty big cargo hold so it can easily hold enough cap boosters for way more cap than a single recharger is going to give. Typically need to stack a bunch of recharge mods to get anywhere near close to what a cap booster can provide. Using a large cap battery would probably be the best option there but I’m not sure the maller has the fitting room for that.

9

Here is a starting point to help you out, its called the magic 14. There is much more but this is a good starting point. Ifyou are focused on armor ships you might want to put the shield skills on the backburner etc. Obviously go with your favorite weapon type. The Magic 14 - EVE University Wiki

So check that out.

Also, this is a bit of a side note but … While Amarr is OK and you are not locked to any faction and eventually in long term you will have all factions ships etc. For PvE, you are far better off going Caldari ships, missiles + shields then Amarr.

In general for PvE weapons that do not require capacitor use are much better then those that do, in addition, shield fits have an option of going buffer, active rep or passive regen, with armor you can only go buffer or active and buffer is not recommended for PvE.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many excellent PvE armor ships and fits which I use jsut as I use shields, jsut that starting out to intermediate levels sheilds are much easier.

If you are Omega, then its no big deal, just start training other ships, if alpha, simply make another account, another character and let it train the other ships and applicable skills. Its free so why not ? Might want to do this even if you are omega on your 1st account.

On every module, you can hit “show info” eitehr while its in your inventory or in the fitting simulation tool and you will see tabs. Switch to see “requirements” or “required skills” tab, and that will largely tell you what skilsl are needed. But some skills are not required to equip or operate a module, only make it better, so those will not show up.

Open your character sheet, skills, and enable / display all. Do not have them limited by “meet requirements” or something like that. This will show you a full list of all skills, then go down to the armor, or shield, or hull categories and you can mosue over for a tooltip or right click for “show info” on them and they will tell you exactly and precisely what they do.

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10

I don’t like spending money.
It’s a perfectly good point, and I do on some mission ships use a booster, but only if I can’t handle the cap drain rathe than a permanent feature.

11

the cost of cap boosters are pretty much a rounding error, not using them is penny wise pound foolish.

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12

Meh, use a ship / fit that doesn’t use much cap and remains 100% stable instead. Done and done. Get extra cargo space for ammo, loot, mission objective, whatever else, less crap to worry about, get better tank that won’t run out on you, etc. etc.

Leave cap boosters for things like T5 Abyss, or burners, or PvP, for plain old missions, especially lowbie ones, its silly to even use them at all.

13

Even though the Recon issue was solved the fit itself is flawed, if you’d work a bit on that and understand WHY some different choices work out better then you’ll be a better pilot.

First of all you went for the biggest guns you could find: heavy beam lasers. While they have the most dps (for beams) and range they also have higher fitting requirements, more cap use and less tracking. It’s the tracking that generally will cause issues in a level 2 mission as those mostly consist of frigate size targets. This is further compounded by the fact that the Maller doesn’t really have a lot of drone power as these are generally used to take care of short range orbiting targets.

This can be solved by good understanding of how tracking works and thus piloting properly and prioritising the right targets, but in reality you’re just better off using less unwieldy weapons. Whether that is using smaller beam lasers (focussed medium beams) or even Pulse lasers depends on the mission.

Then we get to your cap issue, a quick glance at Pyfa shows a horrendous cap stability issue. It’s not that you need to be stable but it needs to be workable, you’ve been trying to solve this with a cap booster but this is not needed, for pve there are better solutions.

Then we get to the low slots, where you fitted a 400mm plate. Ignoring the fact that a 400mm plate isn’t going to do much on a cruiser, the plate itself is fairly useless in almost all forms of PVE. It just adds extra hitpoints, you’d be far better off to either increase your resists so that you get hit for less damage, meaning repairing it becomes more efficient, or by adding more dps or tracking modules because if you kill faster you have to tank less.

A fit that combines all the above would look something like this. It’s well rounded resists wise, durable with enough staying power (more than enough for any level 2 mission apart from tanking Recon :P). I’ve not gone for the most expensive options to keep the cost down a bit:

[Maller, Maller PVE]

Medium ‘Accommodation’ Vestment Reconstructer I
Limited Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane I
Limited Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane I
Extruded Compact Heat Sink
Extruded Compact Heat Sink
Fourier Compact Tracking Enhancer

10MN Monopropellant Enduring Afterburner
Large Compact Pb-Acid Cap Battery
Tracking Computer I

Focused Anode Medium Particle Stream I
Focused Anode Medium Particle Stream I
Focused Anode Medium Particle Stream I
Focused Anode Medium Particle Stream I
Focused Anode Medium Particle Stream I

Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I

Hobgoblin I x3

Infrared M x5
Multifrequency M x5
Radio M x5
Xray M x5

14

There you go. The fit above, posted by Not Phoebe looks good if you want to stick with Maller, though I would switch ships entirely to something that does not use weapons which use capacitor in the 1st place. Which in this game means missiles, drones and projectile.

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Ironically, for the best ship for Recon 1 of 3 you have to pay about 500k ISK in sum for ship and fitting: a passively tanked Executioner (for Amarr; Condor, Atron, and Slasher do the job as well) and a MWD. This Mission is finished within about 15-30 seconds.

But I know the feeling, I also tried a Vexor (died), and a T1 Myrmidon (had to flee in structure twice). After some skilling and reading I finally killed all the rats with a better fitted Myrmidon :wink:
It’s just for fun and to learn, kind of a milestone.

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16

Thank you all for the information and builds provided. I swapped few things around, dropped the plates and for now it seems to be working EZ PZ :slightly_smiling_face: I certainly do love the game and its depth - found switch to see all skills available, not just the ones bought and I am loving it :grin: It´s gonna take couple of months to train all though.

As for the Amarr disadvantage in PvE I´ll yet have to see. When I started I didn´t know they are damage-type locked and the other races aren´t . I´d like to stay with them for I like the ships visuals and lasers and most of all - learning other skills would take couple of months on top of that - swapping armor for shields, lasers for missles. So possibly in the future, when I hit a wall that´s gonna be tough to break or if missions take several times longer than they should. I would really prefer shield tanking to armor tanking -I am getting quite nervous when dropping to armor, because by the time I evaluate that I am taking too much damage and have to warp out, it might be too late to save my ship like it happened with my Omen… but the skills time, yeah.

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17

I like @Boldly_Gone’s approach.

Eve is about enjoying the puzzle box. It’s very deep, complex intertwined and completely utterly unique. I still see and find new things.

Is there a right solution/ship to a situation? No. If there was the Eve would be completable and boring. There are some ways of cracking missions that are easier than others but best is subjective in Eve.

I’m an Amarrian pilot. Most of my time is spent in Amarrian hulls - balancing Capacitor against damage and firepower is a fact of life; you fly a certain way, you manage range a certain way. It’s an Amarrian flying style. It has good points and bad points.
I can fly Caldari missile/shield boats. But they fly and feel different, it’s a different set of reflexes and styles. CCP should be appreciated for that - the racial ships feel different. Minmatar gunships are also very not Amarrian; you don’t fly a projectile system the same way you do an energy system (in falloff? Really?! - I mean I’ve heard of it, but…).
So, @Railx, fly Amarrian ships. I will salute a fellow believer when I see you. They will teach you a lot. A lot of skills are common to all races, cross-training later is relatively simple - you’ll have reasonable drone skills (we’ve some good drone boats - the Arbitrator is under-appreciated) and some missile skills. Then you’ll feel the difference between the races rather than just read about them.
Your logical Level 3 mission ship is a Harbinger. You’ll like that; very Amarrian. A golden brick delivering the Light of God to the Heathens.

Btw: going from Amarrian ships to Minmatar ships is very interesting - speed as defence, shields and fighting in falloff. I lost a ship in a mission purely because my reflexes were all Amarrian - an interesting (and expensive) lesson.

Anyway, there’s no Right or wrong in New Eden, “better” is subjective. You are a capsuleer: enjoy your freedom and immortally. I’m glad you are enjoying life in New Eden.

2 Likes
18

I could not agree more- this is really the wonderful thing about EVE. My usual L4 runner is a Rattlesnake, but I just picked up a Nightmare as well. Both are extremely effective, but it’s striking how completely different they are to fly and use. That’s really a sign of great design and truly one of the things I love about this game.

2 Likes
19

Well, it’s there and it isn’t.

Amarr certainly takes more skills to use their ships, people keep saying Minmatar is the most skill intensive due to the fact they can tank shield or armour but it’s fairly easy to get decent skills in both. To fit and use Amarr ships anywhere ok you have to have maxed out skills for fitting and cap, otherwise it’s going to be crap.

Apart from that there’s the obvious damage type issue but that can be solved with copious amounts of DPS, if only people would fit that way. Most people go for easy going, cap stable, low effort fits. That’s why ships like Raven hulls and drone ships are loved so much: easy to use and even when mediocre still ok.

But if you try to make laser ships easy to use then their dps becomes anaemic and suddenly you have a ship that still has damage type issues, has crap dps comparable to others and it’s still not as easy to use as other ships.

The only way to make laser ships do well is to go in deep: fit for dps, tracking and range where needed. You will have cap issues, you can’t play semi-afk and you have to play intelligently, then you’re rewarded with so much ranged dps that you simply don’t really care too much about damage type issues, you’re melting faces.

But you have to have a form of pride in sticking to your guns (lasers in this case) and going “yes I know there’s better options, go away”. It’s the Amarr way.

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20

Well that is kinda my way of playing games, so I guess I picked a right race :grin: