Step 1: Scram and web the drifter cruiser with something small and fast.
Step 2: Bring in two shield repping Ishtars, one with a scram and one with a web. Have Ishtars tackle the Drifter, warp your small ship out.
Step 3: Deploy LIGHT Drones and an MTU. Set Drones to guard the other Ishtar.
Step 4: go afk while drones slaughter Frigates for hours. When you’re sick of it, or your drones have finally killed the Cruiser, pack up.
Step 5: Profit from the warehouse of Agency Boosters you now have.
NOTE: don’t bother salvaging, it’s just not worth the time.
Good event. Took me a bit to work out a process, but once done, I could do these simply. The beacon/scan side made it more interesting and worthwhile, but lowsec should have offered more … better booster drops perhaps.
Drops … good enough, probably 3Bn worth of implants and boosters, plus god know how much for Gnosis/Sunesis.
Took a couple of newbs with me to do some - they loved how hard it was - almost like they could see how progressing would help. The isk they got made their day.
a few days in the frigates started warping out when the cruiser would have even if your scram is keeping the cruiser their. CCP kept fiddling with this event to stop people from engaging in curtain types of behavior. I guess they didn’t like people farming the frigates for the sleeper salvage.
They did the same thing with the original Drifter battleships, people found ways to keep out of range of the dd and kill the drifters so CCP gave the drifters infinite weapons range.
Why long range? You could use some t1 microwarpdrive to go above 2000 m/s and overburning it could be even 2600 m/s. 3 T1 webs. Just DPS had to be really more than 350. That is the hardest part with non faction cruisers, because you would have to use active armor tank with microwarpdrive and 3 webs in mid AND damage mods AND drones.
So I could catch it when I land. No chasing.
I did the event for the cash. Not so I could chase a cruiser down. 3 t1 webs is moronic to use on a single target with a Vigilant.
Scramming by cruiser was around 10, rarely 11 km, and webs worked a lot better for slowing cruiser than scrambler affecting your inertia. I used 3 t1 webs with Stratios just to slow cruiser down so much to get at 0 with it, and then my speed was enough to keep it in webs until killed, voila.
When I would keep cruiser in a place upon landing, someone could steal loot from me just by warping and coming close, also the drones were damaging my tank with all of them around.
I liked how it went with those acelerators. I think it could stay that way. Drop rate was also good for me. Enough to use it and sell some, but also not enough to flood the market.
I think the escalation was a complete waste of time. mostly because the rats warping after delay means you need as many points as you want to kill rats.
So basically, the exact fit mentioned as ‘only a few select fits viable for the event’ earlier.
It’s not adding much to the conversation to weigh in after a week or two and say “the working fit you guys all referred to two weeks ago actually works”.
Vigilant prices (and the few other ships that were “uncomplicated”) jumped by 50% shortly into the event. As already stated, if you owned one of those ships before the event, you were good. If you didn’t, it wasn’t worth buying one just to do the event.