Present Purpose of Missions

New Citizens Q&A
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In the digging I’ve done trying to grapple with early days gameplay, exploration and low-sec salvage look like easy ways to get into a bigger bankroll. Resource Wars are entertaining enough and the cosmetic rewards might be profitable or at least novel. They are, at the very least, short and sweet. By comparison, payouts for missions are wimpy for a greater time investment, which I assume is due to them being a low-risk and solitary activity.

If my understanding is correct, a pilot does the mission to get Loyalty Points and convert them into ISK, albeit far less time-efficient. Even selling raw ore from a Venture is faster. With no vanity items for the various NPC corps and factions, it seems that missions are the least interesting and rewarding content in the game that I’ve seen thus far. Yet, the agents are everywhere by the hundreds. I know the game is not a race, but is there a point to these other than the warm feeling of earning a glowing commendation from NPC agents?

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Eh… which missions have you tried? L4s actually let you make a fair amount of isk and are one of the best HS income sources after incursions. They definitely beat mining in a venture, HS exploration and resource wars.

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Well I have definitely not unlocked a Level 4 anywhere, so I guess the scaling of the rewards is the key… I’m now wondering about the time investment to unlock them. Guess it is worth while in the long run?

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As @Erethond mentioned, not all missions are created remotely equally :slight_smile: They also fill certain niches in gameplay.

For example, I dislike courier missions, but some enjoy those as a semi-passive way to generate income while watching TV or chatting with friends in-game.

Missions scale up significantly as you get higher in level. A L4 security mission can be a heck of a lot of fun to run and generate millions in ISK, loot, and salvage. For example, Dread Pirate Scarlett (one of the higher-end L4s) can generate between 35-45 million ISK in bounty, loot, and salvage. Not too bad :slight_smile:

Two other important points about running missions:

FIrst, they build standing with corps. This can help reduce fees on services such as selling items and reprocessing in that corp’s stations.

Second, as you mention, they earn you Loyalty Points, or LP, that can be spent in special LP stores for some very valuable items. These items can either be used by you or sold on the market for substantial profit.

So, my advice is to not write them off yet. Get your standing up to run some L3s and then L4s and I guarantee that you will have some fun and make good money with them.

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Thanks, I appreciate the breakdown. I will try to mix them in with the “more exciting” options as I can. I read that the Epic Arc can be redone, so I plan to do it again in June for another boost, maybe get there a little sooner.

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You cannot get implants or BPC with the venture outside of Mining missions. Missions are also more fun than mining or anomaly ratting in null sec because they are more varied. If you think missions are the least interesting and rewarding activity in EVE, you either have not run enough missions yet or you have not done mining or anomaly ratting long enough. :wink:

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Always happy to help. The subject of standings in general is a complex one that could (and has) filled it’s own thread, but essentially there are 3 kinds of standings- Agent, Corp, and Faction. Corp is the easiest to grind and is what is important to getting higher level missions. You will get a bump in Agent and Corp standing for each mission you do, and that is how you get to L3 and L4 missions. It doesn’t take as long as it seems, but Security Missions will get you there faster.

For the Epic Arc, yes, you can do that every 3 months. Each faction has one as well, but that’s a different topic (and gets into the complexities of standings a lot deeper).

As for exciting, well… let me just say you haven’t lived until you’ve gone into The Blockade, popped a couple of the wrong triggers, and are suddenly looking at a few dozen angry pirates who are chewing through your tank faster than you thought possible :rofl:

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Depends.

The income comes from blitzing L4s, L5s or farming burners. But its still no where near as effective many times over as Null or WH or even LS ratting. All the lower missions are just something to keep you busy and give you a sort of “training” for that. Even if you just do L4 clears instead of blitzing you will get no where near decent income.

So it takes a properly set up character, ships and fits, and some experience to do this.

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Beats mining.

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Yes, epic arcs can be run every 90 days. The Sisters of EvE epic arc is meant to be run by new players and gives a nice little chunk of standing with the faction you choose to help at the end. The Amarr, Caldari, Gallente, and Minmatar epic arcs are about level 4.3. The bounties/tags in them are ok and the reward item at the end of them is often not terrible as well. There are two pirate level 3 epic arcs also, but those are, of course, heresy.

Level IV missions are more fun in a group. I would encourage you to do them with at least one other. A person who can accept a lvl 4 fleets up with players who cannot yet, accepts a lvl 4 mission, and eveyone flies it together. Yes, the money is split amongst fleet members, but fun is more important than game money.

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I haven’t run the low level missions in a fairly long time so I can’t give realistic estimates but I can give some guidelines. I roughly remember the mission rewards increasing by 5 to 10 times for each level.

Lv1s pay out rather poorly, but I think it’s largely okay as you are just trying to get a frigate/destroyer setup, and save up some isk and train some skills where you will pretty quickly move on. Heck if you do the tutorials and run the SoE epic arc you can probably just skip level ones and go right to level 2s.

lv2. a bit more isk, and a bit more challenge than lv1s, if you have anything approaching a well fit ship you should quickly learn to faceroll these missions. I did a handful of these to grind standings a while back, pretty much just warped in and shot everything till the mission check mark popped up.

lv3s things start to get interesting. You can get something like 1000 LP for each mission and some have a bunch of NPCs for some nice bounties. Take the time to learn the trigger system and the blitzes for the missions. With skills most missions take about 5-6 mins each. I’d suggest sticking to these for a bit to make some isk, there’s a certain skill level where you make more blitzing 3s than struggling through lv4s.

lv4s, here’s where you can get some of the best isk in highsec (heck beats a lot of what I’ve heard from other areas), there’s a bit of a learning curve but if you mastered blitzing lv3s you should pretty quickly learn the lv4s. Just might need to take some time to grind up the standings, and train up the skills to really succeed. I was doing these about 4-5 months into the game, and that was back when learning skills were still a thing so that slowed me down some, plus I did some extra standings grinding as you needed standings for jump clones. A focused 3 month character can start there, but i don’t know that it’s efficient. At some point it’s worth it to make the jump and start to learn the triggers and start to blitz where you can. And start training into burner ships. A roughly year old pilot should be able to do blitzing at a high level, and if you get really into it you can pick up some injectors to speed things up.

This thread has a lot on blitzing lv4s, that said it’s starting to get outdated with each patch, but most of the core info is right, The mission list and a few fits might not be right. Blitz and Burner Guide v1.2.3

For the burner missions it’s also worth checking this thread, My post is up to date afaik with a bunch of cap stable setups. And when things get changed in a patch there’s usually a post there pretty quickly Burner Mission - Ship advice to solo them including fittings

lv5s. lowsec only missions, often blitzed with multiple alts to pull missions. I don’t have any good data on these.

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Thanks for all the pointers, everyone. I’ve started training skills for Cruisers so I can hop into Level 2 stuff for Caldari NPCs. I guess Level 3 will be a mid-term goal, but I figure if I want to do things like salvage, hacking, and faction warfare, I should skill up for those first before opening up a new ship class. By then I will probably figure out if I want to pay a subscription, but I’ve already put in $5 for Plex to sell. :woman_shrugging:

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I did much else besides missioning, so it took about 7 months to be able to get Lvl3 missions (standing above 3 needed), even if my ships and skills would have been Lvl3 fit after say 4 months. What helped big deal was the urge to get Security Connections skill which improves the outcome of missions (LP and money) a lot - but I had to finish many Lvl2 missions to get all the 12’500 loyalty points to be able to purchase the skill book in the LP store. Same story with Distribution Connections and Mining Connections.
Well, of course you can just buy them on market for about 30-40m ISK. But who likes the easy way :slight_smile:

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2 more pointers for you since you are doing the low level missions.

  1. They are ideal to learn how to manually fly a ship. You can set up your overview to see transversal and angular velocities and watch what happens. This comes in extremely useful later on as you can do some higher end missions in mid range hulls instead of clunky battleships, pricey marauders etc. Many people that skip this are later unable to complete the content and think they need a bigger ship, which is a very wrong approach.

  2. As stated above, don’t forget your QOL skills, some basic social, trading, hauling etc. Don’t have to go too high, but just enough so you can overall function better. This will delay your combat training but its really worth it.

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