[Request] Alpha Amarr L1-L4 Ships/Fits and advice

Hey all,

Following the Alpha changes today, there has been one thing on my mind and that is Alpha L4 mission running. I had a few questions and also wanted some help with fits so hopefully you guys can help me. It might be quite long but hopefully they are coherent. For sharing fits, you can link Omega fits which I will then try to adjust for myself.

Edit: I want to run missions for Amarr-based corporations. Thanks Quelza!

  • What ships and fits should I be using (Amarr preferably)? I was thinking of going Punisher > Omen/Maller > Harbinger > Apocalypse/ NApocalypse >>> Nightmare
  • Would my fits be more of the brawly kind or more akin to snipey fits?
  • Should I care about my other standings if I want to burn through the missions?
  • Do missions in 0.5 pay out higher than missions in 0.6-1.0 sec?
  • Tips/Advice for actually running the missions? Anything I should be particularly aware of?
  • Is it worth my time looting/salvaging or should I just leave it all behind?
  • Any expectations of ISK/hour?

Thanks in advance. I will be sure to keep this thread updated with my progress.

First off, are you looking for recommendations suited to running missions from any agent (meaning they have selectable damage options to efficiently kill a variety of different NPCs)? Or are you specifically interested in running missions for Amarr-based corporations?

If the former, you would want to prioritize the Amarr drone ships: Dragoon, Arbitrator, Prophecy, Armageddon. If the latter, your suggested ship progression would be fine (although you would not want to use a shield-tanking battleship against EM/Therm damage-dealing NPCs, and you’d want a Coercer instead of a Punisher).

Apologies. I was mainly looking too run missions from Amarr-based corporations.
I will update the main post to reflect this.

ship progression looks good, might want a coercer instead of a punisher, but honestly you should only be running lv1s for a short time and it probably wont matter. and then when you get to lv4s apoc is good for learning and then nightmare is a huge upgrade.

I mostly prefer sniper fits at the low level, ships spawn at various ranges and it’s nice to be able to melt whatever spawns in. And then have a set of drones to deal with any frigs that get in under the guns. When you get to lv4s you might want to swap between fits depending on what mission you pull. there are some where you can do a high dps short range brawl fit, and some where you want tachs and all the range they give.

Other standings, really up to you. it’s pretty easy to fix gal/min standings if you switch to SoE missions. But declining faction kill missions might also be a good idea if you don’t want to worry about it.

Mission rewards (payout, bonus, and LP) scale with agent system sec, so the best highsec agents are in 0.5 space. There are a few specialty LP stores where you might need to move to 0.6 space. if it’s 0.7 or above it’s probably not worth it long term. Fine for short term and standings grind though.

The best income typically comes with blitzing. Warp in kill the completion trigger, warp out.

loot/salvage is largely worthless. the exceptions are a few wrecks that can drop either faction items or implants or whatever. Zor is a good example, the hacker card can be sold to mission blitzers, and there’s a ~50mil implant that is a rare drop. There are also a few structures that can drop skill books or implants. there’s one lv3 that can drop 10mil isk skillbooks.

lv 1 and 2 missions no idea about payouts, only really ever did them as a newb where imo they pay out fine, just need to train skills and grind up a bit of isk to move up to the next level, or as part of the standings grind.

lv3s I’d guess 10-20mil/hr at the low level, 30-60 on the high end, high end being a warp speed t3c. Alpha will limit you to a t2 fit t1 BC not sure exactly where that comes out. I was testing an alpha gnosis back with the initial alpha and was guessing around 30mil/hr. So can probably do a bit better than that with the new alpha BCs.

Then lv4s, learning them and grinding standings won’t be great income, if you jump into them and make less than you were in lv3s you probably need to train up some more skills. but if you get into blitzing the high end missions pay around 100m/hr, Although alpha loses a few levels of social skills, so I’m not sure how much LP/Reward you lose. Something like the blockade should be about 20mil bounties, 3mil rewards, and 7-8k LP and take about 20 mins to run. Mining misappropriation is another good one, ~10 high bounty BS and max payout. Gone Berserk 10-12mil bounty plus whatever the rewards are and it’s a pretty quick mission to run, the assault is a good blitz (but supposedly bugged right now) It’s guristas in amarr space but with nightmare tachs you can still do it in ~7mins. A bunch of other missions are good too. Also since you are running in amarr space you should be able to get a good LP conversion. SOE is overfarmed and the LP value is lower than most other stores.

If you get into burners you can about double the lv4 income, I tried the burner playlist as an alpha on sisi and I could do a bunch of them, but some might not be doable but tbh I didn’t test that much either. imo if you start doing burners you should probably go omega anyways. There’s also a big advantage to going to SoE as lanngisi has good spawns for missions, and you will make more LP/hr than any other highsec agent in game, although you lower the isk/lp ratio some.

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I’ll be the second to suggest the route of Dragoon, Arbitrator, Prophecy, Armageddon.

Drone boats and missiles combined are rather potent at clearing PvE content. Additionally Rapid Heavy Missile Launchers technically count as a medium weapon system because of how missiles are coded. Meaning you can actually stick a relevant T2 weapon system on a battleship that way.

Thank you so much for the detailed response. I’ll definitely have a go at getting into a Nightmare then!
I wanted to get into blitzing missions at some point, even 100m isk/hour is very good by my standards at least.

Someone has somewhat convinced me to train into a Machariel and run SOE missions instead. Looking at the LP conversion rates, SOE seems to be higher than the Amarr LP store. I still want to fly the Nightmare at some point, just a slight annoyance that the Nightmare and Mach don’t have any ship crossover (Amarr/Cal vs Gal/Min). I’m honestly not too bothered because if I am making 100m/hour doing missions I can easily afford Alpha injectors daily

Another question popped up if you wouldn’t mind:
If Blitzing missions is (I assume) running the missions as fast as possible just to complete the objective. What are burner missions? I looked at a guide but couldn’t find an answer. It sounded like running some missions, but in faction frigates.

@Kynami_Vaille
I ended up flying a drone boat ^^ it’s something I’m used to so made the early stages that much more easier. Hard to get an idea of ranges and ammo types just now. Thanks for the response

Check some other corps, last year or so SoE has largely been in the ~1500 isk/lp range, currently they are a bit above that but I don’t know if that will hold. Some amarr corps offer a 5 run bpc Imperial Navy Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane Blueprint, that has been trading around 2000 isk/lp. I don’t know what the best corp to run for those is, been a while since I looked. you can use this to search for the corps that offer it LP Store - Return on ISK

That said SoE might be a better long run choice as the Lanngisi agent has good spawns, and that is important if you want to run burner missions. but many missions are vs angels and that is where the mach shines. You could run the apanake agent to build standings and get blood raider spawns for most missions.

There is also the option to do both, amarr + SoE storylines will balance your faction standings pretty well for the major empires.

you are spot on with blitzing. The LP is typically the most valuable thing when running most missions, so it makes sense to run them as fast as possible to max LP gains.

And you are on the right track with burners, pretty much npc’s that cheat, but can be taken down with special fits. There’s a frig version for each major pirate factions where you face a single faction frig, each of the major empire factions have a version with an assult frigate and two logi frigs, For these missions you are limited to a frigate. and then there are a handful of burner bases which have mulitple frigs (angels), or BCs (serpentis), cruiser with 2 support frigs (blood), or even a super carrier (guristas), and for these you can use maily faction or t2 cruisers, t1 bc are allowed but not typically used. with access to t2 small/medium guns and faction ships alphas should be able to do some of them, but if you can afford the setups you can probably afford to go omega I haven’t done a lot of testing there.

this thread has a video playlist
in the googledocs link and another in the comments https://forums.eveonline.com/t/blitz-and-burner-guide-v1-2-3/ and this thread has a bunch of fittings https://forums.eveonline.com/t/burner-mission-ship-advice-to-solo-them-including-fittings/

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Apologies. I was mainly looking too run missions from Amarr-based corporations.

That actually doesn’t matter, and I have no idea what Quelza meant by “if you run missions for an Amarr corp, you won’t need selectable damage”. Amarr corps don’t only send you on missions against Blood Raiders and Sansha, hell - the racial enemy of Amarr are the Minmatar, who have highest resists against EM/TH and who deal primarily EX/KI damage that Amarr ships are weakest against. And of course all corps will send you against the ubiquitous “Mercenaries”.

So the tl;dr is that unless you want to decline a lot of missions, a laser boat is just a bad pick. And yes, that includes the Nightmare. Shooting lasers at elite Minmatar/Angel ships will pretty much halve your damage compared to using mostly EX/KI damage types, and amazing tracking won’t change that.

And meanwhile drones + missiles allows you the liberty of deploying the correct drone and missile type for the job to punch right through the resist hole of what you are fighting. Plus you get to ignore tracking entirely and using a target painter will reduce some of the pain of using larger missiles against frigates while you use drones to remove them.

Depending on how you kit out you can either snipe from very long range with missiles and use drones as well at mid ranges or go in with a brawl fit like heavy assault missiles with webs or for very large ships a heavy grappler to absolutely maximize damage application and minimize time between salvos while drones pick off pests or add to DPS.

And for Omega players missiles also means access to auto-targeting rounds which can be used as a reload to keep some DPS outgoing while some jerk is sitting on you with heated ECM.

Having the option of making your refit needs between missions just be swapping hardeners and ammo makes things much easier. And for drone ships they often have enough bay space to keep a few flights of different types available.

Thanks once again all, I’m learn a lot more than I thought I would.

Thanks Chainsaw, I hadn’t looked at all the Amarr factions, I looked at a few and saw they had the same items so I assumed they were all the same. The items you mentioned do sound like they sell well, I’ll definitely be looking a bit deeper into it.

So I’m currently split minded between ships now. I like the sound of missiles and drones more than the guns of the Mach. But now I am unsure about what ship, I could potentially go towards a Rattlesnake as a missile + drone boat, or something like a Raven Navy Issue but I lose out slightly on the drones.

What ship would be good for SOE or an Amarr faction? Does a Bhargest come into question at all? Sorry if I sound like I am running in circles.

In amarr space lasers are fine. The only minmatar mission I remember getting was Enemies abound 5/5 and a nightmare kills each spawn before the next one spawns in, so doesn’t really matter a whole lot there, and most people seem to decline that chain anyways. Oh noes not the dreaded “Mercs” oh look 0 shield EM resist, and thermal is the secondary hole, sure on armor it’s a bit higher, but your still hitting 2/3 of their hp for pretty much full damage. EM/Therm are also the main damage holes for drones which show up in all areas of space.

Missions like angels extra suck, but hey I’d decline that with any ship.

but then you are using missiles and drones, ewww. I’ll take instant turret damage any day. Mission npc’s move so slow you can largely blap them at range and ignore tracking anyways.

Raven is the classic jack of all trades and works alright everywhere. It’s not flashy but it gets things done. Rattlesnake is kinda like that but can do a lot more damage as it can use high powered drones too, although I find it a bit unwieldy as there is no missile velocity bonus so it takes a while for missiles to hit, and with sentry drones you are mostly stuck in one place, or heavy drones which are slow and take a while to get to targets.

Barghest is a pretty decent missile boat, the massive velocity bonus is nice as your missiles will hit before the next volley launchers out to something like 120km, this makes it very hard to waste missiles by firing another volley before the one in space hits. Very similar to the raven but does a bit more damage and has slightly different slot layout. There were a few people testing RHML fits for blitzing, but I don’t know what their exact outcomes were. I like the cruise version for a few missions, sniping the mission objective at 100km+ is pretty nice. Raven->barghest is a viable path.

I’ll admit I’m very biased to guns, Nightmare + mach is a great combo of ships but it’s a bunch of isk/training to get into both. Mach is pretty much my #1 pick and that is mostly due to the warp speed bonus. I started off in a raven and it’s one of the best t1 bs. Had an amarr character in an apoc/abaddon, and they are decent but can feel some weaknesses. Nightmare fixes most of those issues aside from damage type, but if you are in amarr space it’s largely fine, and surprisingly caldari space largely works for lasers too. There are only a handful of gurista missions and they are almost all blitzable.

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“Space” doesn’t matter at all for missions. Sisters of EVE in Simela(Genesis, so Amarr Empire, with local rats Blood Raiders) will somehow find Angel Cartel for you to fight. Hell, they will even happily send you against Amarr Navy itself - from an Amarr Station located in Amarr held territory.

Why everyone so afraid rats? Only angels are not vunelabre to EM or Thermal so much. All other rats have second Thermal or EM primary. I do now L3 SOE in harbinger with t1 alpha fit and in almost all missions don’t have any problem with applying dmg to rats. Even frigs.

And about missiels. They are good, really good but more boring than mining in hisec. You just fly your drake or raven and fire behind, drink cup of coffe, switch to another target and repeat this all day.

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There is a pretty damn solid night and day difference in actual damage application between L3 and L4 missions in the actual quality of resists on the rats. Once you throw in the fact a good third of the rats in those L4 missions also gain significant tank recovery and hitting that resist hole to maximize DPS becomes much more important.

I’m sure you’ve run across those Sansha elite cruisers with the “Loyal” tag and noticed how they are a bit more durable and actually rep a bit? Or how you got a very early taste-test of the effect of you must have this much DPS to succeed way back during the SoE epic arc?

SoE epic arc? My 280 DPS pulse harbinger never go to armor with full argo on every missions. I blitz epic arc in 2-3 hours.

I was doing for months L4 missions in hisec in raven or malestorm in t1 fits and this is most stupid decision i ever did. You need skills for this missions no matter what faction or ship you are flying. Laser boats will just make them bit harder but i prefer to enjoy my ship and time in eve than just grind missions for isk or whatever.

ps. sorry for bad english grammar.

there are two major components for mission pools, one is the region of space you are in, the other is the faction you are taking missions from. SoE is more closely allied with gal/min so there are a few anti-amarr missions, makes rp sense due to the whole anti-slavery thing. And for the regional part if we look at the apanake agent you will get the blockade vs blood raiders because you are in a region with blood raider rats, where the lanngisi agent will give you an angel blockade because the region features angel rats.

and yea, if you are doing a lot of damage, damage type doesn’t matter as much. A skilled and gank fit BC will easily melt through whatever the lv3 pool throws at you. Damage type can make a big difference with low dps setups where you are barely breaking the NPC’s tank, and also in lv4s it can make a huge difference as BS Npcs have a bunch of hp to chew through. And anyways having one or two non-optimal mission in a pool is fine with enough dps, will just slow you down a little. and of course having a nightmare and a mach makes it so there are pretty much no non-optimal missions, nightmare is great for anything where you need to snipe or em/therm, then the mach for brawling and blitzing. There’s a bunch of missions where you spend more time flying to it than in combat.

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