I went on another early morning exploration run in low sec. This time, the sites were just too much for my little Punisher: wave upon wave of spawns, stasis towers, webs, that sort of thing. So I retreated and purchased an Arbitrator to make use of those drone skills I have lying around.
After running the sites I made over 20 million in profit once the cost of the Arbitrator and fittings were taken into account. Again, all from a single system. I love low sec. I should be fine for ISK until next weekend.
It does occur to me, however, that I'm going to want to fly T2 eventually, and that will be a huge burden financially, so I'm going to need to get more serious about exploration at some point. My skills are already sufficient to find the sites, but there are a few more skills I should pick up.
T2 drones seems like a bit of a must have. I'm only about 4 days away from T2, and it would make running the sites much easier, and it also fits in with flying a Pilgrim eventually. Plus, if somebody tries to gank me, I can actually put up a bit of a fight.
Hacking/Salvaging/Archeology could also use a bit of a boost too, as I occasionally run into things that I simply can't loot.
I'm about a week away from getting into a covert ops, and then a couple of days away from training covert ops up high enough that the scanning bonus is at least as high as my T1 ship. While this would be very awesome (I really want to fly a T2 ship sooner rather than later, and this would give me an excuse to do so), the truth is that my T1 ship does just fine, at a fraction of the cost.
My Arbitrator also needs a decent fit. I really loved the passive shield tanked Arbitrator that I used for mission running, but that fit does not work for low sec exploration. I'll have to look for a fit that suits me over the course of the week.
Ultimately, the 7+ days or so will be taken up by my fitting skills (they'll save me about 1.3 million per Punisher, and free up the rig space for something else, if that's what I want). After that I'll take a look at what is most pressing.
At least the Covops will allow you to zip around cloaked - I find my Helios a vast step up from an Imicus. Also, they warp faster (and cloaked), and sub-warp they're faster when cloaked as well. This means that, at least in theory, they should be very hard to lose.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Arbi... Yes, get T2 drones, they're SO much better. And have you considered rigs? Sure, they'll drive ship price up, but a trimarked arbi will not have the inertia drawback that a plated one would have -- meaning you'll enter warp faster when you need to.
I don't fly Amarr ships myself, so I couldn't comment beyond that. Good luck!