18 Month Review

Starwalker had now been in New Eden for a little over 18 months. He was a reasonably experienced pilot now with just over 27 million skill points. 3 months ago, he had had good intentions of flying more interceptors and covert ops frigates and even to do some exploration. He had done virtually none of that.

Instead, he had spent time still flying T1 frigates in a new part of New Eden - Eugales, especially the Merlin, which was now a fearsome blaster boat with a cool ancillary shield booster. Starwalker was running into more faction warfare pilots, who often ran away and he had also started to fly the HAM (Heavy Assault Missile) Drake, along with a complement of drones. More than that, he had achieved his first solo battlecruiser kill and he even had two new jump clones. It had been an interesting time.

Starwalker was slowly improving, clearly experience counted. He felt that he made fewer pilot error style mistakes, although he still did make mistakes. He had trained for ships in every race and most weapon systems but he was starting to favour Caldari ships, for shield tanking and missiles. He liked the new ancillary shield booster for active tanking and coupled that with the simplicity and damage projection of missiles.

He had been flying around in the Incursus recently, the active armour tanked variety and appreciated some of their benefits, especially armour repair in null-sec. However, Starwalker was also inclined towards favouring gank over tank, despite on occasion losing to ships with really good tanks but lower gank such as the dual repair Incursus. This naturally led back to shield tankers that could use the low slots for damage modules rather than armour tanking.

Whilst Starwalker was still training drones and similar for battlecruisers he had been easily distracted by other shiny toys. Consequently, he had completed level one training for things like the Minmatar battleship and medium autocannon specialisation. There were still some distractions available such as Command Ships and other battleships and Starwalker considered just doing them first so he could then concentrate on the real combat skills needed like heavy missile specialisation and getting more drones skills to a higher level. Perhaps the real problem was lack of discipline and flitting between too many things.

Previously Starwalker had summarised his key areas of focus as ships, combat, skills and base. Perhaps now was the time to really focus:

1. Ships - focus on Caldari ships: Merlin and Drake. The Caracal might be useful as a little fun frigate killer or perhaps the Hawk. Whilst the Merlin was now a blaster boat Starwalker already had small blaster specialisation to level 3
2. Combat - Starwalker maintained better control of his modules and overheating but wanted to focus more on situational awareness and manual flying
3. Skills - focus training plan on Caldari ships, missiles, drones, navigation and fitting skills, after finishing off training for miscellaneous items (battleships, command ships and recon ships)
4. Base - two bases currently had ships, equipment and a clone: Heild and Eugales. Another clone in its ship was located at Fensi

Starwalker was satisfied with the way things were going in New Eden with only one complaint - he still had not sorted out some ISK income to fund his ship losses.