Adanthar
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Posted - 2009.08.14 19:54:00 -
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I've done a lot of all three in both 0.0 and wormhole space (no experience in hisec/lowsec).
Salvaging is fine as is.
The risk/reward on running plexes is horrendously unbalanced. The 6/10 is ridiculously easy for the loot it drops; it's soloable by a 4 month old character. The 10/10 is lolhard, but does not drop loot worth that much over a 6/10. Every other plex in 0.0 schizophrenically ranges between very difficult and rarely escalating, insanely easy and dropping lots while escalating relatively often, or occasionally insanely easy in the beginning and insanely hard in the end (one of these always escalates, the other is 1 in 10 at best). Also, the overseers have around 2 dozen items in their loot table, of which ~20 are relatively worthless and ~4 are 500m+ each.
Hacking in 0.0 is the most pointless thing ever. I once ran 7 radar sites in a row, which took me about 3 hours (30 minutes killing things and 2.5 hours waiting for my alt's destroyer with 3 codebreaker midslots to actually crack the containers). This netted me a bunch of datacores I could've gotten faster researching, a lot of other junk that stayed in my hangar forever, and something like 26 encryption method skillbooks. Really?
Much like plexes, mag in 0.0 is schizophrenic. Mags come in 2 varieties: there are regular pirate spawns (decent, drop loot in comparable amount to ratting depending on the site), and drone spawns (about 5x more NPC's than pirate spawns, exactly the same loot value, I usually don't bother.)
Incidentally, hacking/mag sites would not be nearly so bad if they were not harder to scan out than plexes. As it stands, it takes me roughly 5-10 times as long to scan down some of the tougher radars than the two easiest plexes. Said plexes take 15-45 minutes to do, depending on the plex, and drop roughly 10x the loot that a hacking site does.
Drone salvaging sites are 100% pointless, since you can kill several dozen things per site and get 0 isk in bounties/lots of mineral salvage that no one ever loots since it fills up a cargo hold too quickly to matter. It also pays nothing (in t2 salvage) unless it escalates. Much like most escalations, these can terminate anywhere in the chain so when I scan a drone site down I don't even bookmark it.
Finally, there's COSMOS. Forgotten Ruins and Digital Complex both require archaeology/hacking to enter the complex at all. On top of this requirement that's very hard for a main character (as opposed to a dedicated alt) to meet, the drops have almost no market.
Wormholes:
I have never done a single site in regular unknown space.
I have never done a single deadly unknown site, either, because it apparently needs a fleet of (some ridiculous quantity of ships). Note that, because a wormhole can only take about 15 BS crossing before collapsing (divide by two if you want to not be stuck in the class 6 forever), and it also requires all of you to be online at the same time, some of those sites are barely runnable at all. Fortunately, their loot sucks for isk/hour compared to class 5's so running them is pointless anyway.
Dangerous unknown space radar/mags range from requiring a fleet of 6-8, evenly mixed between competent BS/scorpions/logistics, to kill things for an hour for 100 million in loot each, to requiring a fleet of 4 to kill things for 15 minutes for 200 million in loot each. If you've lived in class 5's, you know what I'm talking about, and also know that this is dumb and needs to be fixed (the overall difficulty, not nerfing the method, please.) Otherwise, it's more or less okay. Gas clouds are fine too, I guess (I hear okay things but really have no clue.)
I'm pretty much out of characters in this post anyway, so I'll wrap up here. Hope this helps.
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