Ninja salvaging series - my first catch

Ninja salvaging series

I will be writing short series about my ninja salvaging adventures in high-sec. Feel free to check introduction part where I wrote on how I took a little vacation from c5 wormhole life and moved to high-sec, with already a 100mil ransom record on my first day.

Catching up

There's a lot of catching up to do as ninja salvaging game changed exponentially since 2-3 years ago. I've been discussing and receiving some tips from the good people of ninja dojo channel over the last few days. As I've already mentioned before, in my opinion, biggest changes that nerfed this play style was:

• inability to swap ships from orca while on aggro timer;
• inability to extend aggro shooting wrecks;
• 5min engagement time to 15min in the past;

This means it was no longer possible to bait with useless t1 frigate and reship midst battle as also it's very difficult to warp to station, reship and return with only 5min timer, not to mention without possibility to extend it if missioner leaves. One may wonder if there were any "good" changes. Well, yes there was:

• Deployables, particularly MTU, can be aggroed by anyone.

There you have it. MTU is a commonly used deployable by missioners to speed up loot collection and salvage, which can be freely engaged by anyone and making carebear to scoop it, watch it die or choose to defend it.

Bringing bigger guns

Now as I could not break BS tank in my last engagement I decided to up the ante. At first I was rather skeptical in baiting with anything bigger than t1 frigate or industrial, however people reported that they get a lot of hits with t2 frigate and even cruiser. I decide to give it a shot. Shooting MTU with frigate is painfully slow anyways, so I get myself a vexor. Vexor is a nice ship. It can dish out a lot of dps, can fit utility in highs, lot's of mid slots and in general, is both flexible and fast.

Just as I bring it to the system, I don't dock, but take it for a spin instead. I scan out a Rattlesnake to which I immediately warp. Just as I enter mission I start dishing out pain on MTU. You can feel the difference, dps is atleast 3 times higher than incursus. MTU is going down fast and to my surprise I get a yellowbox from a Rattlesnake pilot. He suddenly fires and game is on!

I quickly get into tight orbit, put a scram on him and start working on his drones. It takes awhile to kill all the drones with medium turrets and medium/heavy drones. I don't keep full flight of light drones and instead, stock replacement unit for heavy drone, in case carebear gets smart enough to shoot it. Thankfully, that is a rare case.

After drones are gone I start working on the ship itself. This one looks quite tanked, but DPS of Vexor and neuts can keep good pressure on. Now it was just a matter of time until his tank breaks and ship is converted to wreck. As per standard procedure, I open a convo to try and ransom once he is in mid armor. Usually, low armor warning sound is a very good time to contact your victim.

Zosius > 150mil if you want to live
Pita Blade > and how do i know you let me live?
Zosius > if you don't you will die
Pita Blade > and stop if you need money
Zosius > ok, you got 10 sec
Pita Blade > done?
Zosius > pleasure doing business
Zosius > i'll tkae the ship too
Pita Blade > i see :)
Zosius > have a good day sir
Pita Blade > just wanted to se if you are an asshole
Pita Blade > i'm so rich i can loose 20 of these XD

To my luck ransom negotiation was a success, however I feel 150mil barely covers my operating expenses, thus I decide finish the job and see a beautiful explosion. More often then not, carebears have more money than sense and I am more than happy to take away some of that burden from their wallets.

While there were no shiny modules, ship itself was shiny enough and combined with t2 rigs generated almost 900 mil killmail. Now, ninjas do not discriminate. A kill is a kill regardless if it was a cruiser flown by a month old pilot or a marauder flown by a guy older than EvE itself. While size matters, mostly it's about the process, just like fishing.

I would say I'm off to a good start. I was surprised on how fast I got aggro with a cruiser!  Last time I did this, you had to spend long times flying and looking for people to take the bait, on much less threatening ship too. I had to make sure this was not  just a dumb luck. Was ninja salvaging so dead, that new generation grew up without hearing about it? Sounds like I need to go on a quest and bring some emergent gameplay content to the missioners of high-sec. And, as it seems, day was far from over.

To be continued...