A Fishing Interlude in Valheim

I knew there had to be fishing in Valheim from the moment I first laid eyes on the water.  You can see fish just swimming around in there.  And given that the seagulls, which I first thought were just atmosphere, are harvestable for feathers, those fish certainly seemed too good, too real, too physically rendered in the world to be mere decoration.

I once espoused a theory of fishing in MMOs… more than ten years ago at this point… where I suggest that fishing might not be an important feature, that a dev had time to work on it before launch was a good sign that the game was not being rushed into production.  There were some winners and losers that seemed to track to the theory… EverQuest and World of Warcraft both had fishing at launch, LOTRO, EverQuest II, and Rift all lacked it… and no EQII fans, fish harvesting doesn’t count… and so I tend to keep track of fishing in games, even outside of MMORPGs.  Pokemon had fishing from its first generation of titles as well.  Fishing isn’t exactly my brand, but I do try it in every game.

My suspicions about fishing were pretty much confirmed when I started finding fish washed up on shore that I could pick up.  The swell of the ocean is pretty well modeled and when a storm is up the water can come way up on the land.

Shiny fishes are so good, yes precious

Picking up the fish yielded raw fish meat that could be cooked.  That surely meant fishing must be a thing.

After some trying to figure it out, including attempts at bow fishing, I finally went to the wiki to get an answer.  Yes, fishing is a thing… but you have to buy the fishing pole and the bait from the trader.  It took us time to find the trader, and once we found him I put off fishing until everybody had their Megingjord belt for heavy lifting.  But once that was secured and we had some extra gold sitting around in our valuables chest, Fergorin suggested that it might be time to try out fishing.

So it was off to Haldor, who sold me the fishing pole for 350 gold and a stack of 50 bait for another 10 gold.  That bait seemed a bit pricey  at first, but with what we’ve been hauling in for crypts it is probably no big deal, though we’ll need gold for later crafting.

With that I was off to the shore to catch some fish.

A larger pole than Ron Popeil has!

The pole is essentially a 2h weapon, not an uncommon situation, that behaves a bit like the bow.  Left click gets you a targeting reticule as you press down and releasing the button casts.  You can hold it down and totally go for distance… I think it will land as far as 30 meters out… but I quickly decided that wasn’t the best idea.

It is a bit like fishing in LOTRO in that you can see a fish come up to your hook and when you see the bobber bob it is time to haul in your catch.  It has a little pulse effect even, to make it clear you have a strike.  However, unlike LOTRO, and very much in the vein of Valheim really, then the stamina bar comes into play.

Managing your stamina is very much a thing in the game, and a way to get yourself killed if you fail at it.  Too often I have run and jumped to land within striking range of a foe only to find I didn’t have enough stamina left in my bar to hit them or block their attack.

In this case, reeling in your catch brings up the stamina bar and it slowly bleeds out as you reel in the fish.  If it runs out before you land the fish, it gets away.  So you are better off with somewhat shorter casts.

The fish are here too

It also means you shouldn’t go fishing when hungry, lest you stamina bar be at its lowest ebb.

When you get the notification that you have hooked your fish, and you’ve hauled them in as close as you can, you then need to get them ashore before your stamina runs out.

Bringing a fish in close… though that doesn’t look anything like 8m out

Since there is no net to scoop them up, I just start backing up to drag them onto land, where you can then pick them up.

Gotta pick it up before the stam bar goes black

The result is 1 or 2 pieces of raw fish meat, which you can cook up over a fire.  Looking at the food chart on the wiki, cooked fish is a bit better that cooked meat or neck tail, but the effort to get it is much higher, and it isn’t nearly as good as sausage, which we have been cooking up a lot of since we got into the swamps. (I have to go out on thistle gathering runs to keep the sausage factory going.)  But, later on, you can make fish wraps, which are a much better food item.  However, you need barely from the plains for that, and we’re a long way from hanging out in the plains.  So I am not in a huge hurry to haul in a ton of fish at the moment.  The payoff at the moment isn’t so grand and there are always so many other little things to do.

But at some point fish will be more useful.  Maybe then I’ll go out on the new boat and fish for the deep water fish, which yield more meat per catch.

The new longboat parked at Potshot’s pier

I think there is enough room on that deck of a longboat to haul them in.  Until then I’ll just pick up the ones I find on shore.

A Final Fight then Home From Venal

The fall of Darkness, the alliance at the core of the Dead Coalition… once the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition… a couple of weeks back was a sign that the fighting in and around the Venal region was likely going to fall off.  Not immediately, of course.  Wars have their own momentum, and being deployed up in Venal with the Goon Expeditionary Force and ready to fight meant there were still some sizable clashes after the news.

The final fight for me was a dust up between a GEF Typhoon fleet and a Pandemic Horde Ferox fleet in Q-7SUI, just a jump from where we were staged.

Typhoons undocking

There was a call for more firepower so I bought a Typhoon, figuring I would regret it when it came time to move home, that being one more ship to get back to Delve, but whatever.  So got ourselves in range of PH and their Feroxes and the shooting began.

A Ferox exploding in the pack

My worry about hauling home a Typhoon was unfounded as I managed to get it blown up during the fight.  That left me hanging out and watching things transpire.

Just a capsule in the bubbles

A couple of PH pilots locked me up at various points to try and pop by pod, but their Ferox fleet was moving fast and they we not often in range.  I took a few hits but was able to motor to the gate and jump through to dock up.  This was fortunate as I realized at that point that I had deployed in my Reaver’s speed implant clone and, while it wouldn’t have been a tragic loss, it would have cost me a couple hundred million ISK to replace it.

As I was gating out HAW dreads were dropping in to join the fight.

Cyno off to the right

I got back to the station and re-shipped in a logi hull, but the fight was over by then.  While we had killed more more ships, the battle report showed the ISK went well in favor of PH and company.

Battle Report Header

That pretty much wrapped up the deployment for me.  There were some further fights… a couple of good ones from all accounts… but I missed out.  But when the first call came to fly home… I kind of missed out on that too.  I think I was playing Pokemon Sword.  And it is unlike me to miss the first move op.  It has long been my practice to be on the first one because there have been times when there has not been a second such op.  I was on the first move op to the deployment.

Fortunately, there was a second op… or whatever op it was I got in on earlier this week.  I joined the mixed bag of subcaps who wanted to go home.  Given that ranged from frigates to battleships, it was going to be a slow move.  I grabbed the largest ship I had out on the deployment, a Jackdaw, and undocked with everybody else.

The flight home wasn’t too bad.  It ran about an hour.  However, it would have been a lot quicker if we had been closer to the Eye of Terror, the Ansiblex Jump Gate network that runs from Querious around into Pure Blind.  Being out in Venal meant we had about twenty gates to take to get to the terminus to the network.

Move op landing at another gate

Mixed bag we were, but it was a big mixed bag, with about 150 in fleet.  So while we didn’t make up a coherent doctrine, we had the mass to pass and the locals left us alone.  Once we got to the travel network about three quarters of the time in fleet had passed.

Welcome to the Eye of Terror

After that it is about eight connecting gates and five jump gates and you’re back at the Keepstar in 1DQ1-A.  While it was slow going for a bit, with align and warp and align again, it was safe.

That done, there was still a bit of time left in the evening, so I clone jumped back up to Venal, where I still had two more ships to bring home.  I grabbed the Purifier stealth bomber and ran the route again solo.  This is not always advisable.  A move op often signals to everybody that people are trying to get home and highlights the route to camp if you want to pick off stragglers.  However I managed to slip through without any issue and was soon making the warp from the final Ansiblex on my route.

I cloak up for every warp. You never know who will be there when you land.

And so ends the deployment for me.  There were a few good fights for me, and enough structure shooting to keep me satisfied.  Now we’ll stand down for a bit until somebody figures out what we ought to get up to next.  Isn’t it about time for a Burn Jita or something?

Another Bonus Skill Point Weekend in EVE Online plus a Skill Point Event

I woke up this morning to find that CCP had declared this weekend would get you bonus skill points for logging in.

Bonus skill points are the best skill points

I am not sure why this weekend was picked.  Maybe it celebrates the new person joining the community team.  I don’t know.  But whatever.  More free skill points.  I won’t turn my nose up at that.

The event follows the usual routine.  For each of the three days after downtime you log in, claim your skill points, pick which character gets them.  Omega accounts get more skill points than Alphas.

The give away mix

Alpha accounts get 45,000 skill points if they log in all three days, while Omegas get 130,000 for their login effort.  If you are Alpha and want all those skill points, there is a handy button to click to upgrade to an Omega subscription.

And if that isn’t enough free skill points for you, there is always the new variation on the Skilling Spree event going on, Skilling is Just a Means of Communication.

A tribute to a classic Permaband song

In this the daily task of blowing up NPCs has been changed, so now you get skill points for blowing up other players.

10K skill points for getting top damage on a kill mail

This event runs through to downtime on April 16, 2020.

So there are skill points to be had in New Eden.

Path of Exile Synthesis

I haven’t directly mentioned, much less played, Path of Exile is ages.  Back in 2012 it was the indie dark horse candidate in the ARPG competition to claim the mantle of heir to Diablo II.

Path of Exile – Original Edition

In 2013 when it left beta and went live is looked pretty good.  In the lineup of the three, Diablo III had story, Torchlight II had offline play and mods, and Path of Exile had the feel of Diablo II… and the giant skill tree from hell.

So many skills…

Oh, and it was free.  It is hard to argue with that price point.  So I went off to play it for a while.  Along the way I discovered that the game had a serious latency/desync problem that made it pretty much unplayable at random times.  That led me to walk away, never to return.  It wasn’t bad, but even without the network issues it was another ARPG on a list of ARPGs I had at my disposal.

But a couple weeks back in one of the online groups in which I hang out… at some point I am going to have to enumerate these various groups, if only to clarify it for myself… there was a call to come and play Path of Exile.  This was prompted by the coming of a new season… I guess Path of Exile has seasons like some other games… and the launch of the Path of Exile Synthesis update.

Synthesize This

Anyway, I am much more likely to go play something if people I know are going to go play it as well.  Playing with friends, misery loves company, whatever it is I am often willing to go if there will be somebody around to share the story.

The update was scheduled for last Friday, so I grabbed the installer and patched up in advance, then did one more patch up when Synthesis hit and I was ready to go.

I was a little uncertain as to what seasons really mean in PoE.  They seem to be fresh starts separated from any current characters you have akin to the seasons in Diablo III, with some new features and content beyond what Blizz offers for their seasons.  I managed to get into the right season with the right options with a new character.

I went with the Templar class.

I had considered going with Ranger, remembering the last time I played when melee classes were especially hard hit by the latency and desync issues.  However, PoE is influenced by old Diablo II in many ways, including the whole idea that choosing a class also means choosing the sex of your character.  That feels like something of an outdated idea these days, though that may be my MMORPG-centric sens of things speaking.  Anyway, since I am more engaged when I identify with my character… which usually means a male that looks somewhat like me… that left me out of the running for a couple of classes.

The Templar though… the Templar looks like I feel some days.

Looking old, feeling old, not wearing pants

Which is to say he looks like he might be an extra from the medieval version of Dad’s Army.

Things start off pretty much as I remembered, with the shipwreck scenario (rather than the jailbreak scenario) and picking up a few items on the beach with which to clobber the locals.  The Templar is all about beating things with blunt objects at the start.

I was in for a bit of a rough start as I had forgotten pretty much everything about how gems and sockets work and, frankly, beating stuff with blunt objects is long and tiring work.  But when I realized that gem mean skill, and skill mean kills, I was all over that.  And then I found the gem for thee holy fire totem.

Holy Fire Totem described

This baby basically does my killing for me.  And if there is an especially tough mob in the mix, I whack it with my stick.

Cleanse them with holy fire!

As for passive traits and the skill tree from hell… well, mine is chaos.  I’m all over the map.  I decided that the flame totem thing was so good that I had better stock up on mana.  Then I boosted strength.  Then I went down a path that made my defensive abilities more effective.  I guess I am sort of a tank, as I also have a gem for a healing totem.  We shall see.  My build my be complete comedy when we try to play as a group.  But for now, solo, I just abide while my totem burns stuff down.  And then it is time to loot!

Not every loot pile is this big… but some are

Of course, picking up PoE right now has led me into something of a crowded field of games I am currently trying to play.  I am still logging into WoW regularly and go on a few fleet ops every week in EVE Online.  I still have a game running in RimWorld and I spent a bit of time in Minecraft earlier this month. (I’ll get to that in another post.)  Also I just bought a copy of Diablo on GoG.com the day before the Sythesis expansion/season went live, and I want to play through that.  Then, of course, this coming weekend is the 20th anniversary for EverQuest. I plan to peek in on that.  And finally there is the unlock of The Mines of Moria expansion on the LOTRO Legendary server tomorrow.

Something is going to have to give here.

I Was Not Kidding About Level 1-29 Chat

I saw this in Rift Prime tonight and had to laugh.

world broadcast…

See, turning off Level 1-29 chat is something I fully recommend.  Even the devs are sick of it.

 

The Fishing Defiants in Telara

I was a little bit slow to roll into Rift Prime.  As noted, I set myself up with 30 days of Patron status using the abundance of credits I had in the game and rolled up a character on the new server when it launched last Wednesday.

Mounted tiger burning bright, ignore the common chatroom blight

Still, I had some trouble building enthusiasm for a fresh start in Rift.  I haven’t really touched the game since the Free to Play conversion a little over four years ago.  But it wasn’t the conversion that damped my enthusiasm for the game, but the first expansion, Storm Legion, and the design philosophy that seemed to bring to the game.  Not everything about it was bad.  The expansion did have some good ideas.  But the “more is better” philosophy about the size of zones let me down after the awesome tight “less is more” zone design that went into the first 50 levels of the game.

It didn’t help that Rift felt a dated even as I started to poke my nose into it.  The character models, never a high point of the game, seemed even rougher and uglier than I recalled.  It doesn’t help that I favor the Defiant side of the game, which features purple elves, purple… uh… big people, and gray humans that seem to have some rodent mixed into their genes somewhere.

Character models aren’t the most important thing ever for me, so it takes something for me to be put off on that front.  And while the Guardians side of the house has better models, I dislike their post-tutorial zone, Silverwood, with about the same intensity as a I love Freemarch, the Defiant post-tutorial zone.

So I rolled a big old Bahmi (which always makes me think of banh mi, which are not purple at all) chose the cleric’s path, and headed out into the tutorial.  And then, almost immediately logged off.  Clearly I was not excited to play.

I logged back on later and rolled through the starter zone, took the portal back in time, and landed in the corner of Freemarch where you start in the game world, and logged off again.

I wasn’t put off by queues or the horror of the level 1-29 chat, which I turned off fairly quickly.  Many dumb things were being said there.  Freemarch chat was better, but had its moments as well.

Only one of us is correct

Rather it was my inability to quickly match my fond memories of the game with my current experience.  I can prove I was fond of the game because I leveled up one of each of the class archetypes to level 50 before the Storm Legion expansion.

Four Level 50s… and Nehru

That I played a mage up to level cap says something.  I almost never do that and, when I do, it tend to be via some off-the-main-path mechanic.  For example in WoW I will shortly have a level 110 mage.  But he got level boosted from 60 to 100 and his experience from level 101 to 110 will be almost exclusively from pet battles.

But how to get there?  How to find whatever it was that got me hooked back in the day?

It is different when Daybreak rolls up another EverQuest retro server.  There the draw, the nostalgia, is almost wholly concentrated in the first 20 levels.  Killing things in front of Qeynos, roaming into the Qeynos Hills and Blackburrow, ranging out into the Karanas, and then making that first run across the world to Freeport and Faydwer, that about covers it.  Find a few groups, camp some spawns as I go, and nostalgia objective achieved.

It is clearly different in Rift for me, where my memory of the initial tutorial zone ranges from bland to negative.  It is also before the fun of the soul system starts to kick in.  The soul system can be one of the highs of the game, enabling players to create some very fun setups to play.  Of course, it can also be a curse as you are more likely to make an unfun setup if you’re not on top of the whole thing.

Fortunately, one of the post-launch updates Trion kept for Rift Prime was the suggested soul templates for people like me who want a fun setup, but who will screw it up if forced to make their own.  I am enjoying the cleric template I picked, but it took a while to get to that.

The Nature’s Protector build, complete with pet!

You have to go through the usual stages of running up to mobs to beat on them with your one attack, to getting a ranged attack, to getting a good close up attack with a cool down, to getting a better ranged attack, which took a few levels.

I played furtively off and on until Sunday when I started to hit my stride.  The tipping point seemed to involve fishing.  I was stumbling along from quest to quest, knocking down a rift now and again, but not really feeling it.  Then I arrived at Kelari Refuge, a village on the coast of Freemarch and found a mass of people hanging around fishing.

Kelari Refuge arrival

There is a trainer there for fishing, as well as some of the other trade skills.  But, as if my wont, I went for fishing, hanging out on the coast for a stretch.  Fishing quests give experience after all.

That seemed to get me into the vibe of the game.  Fishing in Rift is a pretty decent implementation, a little more old school than the current WoW mechanic,  more useful and well integrated that what you find in LOTRO, but not as clunky as it was way back in Norrath.

I hung out and finished up the fishing quests, earning all the Freemarch fishing achievements along the way.  It was about then that it started to look like we might have enough people interested in playing that a guild seemed appropriate.  I had already ditched the default guild the server sticks everybody in, tiring of an eternal stream of messages about achievements and who just logged in or out, so was set to make a new one.  Fortunately, guild creation in Rift is an extremely frictionless process.  You essentially open the guild window and press the button.  None of that collecting signatures in blood or petitioning for a GM to create you guild.  You want a guild, you got a guild, so I created a guild with what I felt was the theme of the moment.

A guild is born

I then set about inviting people and promoting them.  The default guild structure in Rift has… a lot of ranks.  I set about making everybody an officer and then, on discovering that the default officer rank was actually pretty far down the hierarchy, went and gave officers the ability to essentially do “all the things” so people could get in the guild.

I also found that the only title I had accrued in the game so far fit the theme as well, so I displayed that.

All about the fishing

That done, I set about not fishing anymore, but headed off into the Freemarch quest line again, stopping along the way for rifts and invasion events, which seemed to be quite frequent.

Always another rift forming somewhere…

And from that point on I started to get into it.

Part of that was starting to get into my class/role, which included realizing I left a couple of key abilities off my hotkeys.  Once correctly, or at least better, setup, I realized that I was pretty strong out in the field.

Part of it was reaching that point of immersion… as defined by my own odd parameters last week… where I was just playing the game and enjoying it and not thinking about anything else.

Then there was the feeling of life in the game, with lots of people around and public groups to join and things just happening everywhere.  Sure, once in a while that leads to a competition over quest objectives, but it is mostly a very good thing… as long as you turned off Level 1-29 chat.

And finally, part of it was a sense of nostalgia.  Having, as noted above, run through the game with four Defiant characters previously, questing through Freemarch was a long string of “Oh yeah, I remember that!” moments as I traced a path across the zone.  It had been a while, so details were fuzzy, but I always felt like I knew where I was headed and if there was some other quest I ought to pick up before headed to a certain point.

Add in the random element of rifts and invasion events and I was having a good time.  I logged into Rift and let WoW be for the day.

Of course, I saw a lot of complaints about Rift Prime.  But complaints always bubble up because people happy with things tend to just play.

I think part of the problem is that Rift Prime wants to be several things.  There is a hint of it being retro server in its own way, limiting content for a bit and dialing up the experience slope some.  But it also wants to be a live server while, so it doesn’t limit things that came later in the game.  And there was also a thread in the message from Trion about simply wanting to give people a non-cash shop, non-loot box, old fashioned subscription style experience.

So, as happens when you have multiple threads in your message, people hear the one that appeals to them and ignore the rest, the complain when they figure out that the focus wasn’t solely on what they expected.

Of the complaints, I think experience might be the thorniest of the bunch.  Part of me sees the problem, and I am far enough along to see it happening, where if you just run the quest lines, the quests chains level up faster that you do.  On the flip side, something in the back of my brain recognizes that very same issue from starting out playing years back, that if you didn’t spend time doing rifts and invasion events you would find yourself in that situation.

So maybe a too literal recreation of the original?

It is annoying to find the quests out leveling you.  On the flip side, I don’t want to rush through the game to level 50 in a week or two, I am fine doing the side tasks, and I am obsessive about doing all of the quests, even the ones you can safely skip or might not find if you’re not careful.

But even then I have found myself about a level or two behind the levels of the quests being offered and I haven’t gotten all that far into things.  So maybe some adjustment is needed.  I will say that I was pleased to find my character was powerful enough to handle mobs 2-3 levels above him.  At about 4-5 levels things get dicey.

For the moment though I am enjoying myself.  Rift has its charm and the reasons I enjoyed it back in the day still seem to exist.  And, with a guild, there is a chance of getting together to do things.  Instances would be cool, but just running around and closing rifts can be fun.

I am not ready to renounce all other games and swear to play Rift forever more, but I am good for the next month or so.  As with EverQuest retro servers, there is something of a built-in expiry for me.  After a certain point I lose interest in the expansions.  The problem with Rift is that I lose interest with Storm Legion, the first expansion.  There isn’t even a Ruins of Kunark to keep me going.  Oh well, I will enjoy what I enjoy and move on when that enjoyment stops.  For now I’m good chasing the next rift on the horizon.

Water rifts are so pretty…

Others writing about Rift Prime this week:

• Inventory Full
• Bio Break
• Endgame Viable
• GamingSF

Getting Home from Oasa

The ping said that if we got in Cainun’s fleet fast, there was a chance of a big kill.  The call was for the armor T3 cruiser fleet doctrine, which features the Legion and Proteus strategic cruisers along with armor logi and support.  I happened to be at my desk at just the right moment to log in, get in fleet, get into my Oneiros and undock as we warped off to a titan to get bridged on our way.

Off we go, are we committed yet?

The bridge off the titan sent us to another system where a wormhole to Thera awaited us.  We formed up on the null sec side of the wormhole, waiting for the orders to go through.  The wormhole was not fresh and there was concern about how much mass we would be pushing through it.

To this end we were asked to go to our fitting window and offline the armor plates on our ships to reduce the mass going through the whole, though I admit that I did wonder how you can turn off something like an armor plate.  Armor isn’t like a shield, it doesn’t go away when you turn off the switch.  But I followed New Eden logic and set mine offline.

Lolling about at the first wormhole

Tackle was sent through first, and they zipped off to the exit whole in Thera, through, and off to catch up our intended target.  Then the call was for command ships and logi to go through the hole and into Thera.  After we were in successfully, the DPS ships were called to jump through.  That was enough to collapse the hole, though only about a dozen ships got left on the other side.  No wormhole adventure for them and they got to head home.  That still left over 200 ships in the fleet.

Once we were warped to the out hole in Thera, we followed the same routine.  Tackle had already gone through, so the call was for command ships and logi, with yet another follow up reminder to turn off armor plates in case somebody hadn’t done it when asked the previous dozen times.  Command ships and logi went through successfully, so the call went for DPS ships to make the transition.  About six DPS ships made it through before the hole collapsed.

That left us in something of an awkward position.  A small fleet consisting mostly of logi was now in 1-HDQ4 in the Oasa region, a long way from home, while more than 150 T3 cruisers were hanging about in Thera where the direct hole home had already closed and the hole to the target was no longer available to them either.  Those left in Thera docked up at one of the stations there.

Those of us stranded up in Oasa were told to start burning to KED-2O where an Imperium Caracal fleet, which had used the same holes before us, was already engaged.  They had killed a Rorqual up there and had a titan tackled.  So off we went with Thomas Lear now leading us.  Why not?  We were already there and didn’t have anyplace else to be.  But even as we closed in on the destination system, word came down the line that a titan kill wasn’t going to happen.  The defenders had been successful at blowing up any tackle and the big ship got away.

So there we were, up in Oasa, a long way from home, 33 ships made up of boosts, lots of logi, and a few DPS ships.  We were like the incarnation of old school WoW paladins in New Eden; we weren’t going to die, but neither was anything we rolled up on.  It was time to figure out how to get back to Delve.

As it turned out, there was another Thera wormhole about 20 jumps from our current location, over in The Vale of the Silent in 9-GBPD.  We just had to get there.  Getting there though, turned out to be a bit of a chore.  Going gate to gate for 20 jumps takes some time, but that got multiplied as we went through Russian space in Perrigen Falls.  The Russians have a habit of covering gates around their space with anchorable warp disruption bubbles.  Lots of them.

The gate inside the bubbles

So for a series of gates we ended up landing 60-90km off of a gate, slow boating with after burners lit to jump through, then slow boating on after burners out of the inevitable bubbles on the other side of the gate.

Out of the bubbles on the far side for another warp

The bubbles were all around the gates, so there was no sending somebody ahead for a perch around them, and we didn’t have enough DPS to blow them up as we went. (Though I think we did destroy a single small bubble as we motored to a gate, just out of boredom and anger more than anything else… launch logi whore drones!)

The bubbles probably didn’t cost us all that much extra time, but subjectively, having to motor on ABs felt like a long time.   Ironically, tomorrow’s patch is making a change to anchorable bubbles so that they decay and go away after a given amount of time, so this might be the last time we have to drag ourselves through a series of forever bubbles.  And if our trip felt like a long time to us, I am sure the rest of the fleet wasn’t happy about it either.

While we had been gating about the northeast of New Eden, the rest of the fleet had been hanging out in Thera just waiting for us to get back.  Jay, who was with us, started trying to get them to rise up against Cainun to get him to take them home rather than waiting for us.  I have to admit, keeping more than 160 people hanging about waiting for 30 or so of us had a lot going against it.  On the other hand, our detachment was made up of the boosters and logi pilots.  Everybody tells us we’re special… everybody who just wants to fly DPS and get kill mails… so I guess it was time for them to show us just how special we were.

We made it past the bubbles gates and finally arrived in 9-GBPD where B33R was sitting on the wormhole as a warp in.  We went through and found Cainun and the rest of the fleet sitting there waiting for us.

Back with the fleet in Thera… also, the only good Oneiros SKIN

Once we were all through and back into Thera, Cainun warped us to the out connection.  There, we had a plate check once again.  Then he called out four Guardians to stay behind before sending people through.  This hole was also questionable, but there was another Thera connection option if this one collapsed.  Cainun just wanted to be sure any fleet that had to take an alternate route had some logi support.

And he was correct, the whole did collapse before we all got through.  I was through and in the system I-ME3L in Stain.  That put us 23 jumps from home on a route through Period Basis, Delve, Fake Querious, and Delve again.

Down in Stain

Fortunately, there was only a single anchorable bubble on the route home, reported by our scout, and it was down before we even got to the system where it was.  We were able to gate home without incident.

All told, that was about a two hour adventure which took some of us on a multi-region tour the length of New Eden.

Our route, Blue for wormhole travel, Red for gate travel

You could certainly find systems more distant from each other than we hit, but Oasa to Period Basis does cover a lot of the breadth of New Eden.  And it also shows how handy wormholes can be and the hazards of them collapsing on you.