Mission Running: The Guristas Epic Arc

Epic arcs are Eve’s version of single player storyline missions that lead you through a series of objectives, sometimes even with the option to drive the storyline plot to a certain outcome. There are a total of seven epic arcs available in the game. The easiest one is run for the Sisters of Eve faction and considered level one missions. There is also one epic arc for each of the empire factions, that require the usual standings for level four missions and also have a similar difficulty. Finally, there are two pirate faction epic arcs, one for the Angel Cartel and one for the Guristas Pirates, which have the difficulty of level three missions.

All epic arcs will give you a big boost to the faction standing for who you run the arc without significant derived standing losses to other factions, and reward you with a fancy faction item or BPC after the last mission of the arc. You can even re-run an epic arcs after a three-month cooldown period with any character that has the appropriate standings, which allows to farm these if you have enough characters available. In this post I want to give you some insights into the Guristas Epic Arc, my experience running it and a breakdown of the rewards that you will get from finishing it.

General Tips Running the Arc

The Gurista epic arc missions all take place in Venal, a null sec region that is controlled by the Guristas NPC faction. The mission chain consists of thirteen missions, and you have the option to choose twice between different mission branches in the chain. However, your choice will not affect the final payout or standing gains, so just pick a mission that you like the most at these points. After the last mission of the chain, you will get a significant boost to your Guristas faction standing but also for each mission a good increase to Guristas corp standing, which comes handy if you want to run security missions for the Guristas after finishing the arc.

The Gurista epic arc missions are considered level three security mission and you will need the appropriate standings for level three missions to start it. There are three different agents that will give you access to the first mission and you will only need to qualify for one of them. All following missions will be given to you without any standing requirements.

There is a Guristas agent called Yada Vinjivas, who you can find in Taisy (Lonetrek) low sec. For this agent you will either need Gurista faction or corp standing of three. The second agent is a Caldari agent called Atma Aulato, and is located in Obe (The Forge) low sec and works for the Yitri corporation. To qualify for him, you will need either Caldari faction or Yitri corporation standing of three or greater. The final option is a Gallente agent called Arment Caute working for the Federal Intelligence Office. He requires you to have either Gallente faction or Federal Intelligence Office standings of greater three and is located in Orvole (Placid). All agents also require you to have a faction standing of greater than -2 if you want to access the agent by their corporation standing.

The epic arc in the agency window.

All three agents are located at a beacon in space in their corresponding systems and not at a station. Once you warp to the beacon, you can start a conversation by right clicking the agent in space. Be aware that the agency window will not show you all three possible agents that start the epic arc, but only the closest agent to your current location. If you don’t have the proper standing for this agent, the agency window will not indicate this and it will look like you cannot start the arc. In that case you simply need to fly to the agent you can access and start a conversation.

Starter Agent in Obe at a beacon

The most dangerous part of the arc are actually other players living in Venal, who might try to kill you on the way in and out of null sec or while doing the missions. That’s why you need a properly fit ship to avoid getting killed by other players to get you started with the arc.

I don’t want to give you a detailed summary of all the missions or spoiler the plot of the arc because that’s the fun part of doing it. If you need help with the actual missions objectives, I will just point you to this eve survival page, which nicely describes all missions and their objectives.

The Fit

The only way to get deep into null sec without sooner or later getting blown up is to use one an Interceptors with a Interdiction Nullifier module fitted. Whenever you travel for bigger distances through null sec, you need to fit the nullifier to travel safely. Since the arc takes place in NPC space, there are usually stations where you can unfit the Nullifier and fit your combat fit before the next mission. If the next mission is only a jump or two away or there is no station close to refit, you might get away without the Nullifier or can scout your own way with the Nullifier fitted and then travel back and refit to the combat fit.

From the available interceptors, I picked the Crow as my hull of choice but any of the Interceptors can do the job.

This is the Crow combat fit I came up with:

Crow Epic Arc Fit

The Crow uses Rocket Launcher IIs as its primary weapon system in the high slots. The rockets can be adjusted to all four damage types. Since you will fight mostly Caldari Navy ships, we will need plenty of rockets that deal kinetic damage (Scourge rockets), which is the weakness of caldari ships. Ideally, you bring enough ammo to complete the entire arc, because there might not be any additional ammunition for sale in Venal, although there are a few public stations that might have a limited selection of goods. With Scourge Rage Rockets loaded, this fit does more than 100 dps, which is plenty to get you through all the missions.

The fit uses a shield buffer tank with some extra kinetic resists in the mid slots to tank against the main Caldari damage type. The Afterburner II combined with the low signature radius of the Crow should give you also enough speed tank to mitigate most of the NPC damage.

The low slots contain a Ballistic Control System II for more damage and a Micro Auxiliary Power Core I to get enough power grid to make everything fit.

The rigs slots increase the shield buffer with a Small Core Defence Field Extender II and patch against the secondary caldari damage type, which is thermal damage by a Small Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer II. Be aware that you have a massive EM resist hole, so you better don’t try to PVP in this fit.

Furthermore, I have a Small Tractor Beam I , some Light Missile Launcher Is and some Scourge Light Missiles in cargo. You will need these to finish the last missions, that requires you to shoot an bunker in space behind a force field that regenerates 150 dps, which you cannot break in this fit. For this mission you need to refit to the single missile launcher and the tractor beam after clearing all hostile NPCs and shoot the mission objective through the forcefield with the long-range missile launcher. The bunker is destroyed easily by that, and you can use the tractor beam to get the wreck of the it which contains the item required to finish the last mission. The eve survival mission reports will mention that too, but I want to list this gear here that you can bring it with you before starting burning deep into null.

Additionally, we need some more modules to refit to in cargo. At first, there are two Inertia Stabilizer II and an Interdiction Nullifier I to switch out in the low and high slots whenever you are travelling longer distances or in and out of Venal. By the Intertial Stabalizers , you align faster and can escape player gate camps on the way in much easier. The fit is not aligning fast enough to be 100% safe passing gate camps, but with the inertia stab the align time goes down to 3.1 seconds, which is not horrible.

The entire fit only cost about 55 million ISK, so it really doesn’t break the bank to get started. The amount of skill points needed to fly this Crow fit is also very reasonably and should be doable for Omega accounts with a couple of million SP.

Running the Missions

I fitted my ship in Jita and went straight to the low sec system of Obe to get to my first mission agent. The first mission just sent me directly to a Gurista agent in Venal. On the way to the agent, I passed two player bubble camps in Tribute that fortunately weren’t able to catch me, thanks to my Interdiction Nullifier fitted. From the second mission on, the mission objectives of the following mission are typical security mission objectives. These mostly involve killing some NPC frigates and destroyers, picking up an item from their wrecks or dropping an item in one of the mission rooms. Rarely you will encounter a cruiser or battlecruiser in a mission, but you can easily speed tank these by orbiting at 2k range.The 100 dps of the Crow is more than enough to break these with a little patience. The missions require you to travel around in Venal quite a bit, and I encountered a couple of other players on gates that again I could dodge by fitting the Inertia stabs, the Nullifier and some luck. The closest to being destroyed happened when an instalocking Tornado took a shot at me undocking from a station. Luckily, my shield buffer was big enough that I survived one shot and could warp away before the Tornado could shoot again. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea to run these mission on Saturday night when everybody is looking for action in Venal. The last mission of the mission branch I took, required me to refit into the above mention long range mode to get to the final mission item. I wasn’t smart enough to bring the refit with me, so I had to fly around for a bit to gather the required modules. There are also a lot of NPC ships that are triggered by approaching the final objective in that mission. You should always clear on wave of NPC instead of just charging in, because the dps of the entire pocket is way too big to tank.

The final mission of my branch. The objective is inside the force field.

Other than that, all missions were pretty straight forward and I finished the mission chain in a bit over 2 hours, but I guess you could do it faster if you really want to.

For completing all 13 mission, I was rewarded with 64 million ISK in cash. There are no loyalty points given out by the agents, so no shopping in the LP store after the arc. After the 8th mission you are rewarded with a Guristas faction ECM module instead of ISK, which currently goes for about 10 million ISK in Jita. After the final mission you will get a single run Gila blueprint copy, which is sold for around 50-60 million ISK in Jita on public contracts. This comes to a total of about 120 million ISK in goods and ISK in rewards for the entire epic arc.

Gila BPC + Dread Guristas ECM

If you manage to finish the arc in around two hours, this results in 60 million ISK/hour. Considering that you only need a 60 million ISK interceptor and very little skill points to run the arc, this is an exceptionally good payout. The payout was much more before the industry changes in 2021, but unfortunately the days when a Gila BPC went for 200 mill in Jita are over.

You cannot run the arc every day, but if you are into mission running or ratting to make your ISK, I think the Guristas Epic Arc should be on your schedule every three months.

As always, if you have any comments about this guide or just want to say hello, please eve mail me in game to my main character Piter Presley.


Mission Running: Mining Missions

Mining missions are another subcategory of missions, which ask you to mine a certain amount of ore from a specific site in a system close to your mining agent of choice. The ores you need to mine, are not the standard ores you can find in asteroid belts and mining anomalies, but unique mining mission ores. These cannot be sold or bought on the market. To complete a mission, you have to go there yourself and mine whatever amount is needed. The mission sites always contain the exact amount the agent is asking for and you need to drop it at your agent’s home station in order to complete the mission. Similar to other missions, you are rewarded in ISK and loyalty points (LP) for your services and gain standings to the agent and his corporation.

Mining agents also come in four levels and you will need sufficient standings to the corporation in order to get access to the agent.  To learn more about agents and standings, check this previous post.

Mining sites may contain a few hostile NPCs and you will need to bring a flight of combat drones on your mining boat to deal with them. These NPCs are very weak regardless of the mission level and no special combat ship is needed to clear them.

Most mining missions are at the most one jump away from the agent, very often even in the same system.

Mining missions require you to mostly mine ore, but in the higher levels (3+) you might be asked to mine also ice or gas.

I don’t want to go over each level separately, but will summarize the amount of ore and the required time I needed to finish a mission in the following table:

LevelVolume in m3avg. Time
11K - 2K6 min
21.8K - 6K10 min
34K - 10K11 min
420K - 45K53 min

As you can see, the amount of ore is getting bigger with each level, as does the rewards and the time to finish it. The completion times pretty much depend on the amount of ore you can mine per second and were measured with my quite average mining skills and the fits below.

In the lower level missions, the asteroids in the sites are quite far away from the warp-in point of the mission and you will need to fly closer to get into mining laser range. These missions are better done in a ship that moves relatively fast to minimize the time required for the mission.

My character had most social skills trained to level four to increase the base payout, but no Mining Connections skill was trained.

The Ships

For level one mission and some of the level two mission with low ore volume, you can use a pretty standard mining Venture fit.

Ore Venture Fit

If you want to know more about the different modules and skills to improve mining yield, just check this post about mining equipment.

This is basically a T2 fit, with maximum mining yield and some shield tank in the mid and rig slots. To fight hostile NPCs, it comes with two light scout drones. It has an afterburner fit, which gives you some speed tank against hostile NPCs and lets you get into mining laser range faster. With maxed out skills it pulls 8.52 m3 (2*4.26) of ore per second , which is the maximum amount for a solo venture. If your mining skills are not perfect and if you have to use T1 lasers and mining upgrades instead of T2, your amount will be lower. My pilot reached 7.2 m3 per second, which is not great but also not too bad.

The Venture has a ore hold that fits 5k m3 of ore, so you can finish the low ore volume missions without going back to station to drop off ore, which saves some time warping around.

For the missions with a larger amount of ore (>5k m3), I used the following Retriever fit:

Ore Retriever Fit

This fit is very similar to the Venture, with Strip Miner Is instead of the frigate sized mining lasers, more Mining Laser Upgrades and more drones. The tank and drones are more than enough to fight the NPCs in the higher level missions. This fit pulls 16.86 m3 ore per second, which is a big upgrade to the Venture. The ore hold of the Retriever fits 28k m3 of ore, which allows you to finish most missions in one go. Only some level 4 missions with high volumes will require you to drop ore in station in between. This fit is slow as a turtle and not doing great in level one and two missions, because traveling times within the sites are too high. In level three and four missions the rocks are mostly within mining laser range of the Retriever.

For ice mining missions, I refitted my Retriever to an ice mining fit with spare modules that I always kept in my cargo bay:

Ice Retriever Fit

This fit almost pulls the same volume of ice as the ore fit and all modules you need to swap easily fit into your cargo hold. I had no ice mining rigs fitted, since I wanted to use the same ship for both types of missions. You will get Ice mining missions from level three and four agents. The ice cubes are pretty close to each other, so no propulsion module is required for these missions.

I did not run any of the gas mining mission, but declined these when I got one, because gas mining cannot be done in a barge and I would had to bring a second Venture to run these. However, I only got two gas mining mission within several days and these were safely declined without standing loss. These are also only given out by level three and four agents.

The Payout

I ran around a dozen missions of each level to get an idea of the average payout per level. The amount of ISK and LP within each level is pretty much proportional to the amount of ore you need to mine. So for a level 4 mission that requires you to mine 20k m3 of ore, you will get roughly half the payout than for a mission that asks for 40k m3 of ore.

I ran all missions in the above fits and got the following average payout per mission in each level:

Levelavg. payout
(in mill ISK)
avg. LP
(in mill ISK)
ISK / hour
10.0532
(0.05)
1
20.37 346
(0.52)
5.3
30.5 722
(1.08)
8.6
41.53325
(5)
7.35

With the average time per mission that I mentioned earlier, you will get the ISK / hour values in the above table. The payout even for level 4 missions is still not great, with level 3 mission strangely having the best payout with 8.6 million per hour.  This is caused by the fact that the amount of ore to mine in level four mission raises by more than 1000% in the worst case scenario – 4k m3 ore vs. 45k m3 – compared to level three missions. Additionally, you will sometimes need to drop off ore in station which can take quite a while in a slow aligning and warping Retriever. However, the rewards for level four missions increase by only between 3-4 times compared to level three rewards. This is much lower than the payout by level four distribution mission that was around 15 million per hour for level four missions.

Of course the ISK per hour could be raised by better mining skills and equipment, but even with maxed out skills and an exhumer you will hardly double these values. I think this is actually a very poor payout for quite a lot of skill points you need to invest to fly barges properly and ISK you need to spemd on the equipment. The only real advantage is that you can run many of these missions almost afk with minimal interaction during the mission. Especially level four missions can sometime be run with just activating your lasers twice in 40 minutes. So if you want to make some easy afk ISK, mining missions might be the right thing for you.  This also opens up a good opportunity to run several mining missions at the same time with multiple accounts. With this little interaction needed, you can easily run a dozen accounts at the same time running level fours.

Lastly, mining missions are quite an alpha account unfriendly activity because they cannot train into mining barges. With the venture being the only mining ship available to alphas, the higher level missions will take hours to complete for minimal payout.

Mining Ships and Equipment

Before I am going to continue my mission running series with mining agents, I want to give you a brief overview of the different ships and modules that are used for mining.  Mining missions will require the same equipment and skills as regular mining and agents will ask you to mine the three basic resource types: ore, ice and gas.

Mining Ships

In theory, every ship in Eve that has a turret hardpoint or drone bay can mine. However, there are several hulls that give bonuses to mining gear and have a build in cargo bay to store big volumes of ore, ice or gas.

The smallest hulls to mine are frigate sized and come in one T1 and two T2 versions.There is the Venture, which is the T1 version and has hull bonuses for ore and gas mining. It is one of the most newby friendly hulls in game and every player will get one for free during the tutorial missions.  For extra safety it has two build in warp core stabilizers as a hull bonus

The first T2 version is the Prospect, which has the same mining bonuses. Instead of the warp core stabs bonus, it can fit a Covert Ops Cloaking Device II, which allows it to warp cloaked and operate more safely in low sec.

The second T2 version is the Endurance, which has a bonus to ore and ice mining. It also can fit a covert ops cloak and warp cloaked. Here are some other basic stats for the three hulls:

Mining Frigates

The next step up from mining frigates are mining barges, which also come in several T1 and T2 versions.  All mining barge hulls have bonuses to ore and ice mining. There is currently no barge for gas mining, so you need to stick to frigates for this.

The T1 hulls are the Procurer, which has the most slots of all T1 barges and gives you a lot of fitting options for different scenarios. It can also fit the best tank of all T1 hulls. However, the amount of ore you can mine in a Procurer will be lower than in the other two available hulls. The Procurer also has quite a big drone bay, which will allow you to bring mining and combat drones at the same time.

The second T1 hull is the Retriever, which has the biggest ore hold but a very limited slot layout. The amount of mining it can do is in the middle of the three T1 hulls. The drone bay only fits one flight of drones, so you need to pick either mining or combat drones.

The last hull is the Covetor, which has the smallest ore hold, but will mine the largest amount of ore. The slot layout is similar to the Retriever and hence very limited. The Covetor has also a bigger drone bandwidth than the other two and can launch medium drones or a single ice mining drone.

T1 Barges

There are also T2 versions of all three T1 mining barge hulls. The basic characteristics in terms of ore hold and mining amount of all three T2 are similar to their T1 counterparts.  They all have additional slots to give you a lot more fitting options and most have a bigger drone bay. In general the T2 versions mine a bigger amount than their T1 counterparts and can fit a lot more tank.  

T2 Barges

The last type of mining ships are Command Ships, which use mining drones to mine but additionally can boost the mining stats of other mining ships in fleet. I don’t want to go into the details of fleet boosting and the other perks of command ships like a fleet hangar and ship maintenance bay, but only show you the basic mining stats.

There are three different command ship hulls, which are the Porpoise, the Orca and the Rorqual.  All three require quite some training, with the Porpoise being the easiest, followed by the Orca and then the Rorqual. All three have very big ore holds and bonuses for mining drone yield. The drone bays are big enough to bring various flights of other drones for different purposes. The Rorqual  is the only ship that can use Excavator Mining Drones, which can mine insane amounts of ore compared to even the best mining barge. However, you can only use the Rorqual in null security space and it costs around 10 billions ISK including a proper fitting and the excavator drones, so it is kind of the end game for mining. There is a lot more to say about the Rorqual and its mechanics, but I will explain that in another post. Here are some basic stats of the three hulls.

Command Ships

Mining Equipment

First thing you need to fit on your mining ship are mining lasers. These come similar to the ships in two different sizes.

There are the frigate sized mining laser for ore (Miner I / II), gas (Gas Cloud Harvester I/II) and ice (Ice Mining Laser I/II), which all come in a T1 and T2 version. The T2 versions all mine bigger amounts per minute. Ice miners always mine 1 block of ice per cycle, but get smaller cycle times by skills, hulls and other gear, which again results in more ice per minute.

Frigate sized mining lasers

Only Mining Barges can fit the bigger versions of mining lasers, which are the Strip Miner I for ore and the Ice Harvester I and II for ice. There is a special T2 strip miner version for ore, which is the Modulated Strip MIner II that uses ammunition to increase the mining amount. There is special ammo called mining crystals for all types of ore and if you want to mine a different type, you will have to swap ammunition for that particular ore. A mining crystals last for a couple of hours, so you won’t need new ones very often. With the proper crystal a Modulated Strip Miner II mines a bigger amount per minute than the T1 counterpart. Without a proper crystal it mines less.

Additionally to mining lasers, you can also use mining drones to mine ore and ice. There are various T1, T2 and faction version for ore and ice mining available. They pretty much mine more per minute if they are more expensive. Ice mining drones are quite big in size and need a big drone bandwidth, so not all mining hulls can use them.

There are the two special mining drones for Rorquals, called ‘Excavator’ Mining / Ice Harvesting Drone. A flight of Excavator drones is around 5 billion ISK, which comes on top of the expensive Rorqual hull and fittings. However, with the right Rorqual fitting these mine the largest amount possible in the game and income can be up to 200 million ISK / h.

Mining Drones

To further increase the mining amount of your lasers you can use  a low slot module called Mining laser Upgrade I / II for ore and Ice Harvester Upgrade I / II for ice. There is no upgrade for gas mining available.

Mining Upgrades

Survey Scanners are another very handy mid slot module used for mining. A survey scanner scans all asteroids , ice blocks  and gas clouds around you and displays how much is left in the scanned objects. By this you can time your mining lasers and don’t waste mining cycles on small asteroids. Survey Scanners come in a T1 and T2 and a meta version which have different ranges.

Survey Scanners

There is a special type of ore called Meroxid which is only found in null security space and that requires special mining equipment. It cannot be mined by regular ore mining lasers. There is several small and barge sized versions of mining lasers for Meroxit available and the T2 versions need Meroxit Mining Crystals to to work properly.

Finally, there is one type of rig that increases ice mining amount in all four sizes. There are no rigs that affect ore or gas mining laser yield, but another one that works for mining drones, which is mostly used on command ships.

Mining Rigs

If you then still want to increase mining yield, there are also various implants that affect increase ice and ore mining amount and reduce CPU needs for mining upgrades.

Mining Implants

Mining skills

To use all these mining stuff you will need the proper skills. There are the skills to use the ships which are:

Mining Frigate, which gives you access to the Venture hull with level 1 and at level 5 to the Prospect and Endurance.  The T2 hulls then need Expedition Frigates level 1 to unlock the hull and increase its stats.

Mining Barge, which gives you access to T1 barges with level 1 and at level 5 to the T2 versions.  The T2 hulls then need Exhumers level 1 to unlock the hull and increase its stats.

For command ships you will need Industrial Command Ships for the Porpoise and Orca and Industrial Capital Ships for the Rorqual.

To use mining lasers you need to train Mining for all ore related lasers and Ice Harvesting for all ice related lasers. Both skills also increase the mining output of the corresponding lasers by level.  Finally, there is Gas Cloud Harvesting to unlock gas mining lasers and increase the mining yield.

To get access to mining drones there are again two separate skills for ice and ore mining drones. These are Mining Drone Operation for ore mining drones and Ice Harvesting Drone Operation for ice mining drones. For both types there is also a specialization skills that unlock the T2 versions and that further increases mining yield of T2s.

One very important skill that is a prerequisite for many hulls and gear is Astrogeology.  It increases the mining output of all mining lasers by 5% per level and is required to train into T1 (level 3) and T2 (level 5) barges.  This is probably the most important skill to train to 5.

To use the mining laser upgrades, you will need to train Mining Upgrades, which unlocks Ice Harvester and Mining Laser Upgrades I/II.

Finally, if you want to use mining crystal for T2 strip miners, you will need to skill into ore processing skills. Each mining crystal requires you to train the corresponding ore processing skill of the ore the crystal works on, e.g. Arkonor Processing for Arkonor Mining Crystals. There are quite some different ore types, so to use all the mining crystals you will need a lot of training towards ore processing. However, these are skills quite useful to miners if you want to refine your own ore. From there you could also look into T1 production as a career.

That’s my summary of mining ships, gear and skills. It doesn’t cover every little detail about mining equipment, but will give you enough inside to understand the fits in the next post of these series, which will be about running mining missions in high security space.