Level 3 Security Missions

After a rather long grind of 28 level two missions, I finally unlocked a level three agent for the Transstellar Shipping corporation. While level two mission felt rather easy, the level three one’s step the difficulty quite  up a bit. The NPC ships to destroy are now mostly cruisers and battlecruisers, which deal a significant amount of damage. To deal with these in a timely fashion, you will need a properly fit battlecruiser with more or less decent skills trained. From level three missions on, any amount of skill points and ISK you put into your mission ship will greatly reduce the average completion time for missions and hence the overall payout.

The Mission Boat

I used the following Drake fit to run all my level three missions:

In the high slots, I put a full rack of ‘Arbalest’ Heavy Missile Launchers ’ loaded with Scourge Heavy Missiles. This gives you, even with low SP, a decent range to stay far away from enemy ships. This will help you to mitigate a lot of the incoming damage in the missions. Since, the Drake has a damage bonus to Scourge Heavy Missiles, I only ever used these. You can maximise your damage with other missile types, which will be explained further down the post.

In the mid slots, I fitted a 50mn Microwarpdrive, which gives you a decent speed of over 1k m/s. The Drake is not capacitor stable with the MWD on, so you need to use it carefully to not run out of cap. However, since many missions require you to burn quite a distance in the missions pockets or the NPC are too far away for you to hit, this will save a lot of travel time. For tank, I fitted 3 Large Shield Extender II and 2 Adaptive Invulnerability Field IIs, with give you a nice shield buffer with good resists all over the resist profile.

In the low slots, we have 3 Ballistic Control System IIs to increase missile damage and a Shield Power Relay II. Together with the rigs below, this Shield Power Relay increases your shield regeneration rate to a point that is comparable to an active shield booster.  The passive recharge rate can be up to 82 HP per second depending on skills, which results in 275 EHP per second recharge rate. Combined with the shield buffer of 55.4 K EHP, this should easily get you through all missions. A tank that is based on shield recharge is actually called a passive shield tank, while a shield tank without regeneration mods is called a shield buffer tank.

In the rig slots, I fitted 2 Medium Core Defence Field Purger Is, which further increase shield recharge rate and a Medium Ancillary Current Router I, which provides some extra powergrid to make everything fit on the hull.

The fit is completed with 5 Warrior IIs to destroy smaller NPC ships like frigates or destroyers.

It goes for around 70 million ISK in Jita at the time of writing. This is quite a bit of cash considering the low payout of level one and two mission, but necessary to run level 3s missions smoothly.

The Skills

You will be able to use many of the skills that you trained for your Corax on the Drake fit. These are the shield tank modules (extenders and hardeners),  the Ballistic Control IIs and you will get bonuses for all the missile support skills. Furthermore, of course the core spaceship operation and navigations skills will apply too. What you need to train additionally, are Heavy Missiles and of course Caldari Battlecruiser. I would recommend to train these at least to level 3 and asap to level 4 once you have the time. Other than that, it would be good to keep training on the certificates I mentioned in the last part of this guide, maybe start to train into certificate level 4 for all of them.

Maximizing Damage and Tank

Starting from level three mission, it sometimes makes sense to optimise your damage and tank against the mission specific NPC faction. Every NPC faction has a weakness to a damage type, where it has the lowest resits. It also has a main weapon system which usually deals up to two main damage types to you.

To max your damage, you can pick the right kind of ammunition for your launchers and swap your drones to deal the damage the NPC faction of the mission is weak to. How do you find out which damage type to deal in a mission? If you look up the mission on Eve Survival or on the Eve University page, the mission description will show you the damage type to tank against and which damage to deal.

The above screenshot shows an Eve University mission description of a level 4 mission. You see that you should deal kinetic and explosive damage and tank against the same types.

These are the damage types of your missiles and drones:

You can see that each drone and missile type deals only one specific damage type. For the above mission, I would bring kinetic damage, which are Hornet IIs and Scourge Heavy Missiles.  Most of the times the first listed damage type in the mission description is the lower NPC resist.

To max your tank, you can swap the Adaptive Invulnerability Field IIs against a damage type specific hardener. These are:

So for the mission above, I would fit one Kinetic Deflection Field II and one Thermal Dissipation Field II. If you fit these instead of the Adaptive Invuls, you will get 25% more resists for the two damage types. The other types will be lower, but the NPCs are not dealing these anyways.

If you really need to swap hardeners and drones for a mission highly depends on the mission, your skills and gear. For very combat heavy missions or if you have trouble finishing it, swapping will help a lot.

The same mechanic works for all drone and missile sizes btw, so you could also adjust your medium drones or rocket launchers.

Running the Missions

I ran a total of 21 level three mission to reach level four standings. The missions were mostly combat missions, with the odd courier mission in between. The couriers were very easy and only required a couple of m3 cargo space. I got one three part storyline mission that greatly increased my standings towards Transstellar Shipping, but did not give a training implant.

There were two missions that gave a significant hit to my Amarr faction standing that are marked red in the below stats. You will recognize many missions names from level one and two missions, and the level three versions are mostly similar, just with bigger NPC ships to fight.

These are my mission stats:

In average, I made 12.5 million ISK per hour, which is quite a bit more than for level two missions. The average completion time went up to almost 12 minutes per mission. Most missions happened in the same system or only one jump out, which was great since the Drake aligns and warps slowly.

That was pretty much it for level 3s. As mentioned earlier, these are just a stepping stone towards level 4s, which I will cover in the next part of this series.