Missions & Complexes

Was looking at the wiki for these, and SOE seems to be SIXTY missions long, and the Caldari one has you go through hoops and shooting Gallente navy ships (harder to get friends to come help you). Are these worth the hassle of doing, if your main goal is increasing your faction standings, or am I just better off grinding L4s and getting a storyline every 16 missions?

I think it is worth remembering that to be truly blitzable the faction standings need to be up high in the first place so you can chain decline all the missions you don't want without losing access to the corp/agent.

Another key point is the amount of faction boost you get per faction mission. From what I can tell there are three types, mining (the most prevalent), courier (more rare), and security (rarest). Looking at my logs, the respective faction boost for each type are ~1.5%, ~3%, and ~9.75% (I have social 5). But in my experience, the security faction missions are very rare and cannot really be counted on being offered regularly unless you are getting multiple faction mission offers per day.

So in order to get an equivalent to the 12.5% from the SOE arc, you are going to be looking at needing 9+ Materials for War Preparation missions (9 x 16 = 144 L4 missions) or 4+ Faction courier missions (4 x 16 = 64 L4 missions), and these calculations ignore that you'll get progressively less increase in standing as your faction standing approaches +10. So when looked at in this light, 60 missions for the guaranteed faction boost of 12.5% from SOE begins to look a lot more appetising I think. Plus the epic arc faction boosts don't have derived standings losses.

TL:DR it's your game, play it how you want. But I would definitely do them, they are nice break from the monotony of regular L4's and can be done relatively quickly if you have the right ship.

I would say the quickest way is to do L4 FW missions, as you'll get the equivalent standings boost from 0 to 8.0 IIRC as you increase your standing to the FW corp. While they are tricky, there are guides out there and once you get used to them they'll be relatively easy.

The promotion boosts are one time (ie they can't be redone every 3 months like the epic arcs). But the faction standing rewards are substantial I think you'll agree - I think you get about 10% corp boost per L4 FW assassination missions, and since you'll collect up to 15 missions before heading out to enemy low sec the promotions can come thick and fast, PLUS you don't need to worry about faction missions (FW missions dont give Faction missions, but the promotions do give Faction Standing increases).

Here are the standings boosts per level:

Rank 1: get for free.
Rank 2: +4.4198% (when you reach a standing of 1.0 to the FW corp)
Rank 3: +6.4198% (when you reach a standing of 2.0 to the FW corp)
Rank 4: +8.4198% (when you reach a standing of 3.0 to the FW corp)
Rank 5: +10.4198% (when you reach a standing of 4.0 to the FW corp)
Rank 6: +12.4198% (when you reach a standing of 5.0 to the FW corp)
Rank 7: +14.4198% (when you reach a standing of 6.0 to the FW corp)
Rank 8: +16.4198% (when you reach a standing of 7.0 to the FW corp)
Rank 9: +18.4198% (when you reach a standing of 8.0 to the FW corp)
Rank 10: +20.0% (when you reach a standing of 9.0 to the FW corp)

Sure to run only the desirable blitzable missions you need high standings, but many normal level 4s are very quick to run or have a blitz. A ton of lv4s only require you to kill one group in the last room to complete the mission. And missions like worlds collide and the blockade are 60-120m/hour missions, I just go for the even higher missions. Your corp/agent standings should be able to deal with declining the occasional angels extra or faction kill mission (if you even want to skip them), these declines will have almost no effect on your faction standing. At around 7 standing one combat story line more than repairs the standings required to get 8 story line missions, so if your faction standings are lower it will boost by a ton. It may have even been more than 8, I decline courier missions whenever I get them. Roughly 10 pages of declines at 25missions/page with one mats for war in the middle.

I don't find combat storylines to be all that rare. I'd rather run standard lv4s than try and do the soe arc, going to be making good isk while you do it. Soe arc is great for newbies, but a lot of boring warping around for established players. For example my standings log has 3 combat, 5 mats for war, and unknown courier. My journal also has 3 more combat story lines. which at this point I'm just too lazy to run. As I said earlier I remote decline courier missions as soon as they come up to free those agents for combat/mats4war missions.

As for the lv4 epic arcs, no idea, probably should do one someday

Correct me if I'm wrong but you can't get SOE faction standing through FW?

I mean it depends on what you want the standing for I guess but for missions there isn't much reason to shop at the FW LP stores outside of FW.

That's correct, my only goal is to raise Caldari State standings so I can get lower broker fees at the Jita station. Already got Caldari Navy up to 9.60 but the faction grind was killing me, so I came here looking for options.

I'm not necessarily saying my method is fastest, but that it is pretty dang convenient. I am a lazy creature of habit after all. The lv4 combat storylines give nice boosts, and with high skills go pretty quickly. Depending on skills it might be faster to blitz lv3 missions as you can run them much faster. Most involve warping in shooting a few things and warping out. Been a long time since I've done a lv3 storyline so not sure what kind of boost they give.

I hardly know a thing about FW, but those standings gains look pretty nice, and as they are tied to corp standings it sounds like it should go pretty quickly.

The Cosmos missions are nice, but a one time thing, and are annoying to run. All the various complexes have different ship restrictions, and are a bunch of jumps out of the way. I ran a good deal of the caldari cosmos years ago and never thought about going back. Lived in the lowsec pocket attached to the caldari cosmos and never bothered with any of those missions. A few cosmos rewards are very nice, most are not.

Anyone know how much standings the lv4 epic arcs give and about how long they take to run? For pure standings grinding I'm guessing they aren't worth it. For the no derived standings changes they do seem worth it, although that is a very specific goal.

yep, that's about when I touched it last. Although I did do the 2 run navy ship bpc missions for high faction standings far more recently if you can count those as cosmos missions. the 2 run ME 10% TE 18% navy raven bpc is one of my favorite items in game.

Short answer: yes. And there is some decent loot to be acquired in the process.