Missions & Complexes

While i haven't had the oppourtunity to do so myself, I hear that since the hac rebalance an ishtar is completely capable of soloing it, either active shield tank (pithum c-type) or armor tank. Drone proteus should also be fine doing it.

I think he found the unrated HQ, and not "the maze". its not actually a 10/10 though it does share the x-type loot table.

Are we talking the provincial HQ here, or the Maze?

I did the escalation of the Provincial HQ twice. Once in a small group years back, and it was not that hard. This was before the aggrochanges, so i am not sure what it would take now. I remember we did it with two ravens, an ishtar and we had a scimi as logi. When we had the final spawn we had to get two other guys in drakes to break the tank of the overseer since he has a massive shieldrep. Needs about 2000 dps i think.

Last time i did it, i used a chimera on my pve alt and a tengu on my main. The chim was fit that it could use 14 sentries and did about 1600 dps, and with the added 700 or so from the tengu it was relatively easy to get the overseer down. Still took about 10 minutes for it to pop. During the proces of getting the spawns i had to warp the tengu out on occassion. I think there is also neuts there so those need to die first. The Chimera had no problems tanking it though as long as the neuts were blown up in timely fashion. The room is BIG so you need to warp around a bit.

First two escalations can be done with an ishtar or tengu. 3rd escalation needs more ships, or a carrier. Final escalation also several ships or a carrier and some ships. You need 2000-2500 dps to break the overseers tank anyway, so plan for that and for neuts. So bring logi, massive passive tanks. If i couldn't use a carrier i would probably use several passive shield ishtars and tengu's, maybe with some shieldlogi. Kill neuts first when they appear and you should be good. When down to the final spawn maybe a high dps ship like a vindi or a domi.

Oh, and you need to do it first offcourse. The provincial HQ has two rooms. First room is easily done in an ishtar or tengu, I think you can even blitz it. Blow up EM field, move to the acceleration gate, blow up control tower, and activate warp. Not exactly sure, since the Guristas Military Complex has a similar first room, and i tend to mix the two up now and then.

Second room is a lot harder, because there are 4 sentry guns thingies there which do EM damage. There are also 4 normal sentries there, but the 4 EM doing thingies hit HARD since you have an EM hole if you fit against guristas, A fully shieldtanked ishtar can barely hold on against this, and you need to tank a tengu against EM to make it work. These 4 thingies take quite some time to be blown up. There is also some tackle there so i first start blowing up the tackle. Then i work on the EM sentries. You need to keep the Ishtar moving at full speed and at transversal to be able to tank the EM sentries. And sometimes you need to warp out. If you have two down it gets easier. I mostly just kill all four, ignore the battleships and start working on the station. There is also a smartbomb activating, but its kinetic i think, so barely noticable of you use the standard anti-guristas fits.
Blowing up the station or the faction battleship (usually a Dread Guristas Usurper or Massacrer) give a possible escalalation i explained above.

Good luck!

Two RR tengus should do the trick.
There is a video of it on Youtube from Zaqq. He was totaly overtanked.