Missions & Complexes

Okay my main is minmatar. I'm planning on skilling up to a Loki or Tengu. I've read the faction repair thread but as a noob I'm trying to figure out what agents I should pick to keep minmatar and caldari positive. If I just run missions for those two factions would I eventually be able to run lvl 4 missions with both?

I know not to accept missions with faction targets. Am I on the right track here? Can anyone suggest agents?

Please help a confused newbie

Thanks for the response Lohkil. That makes sense. I read that caldari has a really good loyalty point store so would that be a good starting point? I'm thinking of leaning towards a Tengu for my missioning ship from all the posts I've read on it

Caldari LP store is pretty saturated; CN BCUs have dropped something like 40mil/unit in the past two weeks. There are still gems though.

Hint on LP conversion, especially with a popular faction: don't mission for a security corp, run security missions for a science or industry corp. They get limited run BPCs in their stores that security stores don't -- and there's more profit potential in those.

Oh another question. Does it matter if I mission with a .9 agent or should I got to lower sec like .5 agent? I think I read somewhere that lower sec pays more?

A few things, actually. I forget how complicated it gets but here goes nothing.

There are four types of agents who each offer a type of mission: security (kill missions), distribution (courier missions), mining (mining missions), and storyline (any storyline mission; can be kill, courier, or mining though I've never seen a mining storyline). Mission type is thus determined by agent type. This gets complicated as mission type is keyed to the first mission in multi-part chains, so you'll still occasionally get something out of division. This is all relatively new.

The faction you run for determines which overall pool of LP items are available to you (for instance, CN BCUs are only available form Caldari corporations and Sisters Core Probe Launchers are only available form Sisters of Eve). The major empire factions have the most agents and are most popular to run missions for. Minor factions sometimes, though not always, have offers that pay better due to fewer people earning LP for them.

The corporation you run for determines which LP store you get access to. There are up to three stores per faction: security, research, and industry. The quick and obvious difference between the stores is in which skill hardwirings are offered, but the important difference is actually in the other offers. This applies especially to BPCs. Often the items themselves are available from security corporations, but the BPCs are only available from industry or research corps, and the items end up being much less expensive if produced off of BPCs.

This is a little far abroad, but technically there's another thing worth mentioning while we're on the topic of LP stores: factional warfare LP and LP stores. These offer often deeply discounted rates on common items and also have unique items only available via FW (CN PDUs, FN Omnidirectional Tracking Links, all lower tier faction cruisers and BSs). These offers can more or less ruin normal LP stores, so always watch your conversion rates.



You get more LP from lower sec mission agents. Not that sec status is determined by where you accept the mission and not where you run it.

This all combines to make the "best" empire agents those in .5 with little to no surrounding low sec who work for research/industry corporations but are security agents. Make sense?

A few more tips...

1.) Don't bother doing Level 1 missions. Provided that your Caldari and Minmatar faction standings are not currently negative the following should work flawlessly. Simply do the eighteen 10-part tutorial missions (3 locations for each faction, 6 tutorials per location) while you train the Connections skill to at least 3-4. Doing that, should give you enough faction standing that you will have access to Level 3 agents.

2.) To maximize your ISK per hour from missions, try to find a non-navy corp (E.G. not Caldari Navy Assembly, Gallente Navy, etc) since too many people mission for those corps and the LP stores are rather meh. Make sure the corp you choose has a good LP store (get out excel and do the math). Then make sure that corp has L4 security agents, in a 0.5 sec system, and preferably with no low-sec or nullsec in the constellation. If you find two or more locations that fit that criteria, then mission in the one with the lowest truesec.

Eve-Agents is a good website to find what corps have what agents.

Dotlan is a good website to see truesec (click on a region, click on a system, mouseover the security at the top of the page, truesec will pop-up)

LP database will show you what items are available in each corp's LP store.

Eve University Agent Range Finder is also nice if you want to see what other agents are available in the immediate area. This can be useful if you are trying to find a R&D agent that is close to your mission-running area or if you are trying to see where the closest storyline agent is before you start running missions in a new area.

Eve-Survival is an essential website for mission runners. It details what you will encounter in each and every mission so you know what type of resistances to fit on your ship, what ships trigger additional waves of NPCs, how to blitz the missions, etc.


If you are gonna be serious about running missions (your primary form of income), and once you grind up standings and get access to Level 4 missions, I highly recommend getting into a good mission ship (Tengu, Nightmare, Machriel, or Vargur), work on getting your faction standing very high, and then blitz missions (and skip looting or salvaging). An optimal mission ship will allow you to complete missions quickly, high faction standing allows you to decline missions without waiting for the 4 hr mission decline "cooldown", and blitzing missions allows you to complete more missions per hour. All of these things will allow you to make far far more ISK than someone who flies a tech 1 Battleship, kills everything in every room, and loots and salvages every mission.


IMPORTANT
ONE LAST THING.... make sure you skip faction kill missions. Faction kill missions are missions that require you to kill NPCs from the 4 main empire factions (Caldari, Gallente, Minmatar, and Amarr) Killing empire faction NPCs can seriously screw up your standings with those factions and you never know when you may join a new corp or alliance that lives elsewhere in empire or when you might need to go shopping somewhere.

I really appreciate all the effort you all are givin me. I didn't realize I could get that much rep just from doing the tutorials. Do I need to do amarr and gallente as well?

Ozzie, it sounds like you may benefit from the Uni's Mentor Program. :)