Van Hemlock 90: The Agony Unleashed Episode

Over the weekend I listened to Van Hemlock #90, in which I got to hear Tim’s impressions of the Agony Unleashed PvP course in Eve Online. Not too long ago, one of Agony Unleashed’s PvP instructors (and now member of the CSM) Teadaze gave a lecture about PvP to Eve University and I was eager to hear the opinions of someone who went through the class and put those principles into action.

First, hearing that the class was four hours of classroom and four hours of practical exercise seemed about normal from what I’ve seen in the Uni. The Uni has a lot of classes like Tackling 101, Electronic Warfare 101 and Fleet Movement 101 that it sounded like the Agony Unleashed crew combined into their weekend instruction. I heard Tim mention something about transversal in a previous podcast so I’m guessing the instructors also went into some of the basics like optimal and falloff. I just wonder if the law of autocannons was discussed.

I think the best part of the podcast was when Tim described the practical exercise, which was a roam through null sec. I knew this was going to be eventful when Tim said he was flying a Griffin. As anyone who has watched Clear Skies knows, no one likes ECM.

Listening to Tim talk about his adventures made me think of the fleets I’ve been on. We’ve had a bit more firepower with cruisers and battlecruisers making up part of the fleet, but the Agony Unleashed roam sounded a lot like the famous Eve University blobs that roam through low-sec. Except we bring a lot more electronic warfare ships with us. Only 5 Griffins? People actually make up fleets like that? Oh well, it was a class, so you can’t have everything.

One of the things I enjoyed most was hearing at the end of the podcast that Tim was looking forward to PvP in the future. I agree with Tim that being part of a fleet makes it less scary. And to be part of a fleet getting a lot of quality PvP a player needs to be part of a good corporation, or at least involved in faction warfare.

I’ll copy Tim and Jon’s format and end with what I learned from listening to Van Hemlock #90. The first thing is that having a lot of skill points in Eve doesn’t necessarily mean you will beat someone with a lot less skill points. People say that, but listening to Tim, who most likely has millions more skill points than I do, talk about new things he learned that I already had learned does illustrate the point more clearly than anything else could. The second thing is that joining Eve University was a very good move. I already knew a lot of the information that Tim talked about. Okay, I had taken a two hour class on bookmarks the day before listening to the podcast. But I knew about Goonswarm’s Poseidon Project. And being in a place where everything either wants to learn or teach is a pretty good place.