Interlude Before Act 2

If my grind for to acquire the great white battleship, also known as the Nestor, were a play, then Act I concluded Monday. I set three goals at the beginning of the quest. First, earn 600,000 Sisters of EVE loyalty points and 100 million ISK to obtain a blueprint copy from the loyalty point store. The second was to mine all the minerals necessary to construct the battleship. Finally, to earn enough to purchase and fit an armor command ship to complement the Nestor.

The story, as many opening scenes go, saw the hero of the tale, your humble blogger, do wonderfully. In the first 3 1/2 weeks I built up 355,000 loyalty points, over 330 million ISK, and loot and salvage worth 900 million ISK. Along the way I met, and killed, many interesting NPCs who badly needed killing. Or at least, the Sisters of EVE agent I work with decided they needed killing, and since she's paying the bills, I made sure they died.

But now I face my first obstacle, which signals the beginning of the second act. That's right, the changes in fleet boosting will result in the nerfing of both my missioning and mining fleets. Well, at least the information provided so far indicates a downgrade in performance. Faced with the obstacle, how will our hero react?

The key dates in my mind are 13 September and 22 November. In September, the mining barge changes take effect while in November the fleet boosting changes hit Tranquility. During that 10 week period I will have a window to use 2 strip miners on my Procurer while at the same time continuing to get the passive 10% mining yield boost in low sec that come with my current leadership skills flying in a two-ship gang. I need to take full advantage of that.

So basically I will change my plans a bit. I need to try to finish the LP grind in two weeks. Not only to finish the grind before the nerf, but to give myself time to do a lot of mining in low sec. The pixie dust that will power the new command burst modules contains mainly raw ice products. I figure the ice in low sec will contain more of the products than the ice found in high sec. So in addition to mining the higher-end ores required to build a Nestor, I will also mine the ice needed as a power source for the new fleet booster modules.

I can foresee some minor obstacles to overcome along the way. But Act II needs the obstacles in order to make the story interesting. I also want to somehow work the Gallente COSMOS missions and a Gallente faction grind into the mix of activity as well. That should add a degree of difficulty to the next few months, but I don't want to kill myself. But I think I'm fully involved in the game again and want to see how my current journey ends.