EN24 discord
sov map

Jester’s Trek: Fanfest day one – Guristas

May 2, 2014

I’ll do a full post about my impressions of Fanfest day one later on, but first I want to focus on a couple of items central to the Guristas pirate faction that came up today.

First, on the pre-Fanfest stream, CCP Fozzie had revealed that six ships would be revealed at Fanfest:

  1. two ships that would be of limited use to most players but would be exciting;
  2. one ship that is a T2 upgrade to one of the most popular ships in EVE; and,
  3. three ships that “fill a void we’ve been wanting to fill”.(1)

The second two categories will be revealed at the EVE Keynote tomorrow evening, but today he revealed the first category: the two new Alliance Tournament XII prize ships. And one of them is insane… completely insane.

The Guristas Chameleon will be a cruiser based on the Blackbird hull with:

  • 20% per Gallente cruiser level to kinetic and thermal missiles;
  • 4% per Caldari cruiser level to shield resistances;
  • 30% per Recon level to ECM jammer bonus; and,
  • 600% bonus to medium drone damage, with 50 bandwidth.

All of this combined with 7 mid-slots, 4 high slots, 4 low slots, and 3 launcher hardpoints. I’m already picturing three RLML monsters with crazy resists, four or five double bonused jams… and I’m not even sure how much drone DPS, all being repped by an Etana. It’s going to be nucking futs. Congratulations to Hydra or Pandemic Legion on securing the preferred Alliance Tournament ship for the next five or six years. 😉

The Whiptail frigate prize, by contrast, is sort of a super interceptor. It doesn’t strike me as nearly as crazy for tournament use, though particularly daring and confident pilots will have fun with it on Tranquility.

The second Guristas-related announcement, I’m not sure how excited I am about yet. The EVE: Valkyrie team is working on the lore for their new space game. Turns out the Valkyries will be part of a breakaway faction of the Guristas. Early information hints that though Valkyrie itself will still be multi-player, it will have a mission-oriented aspect (perhaps as part of the tutorial or training?). That part of the game will be narrated by the voice of Katee Sackhoff, which is very freakin’ cool:

The game is also switching from the Unity engine to the Unreal 4 engine. However, no mention was made of sticking to the intended late 2014 release date announced last year. Valkyrie EP Owen O’Brien also made refereces to some changes in direction and focus in the development of the game over the last year. That makes me wonder if Valkyrie will still make it out the door before year-end. Hope so! The little bit of footage they showed today was looking really cool!

But with the shift in tone to Guristas for the lore of the game, plus a new set of custom fighters (tossing out the Empire carrier fighters used in previous iterations), that makes me wonder how hard or easy the eventual integration of Valkyrie to the rest of EVE is going to be. I myself was hoping for a very tight integration at some point down the road. Of course that’s still possible but the initial direction makes it harder. That said, DUST tried for integration right away too… Maybe doing it this way is for the best.

So it was a Guristas-related day today!

Finally, to my amusement… I was sitting in the back during Katee Sackhoff’s pre-recorded video. I’m sure she wasn’t pointing at me, though. 😉

(1) That’s what she said. Yeah, I know.

– Ripard Teg