It was time to ramp up my DeD farming with a better ship. I also wanted to see how much ISK I could make in a 12-hour grinding session. Will my luck continue, or will DeD sites treat me like they always do?

There are a thousand and one ways to go about running DeD sites. I felt my T2 Retribution, which was doing an ok job, was not quite cutting sure. Sure, I could fit a prob launcher onto it. I, however, wanted something a bit more geared and powerful that would still fit into most high sec DeD combat sites.

While out and about, you notice some funny things when running a combat site. Like seeing a Kronos warp into one that only had frigates in it. For them to enter into bastion mode to try and snipe your kills and miss every hit.

While sure, I could bring my Paladin into some of these sites. That just seems like risking way too much for far too little reward. On top of that, hitting frigates at 2k away is not going to go well.

While also running these combat sites, I've noticed people in Stratios. Not a bad option at all, and it is a cruiser, so it would fit into just about any site. I could even do relic sites in it. The only downside is that the hull of the ship is 240 million ISK. That just seems like way too much of a ship for killing mostly frigates to cruisers.

I’ve also noticed a few people running around in T3 cruisers. Again, that would be a great ship to use. However, the starting point for that alone would be 500 million, and you can spend billions if you wanted to on one of those.

From my last big run, I ended up getting about 180 million in loot. I felt that I could get a new ship for about half that, or let's say under 100 million. I’d be happy with that. I also wanted to try flying a type of ship I've yet to do so.

Going the T3 route seemed like the way to go. While, after all these years, I was hoping there would be more T3-type ships. They sadly only ever added in one other, and it was destroyers. They are also kind of an odd ship as you swap between three different modes to boost one kind of stats over another.

There was going to be one major drawback to going this route. While I had most of the skills to fly one. I was lacking the amarr tactical destroyer skills. So it was going to be a little light on DPS and use a lot more power than I'd like to shoot the lasers at first.

The Confessor is not known for being the best ship for DeD running, as far as T3 destroyers go. Most likely to go with the Caldari Jackdaw. I, however, prefer my Amarr ships, and it’s where most of my skills are trained.

Next up was going to be the tricky part. How to fit it. There are so many ways to go. I’ll admit I liked having dual reps and having armor plating on my Retribution. So I ended up carrying those smilear ideas into using the Confessor.

If I had not done that. I could have gotten a bigger beam weapon for even more dps. Now, due to my lower skills in T3 destroyer, the Confessor would have less DPS than my Retrubiton when it was not in offence mode. However, I only ever plan to be in a combat site when in attack mode.

The funny thing is, despite the Confessor being T3, my Retrubiton has more ehp than it. Unless I wanted to drop a heatsink and be in defense mode the whole time. While defence mode boosts resistance by quite a lot. Without having some resistance modules, that just seems like a waste to be using.

Along with having a probe launcher, I can scan down any sites I need to. I went with the odd choice of having a Salvager II on the ship. That is because commander ships that can spawn are T2, and you can get T2 salvage from them. So I figure I could make a couple of extra million if the salvage ends up being decent.

Part of the fun in Eve Online is working out a ship's fit that is your way to play. You can also go back and replace models to better suit things if you feel it’s needed at a later time. I was about to enjoy having almost double the armor and repair ability. I’d have no idea just how much that would be needed.

Once I was all set to go, I set quite a faraway spot from Jita and went checking for DeD combat sites. I made sure to be a couple of jumps out just so I was not so busy as a system.

I even decided to give different factions than I'm used to farming in the DeD sites a chance. That included drones. Although I'd quickly learn and was not shocked by how bad their loot ended up being.

While my ship had a bonus to reduce the fitting cost of a probe launcher. That was it. I was half expecting it to be a lot harder to scan down DeD combat sites in my Confessor. However, these sites were all quite low difficulty, so it was not an issue at all. Just a little slower than I'm used to, but not by much.

I ended up getting some commander or other chance at faction loot to drop while I was making my way to a location. I know, however, any good loot was considered “rare,” and today was not my day.

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I then ended up getting an escalation while clearing a drone site. I even ended up getting two sites into that escolation before I lost the trail for it. The total loot I got for my troubles was under a million ISK worth.

I then went back on my way, going the same route I was before hand. For a while, I was in an area where you get Angel Cartel. Due to my damage type, they were not a great match for me. They were so slow killing after a couple of sites, I decided to skip over any combat sites that belonged to them.

A few hours later, I landed another escolation. This one ended up having me go 51 jumps from where I was. Once there, the trail yet again went cold, and the loot was even colder. At least I got a couple of million out of the site I ran to get it in the first place.

I then got another one while making a quite long trip back. This one seemed like it wanted to go all the way. After running a few of the sites, it ended up wanting me to go into low sec. I looked up the system and knew I'd get ganked in there. Not to mention the drones tend to use webs and scrams. So that was already making it far more risky than I'd have wanted.

Final Thoughts

Unlike some recent successes I ended up having with DeD sites and escolations. No big faction module drops this time around. I was shocked that I ended up getting around four escalations.

The total amount of loot I got out of all the grinding I did was 12 million ISK. Along with almost half of that being from salvaging T2 wrecks. This felt like the normal disappointment I get from running DeD sites.

At least now I have a new ship to play around in. It does feel a little weak. I had to warp out at least twice during my grinding session to keep from getting killed. While the T3 has some bonuses to overheating modules, like armor repair. That's not something I was hoping to be needing in easy combat sites.

For now, it looks like I'll be taking farming DeD combat sites back into being something I do once in a while on the casual end. If only I had had similar results I was getting beforehand. I’d end up doing this a lot more often. The amount of loot you get out of these is rather inconsistent.

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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Eve Online.