While quite a few of the missions I'd pick up would be the run-of-the-mill. There once in a while came the amazing ones. They would have lots of killing and lots of rewards as well.
While most players who ever have run missions in Eve Online know what I'm talking about. For those that don’t. There are a couple of rather rewarding missions even in level 3 that your guys glaze over with lust a little bit when you see you get one.
Two of the bigger ones that I'd end up getting a few times while out running level 3 missions would be Angel Extravaganza and The Blockade. These missions also carry a little more danger and you hopefully know your stuff about missions by the time you get ones like these.
I ended up getting the Angel Extravaganza. Just finishing the missions alone I'd be getting 1.5 million ISK and almost 6 million ISK worth of LP. You always know when a mission is expected to be quite hard when the reward jumps up like this and they also give you six hours to finish in time for the bonus reward. I’d not be needing anything near that.
This mission itself would end up having five rooms and a bonus room that requires a key to enter. One thing I did not get ahead of time was an Angel Palladium tag to run the bonus room. I for sure added it to my list of stuff when I went to resupply and sell goods.
On top of the turn-in rewards, I ended up getting over 3 million ISK in bounties and another 4 million when I went out to salvage and loot. While I would have better missions on occasion. This thing would blow out of the water on any average mission where I did not luck out on a decent drop.
As far as needing to know your missions. This comes in clutch in the 5th room in this mission. Certain ships usually come down to type and a higher of the bounty reward if there is more than one of them. Are the trigger ships to spawn in the next wave.
In total, that room has 15 ships that can spawn. While with my skills it’s not a big deal if I end up shooting the triggers before clearing most of a wave. Along with there being five waves in total, you would be down a few ships if you were just randomly killing things and were unlucky.
The last thing I would want to do is put myself in a situation where my ship could get taken out by NPCS. At least the good thing is here only the bonus and final six rooms have ships that can warp scram keeping you from warping out. I also don’t want to have to fly back through four gates to get back to where I was in the mission either.
Always thrilling when you get one of these. It was then back to grinding out quite a few average runs-of-the-mill missions. Quite a few kill three or five ships and do a turn-in. At least the smaller missions are quite a lot quicker.
One of the missions I'm always hoping to land is called The Blockade. It has five waves of spawns where you need to learn which ships are the trigger for the next wave and save them for the last.
This mission even with my ship and skill I pay a lot more attention to what I'm shooting at. The last thing I want is to have all the wave spawns on me at once totaling almost fifty ships for this mission.
The ISK and loyalty points from the turn-in for this mission tend to be the same as Angel Extravaganza. Bounties and loot I tend to do a bit better on this one than other missions. As you might imagine it takes a little bit to salvage and loot this mission with all the wrecked ships there are.
While those missions can be great. There is an even better standard mission out there. They usually however come with a bit of a price for running them. They are missions that have the other main empire faction ships in them that have no bounties on them. Attacking them will cost you standing with that empire faction.
For the level 3 missions they tend to be ones like Driving A Wedge and Save The Miners among many others. If my mission skip is not on cool down, I'll usually use it to avoid taking a faction hitting with a faction I don’t want to.
Sometimes however my mission skip is on cooldown. Then there are times when I just don’t want to say no to the decent amount of ISK in running one of these kinds of missions. When you are taking out ships from factions like Gallente, Amarr, Caldari, or Minmatar they can drop faction tags.
Even from running level 3 missions, you can get quite a few tags dropped that are each worth 1 million. Sure, there are quite a few that might only fetch 50k each. You can however see from one such mission I looted 34 million ISK after finishing one of the short mission chains that had me kill one of those four factions.
For the short amount of time that mission chain took. That 34 million ISK is quite a payout for a level 3 mission from the loot. The reason I ended up turning them down a lot is my faction with many of those four factions is only .5 standing.
Back during my hay day of running mission level 4s. I did not care at all about what factions I was taking a standing hit with. As I never really went anywhere. I also used to fully fund my subscription to multiple accounts by buying Plex with ISK. So, I needed a lot of ISK.
One day I went up to meet a friend in a Minmatar controlled high sec system. I did not think it was going to be a big deal. I had something like –7 standing with the Minmatar. I entered the system and the Minmatar Navy announced my name in the system and started to go after me.
Needless to say, I had to flee for my life or get blown up by their military. That was hardly the biggest issue. With such a bad standing I could not even run basic missions with the Minmatar to try and repair my standing either.
Instead, I had to go out and grind for special kinds of missions. I forget nowadays what they were. All I do know is it was a nightmare and many weeks of my life trying to fix my standing with just one faction.
On top of that, I also put some skill points into a skill increasing my standing. That is the only reason I don’t have a massive negative standing with Minmatar right now.
I’ve also since then done some Epic Arc missions and when given the chance have picked Minmatar or any other faction I have bad standings with to try and give them a bit of a boost.
There are also derived standing hits that I tend to take on Minmatar when doing other types of missions as well. While they usually are not that big. I know at some point I'll be back on the edge of having a negative standing with them.
Final Thoughts
As far as standard missions that I can just go pick up from an NPC these are some of the bigger ISK rewarding ones I'd get. Sure, there are other missions where I know I have a decent chance of getting a high-value drop. Along with some that are almost as good as these. I just prefer these missions over them. There are also other types of missions I'll get along the way that have the opportunity to blow these rewards out of the water.
Information
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Eve Online.