How to proceed in unknown missions
Sometimes you will get missions not covered in any guide on the net. Especially after major patches, the chances are high that the guides will mislead you more than lead you to victory. It goes without saying you should be careful when encountering this situation, but how?
- Look for a report with the same name, but with a different faction. Sometimes the missions tend to be pretty similar, but with different rats.
- Look for a report with the same name, but with different level. This is not the safest way, but you might get a clue about triggers and waves.
- Look at the mission briefing of any hints about rat type. Use the tanking guide for a safe bet on the tank setup. But also include multi-resistant modules in case of those nasty surprises.
- Overkill. In lower level missions, shooting flies with a nuclear cannon should save the day
- First encounters should be done in a shuttle. Expendable, fast and often hard to hit. Take a screenshot, and then warp out.
- Mission rats will not podkill on purpose. So when your shuttle is blown up, you can safely explore the current level in your pod. Remember you can't activate any gates in a pod.
- Try to keep a certain distance, as it will spread out the pack, damage, and you have a bit more time when webbed/scrambled
- Align to a gate and set autopilot to it. In case of panic, just hit autopilot.
- Always assume you will be scrambled. Look for those special rats using this guide. Veteran runners will recognize the web/scramble/ewar ships from the names. If you know what faction of rats you will encounter, you can find the prefix in the guide and be prepared too.
- If overwhelmed by aggro, warp out, and the aggro might reset. Even if you warp back on top of the ships.
- If you trigger too many spawns so you can't get back in without getting blown up, you might wait until after the next downtime, as it will reset the mission.
Still not too sure if you want to risk your shiny ship on it? Decline it, and wait for someone else reporting it. Don't risk more than you can afford to loose.