I was around the day incursions launched and thousands of ships died. The rate of loss, the talk of how difficult the sansha were to kill, the fact that frigates were WTFPWNBBQ'ing entire fleets was enough to scare me good. Recently though there has been talk in our Alliance chat of a corp that runs incursions on a daily basis. I figured eventually I'd tag along with them in a safe environment. Eventually turned into now and I've spent six hours this evening killing fanatical frigates.
The call went out for two people in shield fits to join an incursion fleet. The request was for a T3 and I was just starting to adjust some probes for my first attempt to find a WH to break the monotony of mission running. I decided now was my time to see something new so I volunteered to join up. I inquired as to a good tengu fit, got a fitting and realized I'd have to reset my rigs or get a new hull. New hull won out since I'd be thinking of getting another anyway. Got a new hull, went through the hoops required to swap out subsystems between two ships (I bought 5 new subsystems and the hoop was jumped) and was on my way.
I got in system and warped to the first room. I saw eight ships floating around, missiles and lasers flashing, but no targets. Hmm, where the heck are the targets? So I asked if there was a bug and was told you have to manually click on the ships and add them to overview. I spent five minutes looking for the incursion ship check box in my overview settings to no avail. Finally I tracked some missiles to a small dark blip on a distant nebula and was able to add sansha incursion frigates to my overview. Huzzah. Later on I had to repeat the process for cruisers. I am not looking forward to having to rinse/repeat for the rest of the ships types. As an added bonus I didn't see any of the ship icons in space until I had them locked up. This made me not a happy camper but I worked it out in the end and was able to get to the killing.
PS- CCP this is ridiculous to allow to happen and incursion ships should have some sort of identifier in the overview list or default to always being on.
Anyway, overview fixed and I started adding to the slaughter. My tengu was firing high damage T2 missiles but they did crappy so I switched to regular missiles and my damage output tripled. Later on I tried precision heavies and they performed about the same as standard T1's. So atleast ammo was cheap.
We killed vanguard missions one after the other for an hour or so averaging about 10 minutes per mission. I learned the patterns and our logi pilots were jonny on the spot with the reps. We eventually took a break, added some more folks, split into two fleets and continued the carnage. We ran some of the mining colony and I learned you need ore to turn in to complete those missions. I didn't find out how much but it was my first day. Highlight of the night was getting to apply tags to designate targets after I was promoted to squad lead for fleet bonuses. I sorta didn't know the fleet could see tags because I'd never highlighted that option in my alts overviews. That will help out some for missions when I'm trying to designate jamming ships.
The time flew by and soon enough people were getting tired. All told I ran 25 missions, got back almost half what I spent on the Tengu, and realized I enjoy incursions. I need to get my boys some basilisks to ease the logi burden, but I see more sansha killing in the future. I do so enjoy whacking the ISK pinata and watching my wallet fill up.
Ship fitting addendum: Tengu worked out ok, but I think a Nighthawk might actually be better with it's bonuses for killing frigate sized ships. I'll have to look into that for the future, especially since it gives me a great excuse to pick up a NH.
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