Hello friends, Gorski Car here back to teach all of you how to krab. Beware that the majority of income here will come from LP and not raw ISK so be prepared to spend a lot of time unloading massive amounts of LP. On the upside though, this provides a top-tier ISK/hr activity with very low ISK investment. Don’t be a baddie and go for those 10k ISK/LP items that you can convert 5000 of but only sell 1 a week.

This guide is written for Minmatar FW missions and most of it will work for Amarr as well with the difference being the route you take. I would only run missions when Minmatar is at tier 4 and 5. Try not to run or turn in missions if you have a completed batch if Minmatar is at tier 3.

Let’s start!





Pre-requirements

FW mission running is split up into two parts. The pickup phase where you run around all agents picking up optimal missions and the actual running part. Turning in can be done remotely from any station.

For the pickup phase, the fastest ship you can use is the Leopard but since smartbomb camps can be a thing I suggest running a high tanked Dramiel with 3x Hyperspatial rigs. Most of the time spent running FW missions is actually spent warping, So while it might take a while to pay off, investing in a set of Ascendancies can actually be worth it.

For running the missions I personally opted for a Stratios. The general rule of thumb for Minmatar FW missions is that you go up against Amarr rats who are heavily using tracking disruptors. This means that all gunships are out of the question. CCP also added webifying rats to help against people running the missions in bombers. These days you have to spend a bit more on your krab ship.

While you can run the missions in something as cheap as a Caracal or Caracal Navy Issue, these ships take far too long to finish the missions and you will have to skip some of the harder ones. I went with the Stratios because it’s cloaky, warps fast and the drones do a lot of damage.

The fit I used is very lightly tanked and uses range to mitigate most of the damage while drones kill your target. Generally, you want to stay at about 70-100km from the closest group of rats to make sure you don’t have to use your armor repairer.

[Stratios, krab]

Medium Ancillary Armor Repairer, Nanite Repair Paste

Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

Federation Navy Drone Damage Amplifier

Federation Navy Drone Damage Amplifier

Federation Navy Drone Damage Amplifier



50MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive

Medium Capacitor Booster II, Navy Cap Booster 800

Drone Navigation Computer II

Drone Navigation Computer II

Sensor Booster II, Targeting Range Script

Covert Ops Cloaking Device II

Drone Link Augmentor II

Drone Link Augmentor II

[Empty High slot]

[Empty High slot]

Medium Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer II

Medium Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer II

Medium Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer II

Imperial Navy Praetor x4

Acolyte II x5

Vespa EC-600 x5

Praetor II x4

Praetor II x4

Warrior II x5

Nanite Repair Paste x200

Navy Cap Booster 800 x22

Don’t worry about the faction stuff because this ship will pay for itself after 1 cycle of FW missions. Other good choices for mission running ships are the newly balanced T3 Cruisers. Both the Tengu and Loki are probably the best ships for running FW missions these days but the price is a bit too much for starting out. Especially since you are doing this in a hostile environment. Otherwise, the Ishtar and Vexor Navy Issue can both work very well.

That’s it for ships. For skills I would heavily recommend having security connections to V. It increases LP payouts by 10% per level and that’s really good when 99% of your income will be LP based.

You would also need enough standings with Minmatar militia to get access to level 4 missions. I suggest running plexes until you get promoted to max rank in FW for that one time boost. Then I would run the lower level missions until your character is ready for level 4s. Beware that running FW missions will fuck your standings up pretty hard and recovering from a -9 Amarr standings, for example, is a real pain in the ass. If you can afford it I would suggest making a separate character for FW missions.

Another easy way to get level 4 standings is to just pay a friend who already has access to level 4s to boost your standings by sharing rewards. This does, however, usually cost a lot of ISK because you will get 50% of his LP income.





Route

Here is a good map of the Minmatar – Amarr warzone. The systems that have a filled blue circle are mission hubs for Minmatar militia. These systems are very important and should never fall into Amarr hands. They are basically what you are fighting for in FW and are the big payout for winning.

Generally, you pick up Minmatar missions in the traditionally Minmatar owned part of the map and run them in the Amarr owned part of the map. These days, however, the Minmatar own every part of the map. That doesn’t change how missions are run but it does increase security a bit since you can dock up safely in a lot of places. The Tribal Liberation Force have 15 mission stations. So the max number of level 4 missions you can run per cycle is 15.

For start point I choose Dal. Why? It’s already a mission hub so you save time picking up the first mission. It is also the station closest to the Amarr side of the warzone. This is where you want to stock up with ships for running missions. Generally, I begin and end every cycle in Dal.

The next choice you have to make is how many missions you want to run per cycle. The most obvious choice is of course to run all 15 but creating a waypoint list from Dal through every mission system and then ending it there would generate an insane 42 jump route. On average this takes around 35 minutes to pick up and that’s pretty boring.

I instead went with a 10 mission run cycle because I don’t have the time or willpower to power through a full mission cycle.





The cycle I used was:

Dal – Lulm – Olfeim – Abudban – Hek – Amo – Auner – Hadozeko – Ebolfer – Eszur – Dal

Total: 26J





A tip is to create a note in-game and have the cycle linked to the Tribal Liberation Stations so you can right click add waypoint quickly.

This takes on average 26 minutes to pick up and is much nicer to run. Another word of caution and benefit for running a 10 mission cycle is that FW missions have a very short expiry time so you generally have to run them as soon as you have started to pick them up. Failing 15 missions in a row could potentially wreck your standings so hard that you can no longer run level 4s.

Once you are back in Dal, you right click each mission system and create a long list of waypoints then press the optimize waypoints button

Missions

This is another important part. In order to maximise profits, you should only pick the good missions and if possible try to get them all in the same system, or at least in close systems.

For missions I would always pick up:

Cost of Hubris (Kill 1 battleship commander rat)

Either warp out after triggering it to wait out the little RP fight, or just burn away.





(Kill 1 battleship commander rat) Either warp out after triggering it to wait out the little RP fight, or just burn away. Lethal Strike (Kill 1 battleship commander rat)

Very simple mission.





(Kill 1 battleship commander rat) Very simple mission. Reprisal (Kill 1 battleship commander rat)

Sometimes this rat moves very very fast and will take no damage. Try burning close to him, then away again to make him stop.

These are the three “kill one commander missions” that I would always do. On top of that, you have the industrial missions which are great.





Roidest Rage (kill the 3 industrials to the left)

This is the best mission and it’s super quick to do.





(kill the 3 industrials to the left) This is the best mission and it’s super quick to do. Supply Interdiction (kill 4 industrial rats)





(kill 4 industrial rats) Shades of Grey (kill all industrial rats)

I would avoid shades of Grey if possible since it does take a long time to run.

And the last type of missions is the structure bash ones. In general, you should only do ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ because the other mission ‘Enemy at the Gates’ takes forever to do since the structure tanks a lot. Never do ‘Cutting the Net’ as it needs you to go back to turn in the item.

This leaves you with the following missions to look for (ranked by how good they are):

Roidest Rage

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Lethal Strike

Reprisal

Supply Interdiction

Cost of Hubris

Shades of Grey

After a couple of cycles, you will have enough standings to mass decline missions and it’s not unusual for my standings to bounce between 2 and 9.

Stats







I collected stats for 291 FW missions.

Those 291 missions took me 28 in-game hours to do and generated an average of 474,586 LP per hour. That’s 470m per hour at 1k ISK/LP, but since we’re a bit more realistic, I’d say it’s closer to 280-380m ISK per hour at more conservative ISK/LP values. During those 291 missions, I died 9 times. The average time to pick up missions was 26 minutes and to run them took an average of 65 minutes, totalling 91 minutes per cycle.

For more in-depth statistics check out this spreadsheet

End

I hope this guide inspired some of you people to take further advantage of the broken warzone that is Minmatar / Amarr. This warzone really shows a lot of the problems FW has. Once a side becomes dominant, there is no reason to fight since you can just join them and fight in the other warzone. There is no real incentive to join a losing side either because other than not having any mission stations, joining Amarr earns you less LP from plexing.

If anyone gets angry at me for suggesting PvE in Faction warfare, I think you should check under which menu the Faction Warfare button is in-game. That’s right, it’s under Business.? Besides, you need an income to do PvP and don’t come to me saying that FW people don’t fight.

A big thanks to Fuzzworks for this page because my own spreadsheet was way worse.