EVE Guide Complex Running Guide  

Complex Running Guide

Complex grinding is about the most profitable thing you can do in EVE right now, it's why every good complex is religiously farmed by somebody, often by many competing entities right after downtime.

Right after server comes up from a reboot/downtime is just about the only time you can be certain it's fully spawned and empty of competitors, (thus) if someone else does show up, you can kill them and claim the complex as your own, or team up / drive them off if you don't have a warp disruptor handy.

Okay, let's take an easy 6/10 sansha complex as our example. None of the NPCs webify or scramble you, just lots of battleships, a few cruisers and frigates, this does not mean it's risk free of course. I've lost armageddons and apocalypses in the time it took me to align and get to 75% speed required to warp, even tanked ones, as 8+ NPC battleships can dish out a lot of damage if they're within range.

Doing this complex efficiently and profitably requires a minimum of two people, if you're soloing all you can do is grind the first stage for Phantasm BPCs / 11th tier overseer effects, so make friends with someone if you don't have any. With one of you flying a battleship, HAC or battlecruiser fitted for 95% damage 5% speed, and the other one a jaguar or wolf setup with an afterburner and a relatively sustainable tank.

What I usually end up using is an Armageddon with 7 mega pulse laser II, offline remote armor repairer, 6 heat sink II, 100mn AB II (or better), 2 cap rechargers (named, t2 or a mix depending on CPU), 1 cap relay, 1 large armor repairer and 10 praetors. Funnily enough, Zor's implant is actually useful for complex grinding, so go ahead and plug it in if you can't afford anything better and by some miracle happen to have lvl 5 cybernetics.
Similar setups work for any HAC, BC or BS, except maybe Scorpion.

Your partner will ideally fly a Jaguar or Wolf (Assault Frigates), the idea is to keep moving around all the time with a low sig radius, good resists and a semi-sustainable repairer. Damage output is irrelevant, but you might as well slap on some T2 280mm howitzers and a launcher. So, 1 thermic armor or shield hardener, repairer or shield booster, cap and an afterburner.

Vary AF type according to the NPCs who own the complex and what dmg they dish out / are vulnerable to.

The AF picks up the key and effects from the overseer cans, enters each stage first, gets aggression from the spawn that aggresses upon entering. Gank ship then arrives and kills that spawn while the AF goes off to get aggression from the rest of the stage. Make sure you get every single spawn shooting at you or the gankship will most likely come under heavy fire. It's important that the AF does not crash to desktop or log off while you're doing the complex or for any reason warp out of the complex. If it does the trip is over and the gankship is probably dead. It's also important that the gankship controls its drones and doesn't aggress anything prematurely. The gankship should be ready on the gate before the AF uses it since the key doesn't hold them open for very long.

That's it.

Some modifications might be required for complexes that have tacklers, since the AF will die rather quickly if webified. One can do the Serpentis 10/10 with 2 AFs, or more quickly with AF and a HAC, or even faster with AF, HAC and a BS.

Oh, and don't get too upset when the final overseer can is empty, sometimes you strike it rich with a Nightmare BPC; usually you get some Centum A-Type mods, but you always get 68 million ISK in overseer personal effects from doing the complex plus at least 36 million isk in bounties.
So that's approximately 50 mil/hour per person - three times as much as you can get from Arkonor mining.

10/10 obviously pays much better since the tags from the first two stages alone pay you more than an entire 6/10 complex in which the final Overseer's can has nothing special.

This guide is of course rendered somewhat obsolete by RMR since the end bosses get beefed up a little, might actually require heavy nosses/neuts to kill them, making things slightly more interesting, since the NPC’s themselves will also be using EW and Nos/Neuts on you and some of their tanks will become too much for even dedicated damage dealers.
So basically becoming filthy filthy rich like me is easy if you have an hour to spare now and then, roughly 100 million in startup capital, someone who can fly a battleship and someone who can fly an assault frigate.
Of course being a trader is still the most profitable way of life, but complex grinding still pays better than pretty much anything apart from trading / escrow, and requires considerably less startup capital.

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