Rusty as Hell

Since coming back to Eve properly around July 17th, I have suffered 10 ship losses. Whilst the circumstances surrounding each ship loss aren't particularly facepalm worthy, together they represent what happens when you stop playing Eve for a while - you get rusty fast.

So, going through the losses incurred in and around Molden Heath (the first 5), let's see what happened:

Number 10 - The first one always hurts the most

The Beast

This Harbinger was the original one I purchased when I first visited Molden Heath back in February, surviving dozens of fights. I was chasing a single Hatchery Drake running a mission into a deadend system. When I tried to leave, I found him barring my way, with the rest of his gang - a Hurricane, Sentinel and a Dramiel sitting on the other side of the stargate. Attempting to split them up, I jumped into the rest of their gang after the Drake aggroed me on one side, burnt back to the gate forcing the Dramiel to jump into the other side with the Drake before attempting to burn off and gun down the Sentinel whilst outpacing the Hurricane and warping off before the Dramiel could jump back in and pin me down. Whilst in theory this should have worked, I neglected two crucial facts, namely

a) Without the gangbonuses of my alt sitting in the next system, I was only slightly faster than the Hurricane and Sentinel
b) The Sentinel's Tracking Disruptor made it tricky to kill him.

In the end, I put the Sentinel in half armor before the Dramiel managed to scramble me 50km off the stargate, at which point I inevitably popped.

Number 9 - The ONI that could (have)

Without my shield Harbinger, I decided to go roaming in my Omen Navy Issue instead. In this ship, I managed to grab initial point on a Thanatos in Bosena which was camping stargates before losing it to an untimely disconnect whilst warping to the Bosena station at 100km. When I relogged, a Falcon decloaked 5km off me and webbed & scrambled me whilst local spiked. Fortunately he appeared not to have an Amarr jammer and I was able to apply my lasers, energy neutralizer and set my drones on him intermittently. Unfortunately, his jammers kept him alive - by the time his gang landed and made mincemeat of me he was in low armor.

Number 8 - Armor outruns shield, what?!

Not to be deterred (much!), I started roaming in my last Myrmidon. Finding a Gunpoint Diplomacy neutral Hurricane sitting on a stargate, I was hoping he would engage me, seeing as I could not initiate hostilities without taking sentry gun fire. Unfortunately, he decided to jump through and warp to a station. After giving him a few minutes to get his backup to arrive (another Hurricane I had spotted earlier), it was still clear that he wasn't willing to engage. As I made to leave the system, he finally made his move and followed me to the stargate.

Interested to see why he had a sudden change of heart, I jumped through the stargate once aggressed and came across his backup - the afore mentioned corpmate in a Hurricane, with another in a Tempest. Fearing the Tempest's heavy energy neutralizers and their effect on my armor repairers, I burnt back to the stargate and jumped through, but not before taking significant armor damage. At this point, I decided to try burning away from the stargate and hopefully outrunning the enemy gang. To make matters worse, once again my gangbonuses were in the system with the Tempest and thus, eventually I popped 300km off the stargate, but not before burning out most of my modules and going through most of my cap booster charges.

Number 7 - The power of Electronic Attack Ships

Often, Ewar such as Remote Sensor Dampeners and Tracking Disruptors are called ineffective. In reality, in small gang situations, they are often times incredibly effective, especially in small gang PvP. Roaming around in my brawler Crusader whilst my alt secured logistics to move ships back to Hevrice from Atlar as the Molden Heath campaign wrapped up, I found a Vexor in top belt in Bosena. Warping in, I was amused to see him attempt to kite me with medium railguns and deploying Hammerhead IIs. Easily getting him scrambled, with my Afterburner I had no difficulty remaining untouched by either his drones or his guns. After settling into a steady orbit, a Keres uncloaked 30km from me.

Rarely seen, the Gallente Electronic Attack Ship

Abandoning the Vexor, I sensed an easy kill and closed in on the Keres. Unfortunately, he spotted me and damped me down to a lock range of 6km, hardly ideal. At the same time, a Vagabond and a Thrasher landed. Burning away with my Afterburner fit Crusader, I found myself unable to catch the Keres, who was MWD fit. However, at the same time I was able to outrun the Vagabond and the Thrasher. Burning away, I hoped that I could manage to drive the Keres out of capacitor, as Remote Sensor Dampeners as well as the MWD would use up capacitor by the bucket.

After a few minutes of this I kept trying to manually burn to catch the Keres out, using such manoveurs as the slingshot. Unfortunately, the combination of his bonused Warp Disruptor range, his Sensor Dampeners and superior speed allowed him to keep me at a comfortable range and eventually I got lax and the Vagabond managed to warp to his Keres friend and run me down with his overheated MWD before I could respond. I reshipped to an Armor Hurricane, but their gang scattered just as I was about to scramble the Vagabond.

Number 6 -  The Scary Celestis

With the majority of my ships back in Hevrice courtesy of my alt and a bored freighter, all that was left was to head down there with my main. Grabbing my anti-frigate Celestis, I started roaming the 47 jumps back without my alt. The first jump out, I spotted an Damnation and Maelstrom running a mission. Without a prober, I decided to move on. A few more jumps out, I spotted a Rattlesnake in a safe spot near a stargate, with no other celestials on scan and only a single other person in local, who appeared to be a carebear.

Purchasing probes and a probe launcher from a nearby station, I refitted my Celestis, probed him down and swapped fittings back to full combat. Landing ontop of him, I was relieved to find him still there and started making my way through his considerable shield buffer, jokingly wondering if I could break his passive shield tank with my measily 200 DPS. After a minute or so of no response, the Rattlesnake pilot appeared to return to his screen and deployed drones which proceeded to bloody me and forcing me to run away with my tail tucked between my legs.

Continuing along the roam, it was dreadfully empty until I finally came to Amamake. Unfortunately, none of the Faction Warfare frigates would engage me and I somehow escaped a 20 man FW frigate fleet in my armor tanked Celestis. Eventually, I decided to suicide my ship into a Tengu and 2 Slicers, hoping to lure one into overheated web range, which occured, however the Tengu managed to annihilate me before I could finish off the Slicer.

Well, at least the trip back to Hevrice was made quicker - only 10 jumps via high sec in my pod!

Feel free to reply in the comments section with what happened when you came back to Eve and the dreadful, dreadful mistakes you made

Status Update

Apologies for the lack of posts, Eve suddenly got complicated. In particular:

1) Incarna prevented me from PvPing, by annoyingly causing my clients to freeze for several seconds or crash entirely.

2) RL drama reared its head

And finally,

3) Once these issues were sorted out, I found out that I am silly rusty at the moment - losing ships in silly situations where I wouldn't have a few months ago.

My next post will examine these losses, just wanted to give you guys a heads up about why I haven't been posting.

Oh, also Kirith Darkblade is back, the man with his Rifter plan.

Back in Black

Exams over, I'm finally back in the sack!

ACDC - Back in Black by filipivan

Watch this space for upcoming developments, including one that a few people have asked for. Let's just say that I've finally found a way I can record fights in a decent quality without my FPS going <10.

On Hiatus

RL is flaring up - I have exams starting within a month and thus will be cutting back on Eve in order to focus on studying. This will also extend to this blog - don't expect to see any new posts for the next couple of months.

In the meantime, last night I helped down an Archon and a Nidhoggur whilst setting up our HQ for our next campaign - Molden Heath, Resurgence. 

The original FC of the fleet who lured it out (accidentally) has written up a fairly accurate report here, which I have pasted below (with minor edits in order to make more sense):

We still had a respectable fleet up and Lee wanted to take his new falcon for a spin. I didn't check his fit beforehand (more on this later) and we heard tell of a camp near muttokon. We headed out with 3 canes, 2 drakes, 2 rifters and a falcon and sure enough, there were a brutix, mael and myrm on gate. The fleet held while I went to spike it but unfortunately the mael and brutix warped off before I landed so I was forced to take potshots at the myrm, baitdrake style. His friend jumped through in a drake and opened up on me so I pointed him and the game was on.

We jumped in and warped to me with the falcon staying hidden to try and lure them into escalating with their entire fleet before revealing the futility of it. Sure enough, they landed their fleet back on us and it was game on. However they had a surprise in store, the moment the battle got underway an archon landed. Things started badly with a gank fit brutix getting in cael's face while we couldn't get a jam (no gal jammers) but fortunately it's massive lack of tank meant that it got popped between repair cycles and Cael got free. While he was recovering his shields I set him with the task of finding me a fleet to deal with my archon so I could focus on FCing.

Back on the field they had a Harbinger, Myrmidon, Drake, Maelstrom, Harbinger and Raven escorting their Archon but were struggling to really apply their dps. The Harbinger got out of rep range and a Rifter kept it there while we smashed it down. The first of Cael's volunteers landed on grid and I was pleased to see it was Suleiman Shouaa, a local cane pilot with a LOT of skill points, experience and dps. He wasn't on comms with us and the extent of our communication was him saying "that mael is arty fit, warn the rifters, I'm gonna kill it" before soloing it in about 30 seconds flat. They weren't getting anywhere as they were tied to the Archon's rep range and we were nanoing so they did what anyone would and warped in a second Carrier, this one a Nidhoggur.

We split our points between the carriers and the Xs in our intel channels started rolling in. Vanderie,  a member of Gunpoint Diplomacy took over and we were quickly able to finish off the support in the form of a Myrmidon, Raven, Blackbird and Drake. Unfortunately the carriers decided they were committed and their support kept returning and our Falcon was sitting exactly 100k off an aligned point. A stabber fleet landed on him at 0 and 2 shotted his completely untanked hull, sending our shiny new falcon to its grave. Seconds later Sulei hulksmashed the SFI but still, .

The entire op was getting pretty messy by this point and the Teamspeak Server decided to crash on us which probably contributed to the death of a weird active tanked pest which was sitting within neut range of the carriers. It wasn't ours though but still, things weren't going perfectly. Gunpoint had cynoed in a carrier of their own (which got promptly jammed) but they didn't have enough Liquid Ozone to bring in some dreads and the Carriers weren't going down. They could have probably still logged out at this point despite us having 20 guys on the field. They continued to try and bring in support but there was just too much and all that they achieved was letting me headshot a Falcon.

We were very slowly breaking the Archon's tank while we hit the Nidhoggur with jams and neuts but it was painstaking work. People were bringing in alts, fuel, spare ammo and boosters to try and keep the damage up and eventually a cyno was lit up for two executioners dreadnoughts. Both carriers instantly started self destructing but we were able to kill the archon about 15 seconds before it finished its timer, with the Nidhoggur pulling it off successfully.

Archon goes boom!

The Battle Report is found here and is correct as far as I am aware.

The only incorrect parts of the above report is regarding me - I wasn't contacted by anyone to help them kill the Archon, I was actually stalking them and planning on killing them when I found them engaging the Archon & its support on the gate. Funny how things work eh?

See you in two months.