Jumping to conclusions is bad for your health...

Today I was out soloing again in my Rifter (which I've become steadily more fond of the more I fly her). I was painfully aware my killboard has had little activity for quite a while now, so I had decided no matter what to get into a fight with something, win or lose.

I landed in Ami to an essentially empty local except for a Drake and a Cynabal, neither of which who I had a hope in hell of killing. I'm desperate not stupid ;) I then jumped into nearby Bridi, which usually has several cruisers kicking around looking for a fight. Local was totally empty except for me. Seriously? The one time I want to run into a cruiser, they're all offline.

BRIDI Y U SO EMPTY?

I then jumped into Fensi. Jackpot! Two players in local, both of which in T2 frigates according to the D-Scan. Either a Jaguar (I'll die), or a Sentinel ( LOL Ewar frig!). It's probably quite obvious which one I started searching for. After about a minute or so of spamming D-Scan while hopping between planets, I had narrowed him down to either an asteroid belt, or a planet (both symbols were on top of each other). I assumed that he would be kicking around the belts looking for a fight, so I jumped in at zero, hoping I would land right on top of him. As I hit the belt, a red player bar appeared in my overview.

Crap.


I hadn't noticed this guy (Volstruis) was at -9.6 security, which suggested he was no idiot checking out Ewar frigs. It also suggested that he was either confident he could take the Jaguar (I had been in system at max 2-3 minutes by this point, so he had probably been in belt waiting for the Jag before I found him first) or he was bait for a gang. Local stayed at three though, so he appeared to be soloing. Therefore I was quite certain I could take him. I knew very little about Ewar frigs at this point, save for the fact that many players deride them as useless and underpowered, so I hoped the superior DPS of my Rifter would offset his jamming. My first mistake here was that I assumed the Sentinel was a jamming boat like the Keres.

Hey he's 200km out! I'm totally safe!

Luckily as I worried over this "experienced player alert", the Sentinel was over 200km out from me, and the belt rats appeared to be chasing him (they didn't lock me up anyway). I hit my afterburner and started to fly right for him. I assume he must have had a warp-in for the belt because all of a sudden he was only 10km from me and yellow-boxing me. Woot! I was certain my web and scram would hold him still long enough for me to break his puny Ewar ship with my autocannons.

Yeah that didn't happen.

What actually happened is that my cap vanished. All of it. Gone. My scram and web stopped, along with my afterburner and my jaw hit the floor. I'm pretty certain my reaction was along the lines of "OMGWTFBBQ?!" The Sentinel then began to pull away from me and I started to panic. At most my range is around 5km. I could see from my overview that he was Tracking Disrupting me, and I assumed from the fact he was now hovering at around 15km that he was using a range script. With no cap I realised I would never be able to catch him, and although my guns didn't need cap, they didn't have a chance in hell of hitting him at that range. I decided to try and bug out. I guessed that he must be using a disruptor over a scram, which meant I'd need to be about 25km or more away from him to be able to warp. However the whole warp thing was going to be a problem without any cap, let alone getting that distance from him without an afterburner on. By this point the Sentinel had whacked out his drones, obliterated my shields and started gnawing my armour. Yeah you guessed it, no cap, no armour repairer.

Luckily though, by some sort of divine intervention, I hit upon the idea of using my nos on his drones. I have no idea if this actually worked, or his neuts ran out of range (I was flying away from him as fast as I could by now) but either way my cap was slowly returning. I managed to get off a few rep cycles to stop me dying a fiery death, then switched on my afterburner to gain some range while aligning to a nearby planet and spamming warp. It took a few heartpounding seconds that seemed to stretch on forever, but I finally got the message "You cannot do that while in warp".

YES! I was free!

I zoomed away from the Sentinel and bounced around a few planets incase he tried to follow before heading to my safespot. I chatted with Volstruis after, and he lamented the fact that he had managed to lose his point on me. I agreed that if he hadn't lost said point, my Rifter would be a smoking wreck right now, those Warrior II's hit like a bitch. I had managed to kill two and maim another (he only had four out which surprised me) but I was sure another minute would have ended my attempts to murder his ship. We exchanged "gf" in local and went on our separate ways.

I then checked the description for the Sentinel, as I had completely underestimated my chances of killing the slippery little bugger:


Amarr Frigate Skill Bonus: 20% bonus to energy vampire and energy neutralizer transfer amount per level and 5% bonus to effectiveness of tracking disruptors per level


Electronic Attack Ships Skill Bonus: 40% bonus to energy vampire and energy neutralizer range and 5% reduction in capacitor recharge time per level


Drone bandwidth: 20 Mbit/sec 
Drone Capacity: 60m3


Ah. That explains what happened to my cap at the start of the fight and why he was only using four drones. I was just lucky the other guy made a mistake in his tackle, allowing me to escape. So lessons learned from this fight?

1) Never underestimate any ship, no matter how much it is laughed at on the forums.
2) Learn the capabilities of Tech 2 ships instead of assuming you know what they will do
3) Don't panic when you lose all your cap in a Rifter, your guns aren't affected ;)


Tl;dr Ewar frigates are more dangerous than you might think