Trying out some bigger guns

A while back, I saw a live feed from Sard Caid (who is quickly becoming my new idol :P) flying a Cyclone with an X-L shield booster, and doing surprisingly well with what I assumed was a terrible ship. To be fair to myself though, that's only because seemingly everyone I asked said, "LOL CYCLONE R BAD, FLY HURRICANE TROLOLOL"

So instead I was intrigued, and decided to try it myself. Due to my fast fading Caldari carebear ways, I have pretty strong shield tanking skills, and after my brief fling with Minmatar cruisers, I can use Medium Autocannons with some effectiveness. Obviously my DPS was not going to make anyone fall over in terror, but I assumed I could outank and wear people down instead (quite alot like my Vengeance actually). I could fit pretty much everything besides the Medium T2 Autos (which I really need to get around to doing) and EFT was showing a pretty decent tank. Of course the only downside was the huge amount of cap that X-L booster guzzled. In order to feed it, Sard had had to fit two cap boosters, which limited my other mids to a scram and a MWD. I wasn't going to kill anything small or fast in this, they could just break range and escape. And obviously the faster I burned through the boosters, the less time I would have to kill anything.


So I needed a slow, easy to catch target. And amazingly I found one.

It's actually a quite cool looking ship...

I was sitting on the gate in Pananan, trading some banter with the locals, when a Prophecy landed on gate next to me. I knew Prophecies had a reputation for being massively tanked bait ships, so I wasn't going to GCC for a target that could end up holding me down for fifty of his friends to jump in and asskick me. Instead I locked him up, hoped he had an itchy trigger finger and went back to Local chat. Here's a taste of some of our hugely intellectual conversations:


vukzii > btw, comments on what movie i should see tonight?
vukzii > im thinking about the fighter
Seraph Minayin > hm


After a minute or so, the Prophecy burned off gate and sat out at 20km. I ignored him and tabbed out to change my music.

Of course he chose that point to start shooting at me. My shield alarms blaring away scared the crap out of me and I quickly tabbed back to see him sitting 35km ish off the gate and slowboating away. My shields were fine, at about 60% (damn you overly loud audio), and the gate guns were already starting to tickle his armour. I reckoned I could hold him down for an easy kill, and burned straight for him. I orbited at about 5km and turned on my warp scram. All I had to do now was apply my DPS and wait for the gate guns to melt his face off. (Stupidly I didn't deploy my drones for a another hundred DPS until pretty late in the fight, I'm used to frigates where I don't have that luxury). I was tanking him pretty comfortably, and was expecting this to be a pretty simple kill steal (from the NPCs that is).

Of course at that point his buddies jumped in. Well crap.

I started recording, just so I could see what I did wrong/right with this ship afterwards (I expected to die), not realising what was about to happen. (Actually, this is a really good habit to get into. Record your fights so you can watch them back later. It's a great learning tool, plus you can show off awesome fights to your corpmates :P).

So anyway, a Hurricane and a Legion had landed on gate, and I was certain I was going to die. I may have been able to tank the Hurricane for long enough to de-aggro and jump out, but that Legion was just going to burn through my shields. I decided to atleast get the Prophecy kill, and then most likely die in a glorious ball of fire.  Luckily the Prophecy was having serious trouble tanking those gate guns, and soon exploded. I then decided to act like a Pro-PvPer and managed to screwed up my cap boosters, which meant I was left without tank for about 10-15 seconds (Clearly I was bait tanking and stuff...). Thankfully the Legion was too far off to apply decent DPS, and the Hurricane seemed to overshoot me. I eventually rectified my mess and clawed some shields back. Ready to die horrendously to lasers, I eyed up my options, have a go at the T3 (yeah that wouldn't end well), or gun for the Cane and hope he had a terribad tank?

Then I realised I wasn't actually pointed. Erm, cheers?


The Hurricane must have screwed up his approach, because he got seriously close to me, then zoomed off to about 28km, so he dropped his point. I expected the Legion to have a faction point (Fed Navy Disruptor can reach 30km, and he was at about this distance) but apparently he had decided to avoid teh shinies, which meant I had a few seconds before that Hurricane pilot turned his ship around and pointed me again. Of course I chose the coward's way out and warped my ass the hell away while having a good laugh to myself. They had pretty much just given me a free kill, and I wasn't going to complain about it.

Local

vukzii > don't die plix
vukzii > Nsephiroth you popped too?
Seraph Minayin > he died
Seraph Minayin > i warped
Seraph Minayin > screw you guys and your blobs
Seraph Minayin > :P
rezilliant > lol.. three people isnt a blob
Seraph Minayin > you know what i mean :P -> (I meant, stop trying to kill me all the time XD)
vukzii > yeah seraph lolololol
Seraph Minayin > SHUT UP VUK YOU TOUCH KIDS -> (Classic LowSec banter with Vuk)
vukzii > i love myself


Thanks to an utter lack of GCC, I warped back to the Daran gate and got my battle-scarred Cyclone back to HighSec. So long, and thanks for all the fish!


It's been a pretty profitable evening (though I didn't get to loot the Prophecy wreck), and I'm looking forward to flying this Cyclone some more (once I get T2 guns anyway). It's nice to be able to engage on gates and stations if I want to, just a little annoying that gate guns are going to have something to say about it :P





P.s vukzii is awesome and way better at PvP than Garmon. (I promised to say it)