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

Skill Training Complete...

I'd wager there's few more satisfying moments in EVE than when you're sitting in station updating orders, and you hear the magic words "skill training complete" chime from your other client.

When I first started EVE, I made the assumption that bigger = better, and that a fleet of battleships would tear apart a frigate fleet. It just makes good sense right? I mean, some of the guns on battleships are the same size as several of the frigates! So of course the battleships would win... Except in EVE, a fleet of frigates would be a nightmare for a battleship group, as they would have to rely on their drones to fight for them due to piss poor tracking vs smaller targets.That's one of the reasons I love EVE. Few ships are utterly useless, no matter how easy it is to get into them. If flown well, they can still be used to great effect. (Although no frigate fleet would have the DPS to break the tank of a decent battleship fleet, assuming both sides have logis. It'd be a draw)

But anyway, I was chugging my CNR through an Incursion the other day and I realised how bored I was of battleships in general. Yes they look awesome. Yes they have firepower that would devastate an entire city. Yes they can take a hell of a beating and take on multiple ships at once. 

But they're so slow. Speed is the new cool, and Battleships are the obese people of the spacelanes. So I started looking at other options for PvP. While battleship combat sounds awesome, I wouldn't be able to stand the time it would take for my ship to react in fight. I wanted my ship to be fast, sleek, and sexy. Obviously, I found my way towards interceptors. More precisely, the Amarr Malediction.

She's beautiful...

This ship seems to be everything I want. Fast, missile based and hot as hell. (Khanid designs are my guilty pleasure. Amarr style with the laziness of Caldari missiles. What's not to like?) I started training for it immediately, planning on picking up Assault Frigates along the way due to the Vengeance, which appears to be built like a Punisher, but with a bigger tank and rockets. Sweet.

I could train Assault Frigates in a matter of days, but the skills I needed for an Interceptor were far more navigation based. I tend to ignore navigation skills (who needs speed when I can have moar firepower?). So it was with some horror that I contemplated a 60 day skill plan for one ship. While alot of the skills would be useful in the future, I still couldn't believe I would have to spend two months to have decent support skills for this wonderful design. But I wanted it. Badly. Gritting my teeth, I started to train Evasive Maneuvers V, and bought the Interceptors skill book.

This is one of the few things I dislike about EVE. Sure I could fly an Interceptor by the end of the week. But flying it, and flying it well, are two entirely different things. 53 days different. If you start using a ship without support skills, you have no right to complain when it gets shot out from under you ;)

U MAD BATTLESHIP? U MAD?

But 10 days into my plan and I'm pretty glad I started. I can sit in my Malediction and fly it around, but it's still got alot of training left before I decide to risk it on a corp roam. But in the meantime, atleast I look cool to all those battleship-flying chumps hanging around Amarr...

Quote of the Week - Incursions

Yes I know everybody does this. But mine will be mainly from corp members, and I'm not going to tell them when I start looking for a quote to avoid them spamming stupid things.

Anyway, the quick backstory here is that we were chatting in corp and explaining to the newer guys what Incursions were and why quite a few people dislike them. Which is when Khrystynah pulls out this, which I felt perfectly explained the actions of a fair few players ;)

Khrystynah > ohhh, so all the cool kids who fly in nullsec space doing PvP masturbation and making money got their feelings hurt by incursions, because that means that people have an alternative?


Now I'm not saying that these players are wrong, but I'm pretty certain that Incursions aren't breaking the game as much as some people believe. So what if some of the prices for faction ships have crashed? They were overpriced anyway. Who cares if people are making money with minimal risk? People make ISK with just about the same amount of risk in NullSec everyday anyway.

No I don't mean PvP. Well maybe you could class blobbing under "minimal risk".

But what I mean is Anomalies. If you are deep within alliance held sovereignty space, the chances of you getting ganked while running an Anomaly is even less than dying to rats in a decent Incursion fleet. Infact you can do Anomalies with far less effort than an Incursion, if you get a local carrier to lend you some fighters :)

So really, I can't understand why (mainly) NullSec players are making such a fuss about Incursions. It's just our version of NullSec Anomalies. Deal with it.

It's a good thing I can run Incursions

Over the last week or so of me attempting PvP, I have spent over 30mil on ships, modules and rigs. Experimenting with an Arbitrator didn't end too well either and cost an extra 7-8 mil. It's made me realise quite how much the markets are driven by the demand created by PvP fights. For the guy selling Republic Fleet ammo and Punishers, I've probably contributed about 20 mil to his coffers. And I'm barely doing PvP in comparison to some players! I can only imagine the ISK NullSec Alliances spend purely on ammo, let alone ships and fittings.

The pure cost of sucking at PvP has shown me I'm going to need some more ISK before I devote myself entirely to asskicking (or getting asskicked, similar idea). So I have two solutions, run a load of Incursions and live off those profits for awhile (yawn), or start retraining my industrial/hauler alt into a Uber-Trader and make passive ISK through that.

Market PvP, here I come!

I'm sorta leaning towards the trader option, purely because it seems much more fun. Also I've not really dabbled much in the economic side of EVE besides lining the pockets of frigate builders. So I'd quite like to see it from the "other side of the fence" as it were, and make some money while I'm at it. If I do well then I may write a little about it on this blog, and if not... well it'll make a good "What not to do" guide ;)

I've worked out a skill plan in Eve-Mon, bought the skills I need and whacked the first few in the oven. My alt had a nice 250mil of my Incursion payments added to his wallet, and I've invested pretty much all of it into the market already on items I reckon will sell. I'm probably going to lose all my ISK knowing my luck...

But if I get rich, I'll let you know :)

So close!

I nearly got my first above class kill on a Vexor today in Highsec. I was roaming around the belts in my shiny new Rifter, when I saw a yellow can and a hauler chugging towards it. Easy target. I burned right at it and flipped it with the hauler barely 3km out. He locked me, and at first I was half expecting a Battle Iteron to kick my ass. Instead he warped out.

Trying out the Rifter

Hoping he would come back in a PvP ship I loitered around the belt for a minute or two. I wasn't disappointed. He warped right back in, unfortunately flying a cruiser. I normally avoid attacking cruisers, but I noticed the guy was a 2012 player. That meant that at most he'd had a month's worth of training. No way would he have decent enough skills to be flying a drone boat like the Vexor effectively in one month. Not only that, but I guessed he would be inexperienced at PvP and make some mistakes. I was mostly right.

I burnt right at him. Due to where his can was in relation to the warp-in point, we were about 20km from each other. I switched my ammo to Fusion S and hit my Damage Control on. He had already launched his drones. All four of them. And they were Hammerhead I's. In my mind I had already won. Here's why:

1) I had been utterly right about his lack of skills, four drones meant he couldn't possibly have Tech II drones, which would have been a problem for me.
2) Hammerhead I's. Conformation he couldn't use Tech II drones and he was using mediums on a frigate. They would have a hard time tracking me while I shot them to pieces.

So I settled into orbit at 1000m from him to screw up his tracking with his blasters (again no way would he have decent tracking skills after a month) and started to lock up, web and destroy his drones. They dropped fast. I was expecting more drones to pop out, but none arrived. Either he hadn't realised that I would aim for his drones, or he had forgotten to load more. So instead I switched to him. And had a shock. My cap had utterly disappeared while I had been nailing the drones. Luckily I was using a Nos and autocannons so I hadn't suffered massively, but the fact I hadn't noticed this pointed out how poor my tactical awareness is. I switched all my important mods back on. He only neuted me twice more then stopped. I assumed his cap skills were causing him some pain trying to keep that neut running, so he had switched it off. I was slowly wearing down his armour (it was around 50% by this point), and I was certain I would win this. I had been utterly right about him not being able to track, and my shields had actually started to regenerate.

Vroom

Then another orange jumped into the belt. Crap.

While I had been waiting for the miner to come back in, I had set his whole corp to orange, so I could see if any of them wandered by and saw me flashy red after stealing from a can belonging to them. While the miner might have been inexperienced at PvP, he was not stupid, and had called for backup. Unfortunately, this orange was their CEO, flying a Daredevil. I overheated everything and prayed that the Vexor would explode before the Daredevil reached me. There was not a chance in hell I could fight it and survive. The Vexor was inching towards 25% when the Daredevil locked me. I prayed even harder, my hands clenched into fists.

But it was no use. Clearly there is no god :(

Angry at myself for not paying closer attention to local, I warped my pod back to station, before writing a sarcastic EVE-Mail to the Vexor pilot. After I sent it, I realised how pointless that had been. I had just provided him with tears. He was surprisingly mature though, and I attempted to reply in good faith, complimenting his choice in fits, as the neut was utterly unexpected on my part. Now that I've calmed down a little after being denied my EPIC KILL!1!1!!, I can totally understand why he did it. I would have done the exact same in his position. In my excitement to get a cruiser kill, I forgot to pay attention to what was going on around me and I payed the price. Next time, I need to calm the hell down and focus on popping the other guy before celebrating. In my mind I had already won, and that lost me my Rifter.


Tl;dr New guys are inexperienced, not stupid, and fighting one does not guarantee an easy kill :(

Solo LowSec kill!

Today has been a busy day. I spent some time checking out our corp's new POS set up in LowSec to allow all the new guys at PvP (such as myself) a safe haven for practice. For example, if we get overwhelmed in a fight, we all just run away and hide behind cosy shields. Not very "badass PvPer" but we're still learning ;)

Anyway, shiny blue forcefields are only interesting for so long, and the system was pretty dead at that point besides me and a few other corp guys. So I headed off to Ami in my newly fitted out Rifter, after I decided that every PvPer ever can't be wrong. And I'm starting to like this ship. While it's nowhere near as tanky as my Punisher (see a few blogs back) it's much faster, with the smaller plate also allowing me to fit weapon rigs instead of fitting ones, and the three midslots provides room for a web, giving me an even bigger speed advantage over other players.

So I'm bouncing around Ami, hitting my D-Scan, trying to find an Incursus that keeps popping up now and again among the Drakes and Jaguars. Eventually I get bored, and giving up on finding the Incursus, I warp straight to belt one. Bad idea.

A Jaguar, Enyo, Fleet Stabber and another random ship appear in my overview

Seeing two flashy reds and two yellows in my overview makes me nearly crap my pants. I align to a nearby planet and start spamming warp. Luckily they were either ratting or killing each other, so I escaped without any potentially fatal attention. Muttering to myself at my carelessness, I notice that the Incursus is back on D-Scan, seemingly mocking me. "Oh it's on now" I think.

About eight minutes later I realise that I'm useless with the scanner, and instead switch to jumping between belts hoping to find him. On my third jump I strike gold, figuratively speaking. It was the Incursus, seemingly ratting. Unfortunately I had landed about 10km from him, so I had to react fast before he warped out. Stupidly I had also not prepared in the slightest for this fight, as I still had RF EMP S loaded in my guns, despite the fact that shield-tanking Incursuses (Incursi?) are incredibly rare. Also I was mildly suspicious it was a trap. Who rats in a system with over 15 pilots in?

But I was desperate for a kill, so I hit my afterburner to overheat, and rocketed towards him while locking on. I hit my guns and scram at the same time. He didn't even appear to have realised I was here yet. And then I got that stupid Concord warning. "This is a criminal action la la la". Guns still hadn't fired, and by now the Incursus had noticed I was there and was locking me up. Almost face-palming, I ignored the warning and told my guns to fire again. His shields melted instantly, though I wasn't too surprised, EMP ammo vs untanked shields is a no-brainer. But then his armour started melting only slightly slower than his shields. My jaw dropped, was he using a kite fit? I wasn't expecting him to go down fast, but I am used to the "grinding down" style of my Punisher. Maybe the Rifter is more ganky. By the time I was halfway through his armour he had only just dropped my shields, and when he exploded I was still at 75% armour. Either the Rifter is better than I thought, or he had a seriously poor tank.

I scooped my new loot and warped off to a nearby planet, ecstatic at my first solo PvP kill in LowSec. It was while I was bouncing around planets, waiting for my GCC to run out, that I saw the cyno appear on my overview, and a Moros popped up on D-Scan. Besides Chribba's Veldnaught, I had never seen a capital ship in Eve, so I warped to the cyno at 100km to check it out.

Stupid mistake.

The smarter ones among you will have already realised how dumb this was. For those of you like me, who know very little about capitals, let me explain what I learnt in about 10 seconds in LowSec.

1) Capital ships are slow

2) Capital ships on their own are juicy gank targets

3) Any capital ship on it's own outside a fleet is going to get attacked by a gang if it isn't somewhere they can't hit it within about 20 seconds of it cynoing in

So it was obviously a station the cyno had been dropped at. No capital pilot is going to get their alt to drop a cyno anywhere else unless its in the middle of a fleet fight. I still had four minutes left on my GCC. Unfortunately while I was checking out this huge ship slowboat towards the station, I did not notice the sentry guns take aim at me. Oops.

Victim: Seraph Minayin

Corp: Adamas Anima

Alliance: Unknown

Faction: Unknown

Destroyed: Rifter

System: Ami

Security: 0.4

Damage Taken: 3466

Involved parties:

Name: Amarr Sentry Gun / Zoar and Sons (laid the final blow)

Damage Done: 1900

Name: Astra Winter

Security: -0.10

Corp: Tempus Stabilis

Alliance: None

Faction: None

Ship: Unknown

Weapon: Modal Light Electron Particle Accelerator I

Damage Done: 1474

Name: Blood Converter / Blood Raiders

Damage Done: 92

As you can see, I got pretty nailed by those guns. The earlier damage was from the Incursus and a random belt rat. (Weirdly Battleclinic doesn't show my loss as being due to station guns, probably because it's a manual post. I need to get round to putting my API key on there) I also lost most of my sweet lootz from my fight, and this annoyed me more than the loss of my ship. After I waited out my GCC in a station, I bought a Kestrel, flew over to my wreck, and grabbed whatever had survived.

Getting my property back

I've learnt some valuable lessons today. The main one being to ALWAYS wait out my GCC away from gates and stations, a classic mistake for those unaware of LowSec mechanics. However I've also realised I need to practice my D-Scanning skills, and that warping to zero on asteroid belts is an incredibly stupid idea. Maybe next time I'll be less dumb ;)

Tl;dr While in LowSec, pay attention all the time. Don't assume you'll be fine like I did :)

A snag with the Punisher...

One problem I found with my Punisher today was the fact I had no way of dealing with frigates using cap boosters, other than wearing them down through the use of my nos. Hardly an elegant solution and it takes a hell of alot of time to do it, enough time that in lowsec, it would probably get you blobbed.

However in High-sec duels, this is less of a problem. Blobbing only happens if you take from a can that clearly is owned by a corp with about 50000000000 frigate kills. I normally drop my own can, because blobbing the other guy is no fun to me, I want a fun fight. (come to Amarr if you want some awesome duels, it's not just me hanging around outside the station). But today I realised the horror of neutral alts/friends repping the guy you're trying to kill. Which lead to this.

Time for a new ship...

While I'm a little disappointed I didn't get the kill, I'm glad I've had the experience that tells me if the other guy is cap boosting, expect him to call for help. By the end of the fight I was barely keeping my repper on, but I had got into Yabbiy's hull. And that's when a nearby Osprey turned flashy red, and Yabbiy's shields went back up to full. At this point I knew I was dead. My cap was nearly out, my repper was overheated to the point where I was certain it was about to die, and my guns were in a similar position. It was inevitable I would lose. No surprise comeback for the plucky underdog today ;)

We private convoed after I had gone all splodey and I admired Yabbiy's fit despite his use of a repping buddy. I've never seen a cap-boosting Punisher before, and it was surprisingly effective. To my dismay, Yabbiy told me that he had run out of cap-boosters right at the end, which was why the Osprey intervened. To say I was devastated  would give you an small idea of how I felt. If that Osprey hadn't been there, I would be the proud winner of a true "gf" and pleased I had beaten a player so much more experienced than me, in both skill points and PvP. Yabbiy mentioned he was impressed by my fit too, and was intrigued to see it, so atleast I can say I had some sort of surprise advantage over older players? Grasping at straws I know :D


Tl;dr Cap-boosting ships are a problem. And neutral reppers make me sad :(