legion of xxdeathxx
Epic Fail
All right, I say to myself as I undock my Harbinger from TVN station, it’s payback time. I’m feeling pretty confident, as I managed to solo an Ishtar the last time I brought a Harbie to Venal, and I’ve just finished AWU 4 so I was able to mount a bigger plate for more buffer on my Harbie. Thus armed, I set off for the journey to Venal in hopes of killing some ratters.
Which I fail to do, over the course of many hours.
Because every single goddamned ratter I saw was a stupid bloody cloaky Cerberus aligned to a POS 100km off the belt warpin point. Which is exactly how I rat.
“Fuck it,” I say. “Next time I’m going to the Drone Regions, the ratters there are total morons.”
So I went to the drone regions. And every ratter I saw was a stupid bloody cloaky Cerb, et cetera. A couple of PVPers from Ethereal Dawn engaged me, but I managed to deagress and GTFO in deep structure. I returned home with 19% structure and a big flame coming out the side of my ship. 
I pause briefly to kill a Manticore in P3EN.
Repairing my structure, I decided to go out again. Once again, I see a lot of empty space and ratters that I just can’t catch before they get safe. I resolve to try and shoehorn a probe launcher onto my Harbie somehow.
On the way home, I instapop an overconfident Manticore pilot who for some reason elected to engage a Harbinger solo. Very exciting, I know. A stirring battle ensued, lasting all of, uh, half a second.
For my third outing to the drone regions, I barely got as far as QFF before I encountered a lone Tempest belonging to Legion of xXDeathXx! And I had a horrible dilemma – stupid Minmatar crap, do Tempests shield tank or armor tank? Oh, the hell with it, there’s rats on the gate, maybe they’ll help, I have a decent buffer and lots of DPS.
I hit him, but not hard, and he was chewing through my armor pretty quickly. Oh, right, he’s doing the *best* damage type for my race. Man, that was pretty stupid, huh? Plus the rats decided to shoot me and not him. I immediately deagress, but not soon enough, and I lose my Harbinger.
For my final fail of the evening, I decide to go back and get my utterly beloved pulse Zealot, which I usually fly in roaming gangs and is a fantastic ship for that purpose. It’s a bit lacking in the mids to be a really viable solo ship but I decided to give it a shot anyway. I don’t feel like flying all the way to bloody Kalevala, so I take the trip to Venal, where I find a TRI pilot, Zudari, ratting in an Ishtar! Sweet! He warps to a planet, and I come in right on top of him.
Big mistake.
He drops sentries, which my pulse lasers quickly rip to shreds, dropping the incoming DPS considerably… until my lasers stop firing me because he’s in $%@%#!!#@@ neut range. He drops a fresh set of Bouncer IIs and my Zealot soon explodes around me.
Fail, fail, fail and more fail. I need to pick my targets better – but I can’t seem to *catch* any of the ratters who aren’t already willing to PVP. And my experiments with EFT have proven that there is no Amarr or Caldari ship that makes an adequate solo anti-ratter platform while still fitting a probe launcher. (That 220 CPU is a bitch).
Except… hey, what about the Curse?
