losses
Wherein I lose another Rook, this time to an Overview Glitch
I’m sorry, did I say an overview glitch? I mean the corporation, Overview Glitch. I had decided to go poking around in far northern Venal, you see, having become convinced that there were no ratters left in the Drone Regions and deciding to try my luck elsewhere. I had spent a number of hours prior to this logged into my capital alt, bashing Triumvirate POS towers in Pure Blind with my dreadnought, and I was desperate for some more solo action. Things are kind of crazy in Venal right now with the Northern Coalition finally stomping TRI for stealing a bunch of r64 moons while the NC was off killing Kenny in the south, so I thought I’d go and check out the action.
Unfortunately the action was very, very blue. I travelled thirty or forty jumps around Venal, and it was blue as far as I could see. Granted, I didn’t actually bother going to H-PA, but that’s because I knew the NC was already camping the WTF crew into the stations there anyway. So it was that I had literally just given up on Venal and turned my ship towards the Drone Regions when I saw a pair of neutrals enter local. A Crow and a Crusader landed on the gate with me almost simultaneously, and I knew then that if I jumped through they would just catch me on the other side. I waited for them to get aggro – but then as with the Zealot/Vagabond pair that killed me last weeek, one aggressed and the other did not. I figured this meant that they were scouts and there were larger ships coming to support them from behind.
With one interceptor, the Crow, aggressing me, and the other holding off, I knew that I had little choice but to stand and fight. My best chance, I thought, was to put a jammer on each Crow, align and try to warp out and get safe before their DPS arrived. While this was a fine plan in theory, in practice I missed cycles on both interceptors. After my previous luck with the Drake, I was starting to feel a little bit picked upon by the universe, and I went ahead and put all my DPS on the Crow. Unfortunately I still had Fury missiles loaded; that might be a reason to keep faction missiles in the tubes most of the time.
Even so, to my suprise I hurt the Crow pretty badly. He was forced to disengage and leave the field, but not before the gang’s DPS support, a Sleipnir, landed on the gate with us. He took me to half shields before I could put both my jammers on him. Finally, though, my ECM did its job, and the Sleipnir soon found itself out of the fight. With only a Stiletto and a Crusader left now, I began to have some hope: If I could either kill or force the interceptors to abandon the field, I might just be able to escape!
The fight raged on for over ten minutes. I would occasionally miss a cycle, and the Sleipnir would shoot me down into armor before my jammers kicked in again. Then the passive recharge on my shields would take me back up to 30% or so, and we’d do the whole thing over again. Meanwhile, I put the hurt on the ceptors, focusing on the Crow again as it returned to the field with low shields and armor nearly gone. I was holding up much better than I thought, if I could just hurt the interceptors badly enough and keep the Sleipnir jammed, they might disengage.
Unfortunately, just as I began to have hope for survival in the face of this pitched battle, the gate lit up with its brilliant blue-white glow and a new neutral appeared in local.
The Overview Glitch pilots had called for reinforcements, and an Ishtar had responded. It set its Bouncer IIs on me just as I missed a cycle on the Sleipnir, and in seconds my ship was dust and ashes. I sat by my wreck and waited to be podded, accepting the compliments of the Overview Glitch crew for a battle well fought with a certain degree of ill grace due to frustration at my repeated failures.
Returning home I spun my pod in TVN station, beginning to question the wisdom of my repeated outings and nightly losses. My industrial corp could bear the cost, but not for too long, and this was getting very expensive indeed. I was reminded why I started flying Harbingers in the first place: They are cheap and can be flown unrigged (which otherwise would double the cost of the ship). Since I had one waiting in my hangar, I knew what I would be flying next.
TRI, don’t bother to use your scanner – you’ll know what I’m flying.
The Rook: Great Soloship, or Greatest Soloship?
My recent experiences reminded me that the Rook was substantially rebalanced in QR, and by all reports is pretty badass now. So I poked around with EFT and came up with the following:
[Rook, Solo]
Ballistic Control System II
Signal Distortion Amplifier II
Ballistic Control System II
Invulnerability Field II
Invulnerability Field II
Large Shield Extender II
10MN Afterburner II
Warp Disruptor II
ECM – Multispectral Jammer II
ECM – Multispectral Jammer II
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Thunderbolt Fury Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Thunderbolt Fury Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Thunderbolt Fury Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Thunderbolt Fury Heavy Missile
Heavy Missile Launcher II, Thunderbolt Fury Heavy Missile
Particle Dispersion Augmentor I
Bay Loading Accelerator I
Hobgoblin II x5
22k ehp and 431 dps with all skills at V – but the real key to the beauty of this ship as a solo roamer is those two multispecs. With good skills and a bit of luck you can jam any one other recon, or multiple frigate or cruiser sized ships, while dishing out a suprisingly good deal of damage. This insulates you from the “PPPPPvP” aspect of PVP in EVE to some degree, and vastly increases the ability of the ship to extricate itself from difficult situations.
So with my fancy new hac-recon hybrid, I headed for the Drone Regions with every intention of this really, truly, finally being the time when I would actually manage to gank a ratter. Just one Raven pilot not watching local, that’s all I ask.
But it was not to be. After several hours of roaming, I headed for a station system in northwestern Malpais in the hopes that there would at least be *something* there. And something there was – at the station I found a Stiletto and a Sacrilege. I jammed both and fled, not wanting to play docking games with nasty ships like those. However, the Rook’s ECM performed nicely and got me away from the unfavorable confrontation.
A few systems later, I came upon another station system, this one under the sovreignty of Flame Bridge, an alliance whose name was new to me. This time, the residents had evidently heard I was in the area, and I found two SBs, a Crusader and a Sabre waiting for me. Finally, here was a fight that looked like it might be really fun!
As the blood rose and thundered in my ears I decloaked and activated my hardeners. Priority one was cutting down the incoming DPS, which meant jamming the stealth bombers. One multispec on each bomber did the job, and I turned my attention to the Sabre, who had just dropped a bubble on me. Even though he was moving at high speed my missiles tore into him and he just narrowly escaped in deep structure, warping out and leaving the field. By this time the Crusader had a point on me, and an Ishkur had joined him on the field. I turned my attention to the stealth bombers, glass cannons that would be easy to kill and eliminate their DPS so I could turn my ECM on the Crusader and Ishkur. I pointed one bomber, a Nemesis, and took him down fast. The other bomber I also put into deep structure before he managed to MWD out of my scram range and left the field.
Now I just had the Crusader and the Ishkur to contend with. I put a jammer on each, and pointed the Ishkur. As my missiles began to chew through his tank I thought to myself, “Well! Successful test, winning a 5v1 is not bad.”
And then, the reinforcements arrived.
My jammers went dark. I lost point on the Ishkur. My AB went dead as well. My invul fields shut down. A Curse had entered the field, and I was fucked.
The coup de grace, administered by an Armageddon, was mercifully quick. With no implants in the clone, and a “gf” in local, I sat by my wreck and waited for the medical clone jump express to take me home.
Back in TVN, I reflected on my adventure. The Rook proved the most successful of my solo roaming experiments overall, and despite both the cost of the ship and the fact that I have already lost one in battle, I think Part 7 of this series will be written with one as well. 
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?
Griefing TRI pets
After a two week absence due to vacation, I resumed my sojourns across New Eden to find fun, profit and ~~good fights~~ in far distant lands.
This time, rather than take my trusty Harbinger, I decided to go commerce raiding. With the new changes, stealth bombers are a wonderful cloaky gate camp ship. I staked out a spot on the H-PA gate in 9-2 and cloaked up, carefully staying on the far side of the gate from any celestials to avoid being decloaked, while also being in that tiny 500m range between where you can jump and where you get decloaked by the gate.
I settled in for a nice camp, and watched a few TRI vagas and ishtars go about their mysterious business. I idly thought that Vagas do look like fun and contemplated (shudder) crosstraining Minmatar HACs, now that I’ve got my Amarr skills close to solid. I did not have to wait for long, though, as an Iteron V soon popped up on the directional scanner, heading my way. (9-2 is sort of nice for this, it’s so big and empty that there is not a lot of ‘noise’ on the scanner).
The Itty, which belonged to a pilot from Sentience. named Rhionni, jumped right through the gate and I decloaked and jumped after him. I was easily able to get a point on the other side, and two torpedo volleys finished off the Iteron wreck. Mildly excited to see what goodies might have been dropped,
Rhionni > why did you do that, you’re blue
Kesper North > I am? Sorry, you’re neut to me. Contact my alliance’s diplomats, if this proves to be a real blue on blue situation I’ll be happy to compensate you.
Rhionni > ok, thanks. do you mind if i come get my stuff? i can’t finish this mission without it
Ahhhhh, so it’s mission cargo. Gotcha.
Kesper North > Go right ahead, I’m just here to bug TRI. I don’t really want to give random innocent people a hard time.
Rhionni > thanks!
While I’ve been talking to him, I have been pulling up the killboard records for his corporation, and oh look Sentience. pilots have been on ME kills with TRI. Given that they both live in H-PA, they’re probably blue to one another. And I really doubt an 11 man corp is really supposed to have standings with ME, especially given that hostile history.
So I take up a position 10 km from Rhionni’s hauler wreck, wait for the new hauler to show up, and pop it again. Wailing and gnashing of teeth and promises to contact diplos ensue. I post about the incident on the leadership forum for the benefit of our diplos, who respond that they don’t know Sentience. from Adam and they certainly don’t have blue status. I pop both the guy’s wrecks and go back to camping, job done.
Unfortunately for me, the other hauler running back and forth is stabbed. I chase him to 6NJ and back, but I can never get more than one volley on him, and it’s just not quite enough to pop him. Still, I say to myself, I’ve gotten a couple of hauler kills, and it’s getting late. Time to go home. I’m just about to head for home when a Vaga and a Legion show up, decloak and instapop me. Scratch one stealth bomber. Fooey.
My poor pod begins the long flight across 9-2, resolute in my decision to return to Venal the next day and give TRI some what-for.