pppvp
Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you. And sometimes..
…The bear slips on a banana peel and falls in the river.
So it was when I ran into a Solar Fleet gang while roaming in my Harbinger. I was in NJ4 in warp to the G9D gate, and Solar started jumping in while I was in warp to the gate. Landing, I discovered a Malediction, a couple of Stilettos and a couple of Sabres waiting for me. I wondered if this was all there was to it – a small, very very fast roaming gang. I sat on the gate and waited to see if they would all aggro me, or if one of them would be smart and hold off to pin me on the other side.
Well, to my considerable gratitude, they all aggroed me, and I jumped through as one of the Sabres tried to bump me off gate.
On the other side, I saw a nightmare list of a dozen HACs and battlecruisers. In a token attempt, I warped to a planet at 100.
My velocity indicator was at 50% when the fastest lockers acquired me and started firing. I expected to see it start to dwindle as more and more of them locked on, waiting for the little warp scrambling icon to appear next to them in my overview. Soon, every one of them was firing, and my armor was starting to go down fast.
And then I went into warp.
The Solar gang apparently didn’t put any tackle on their DPS ships… and then let all their tackle get stuck with aggro on the far side of the gate. Oops! Making safespots, I bounced around till my aggro timer ran out and logged. Not a good fight, but a lucky escape.
Morsus Got ‘Im
The Hurricane I fought the other day got bagged by Morsus Mihi (with some help from Majesta) in WH-JCA. I thought I would link the kill here, since it’s always cool to see the fittings of the stuff you’ve fought:
http://kb.majesta-empire.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=66869
I’m kind of curious to fly a Hurricane some time.
…And Execution (by missile fire)
The system of N6G-3C is an interesting one. It sits near one of the entrances to Venal and thus is a chokepoint for traffic, making it a logical enough gatecamp spot. But the particular brilliance of its choice lies not in its position but in the layout of the system itself. Most of the celestials in the system are clustered relatively close together, but the outbound gate on the pipe lies 20 AU away from the nearest object, well out of d-scan range.
This meant that when I jumped into the system and saw a lone member of White Noise in local, all of my warping around and d-scanning did me no good at all. I was fairly sure I had all the planets and asteroid belts covered in the course of my scans, and I had turned up nothing. At this point my best guess was that the WN pilot in local was a cloaked scout placed to monitor the movements of Northern Coalition fleets as they carried out operations against the WTF coalition’s assets in Venal, and that I would not get a fight out of him. With that in mind I shrugged and warped to the next gate in my route…
Right into the catch bubble of a Broadsword sitting some forty kilometers off-gate. I had forgotten that the next gate was not in d-scan range of a celestial, so I had no way to see if it was camped. A sensibly cautious pilot might have turned around rather than taking the risk of going through a gate he couldn’t check before proceeding. Caution is a difficult habit to acquire, especially in video gaming, when one is normally rewarded for having twitchy reflexes and diving into the thick of things.
Cursing, I aligned for the gate and turned on my microwarpdrive, knowing full well that it would be pointless to try to break a Broadsword’s tank and fully expecting that he would have backup coming in any second now. The best I could hope for was to burn for the gate and tank their DPS long enough to make my escape. The problem was that the Broadsword pilot, Econom, was even more clever than I realized: he had positioned his ship so that the shortest path through the gate would take me right past his ship. This allowed him to use a 9km-ranged warp scrambler to deactivate my microwarpdrive as I went by; a stasis webifier then stopped me dead in my tracks. At 75m/s, I would never make it the 35km remaining to the gate. There would be no escape, all I could do now is go down fighting and maybe take one or two ships with me.
Unfortunately for me, the White Noise pilots used a classic 3-ship gang setup: the gate flashed twice, and we were soon joined by fe25 in a Cerberus and Sascha Balkin in a Falcon. The Falcon ensured that it wasn’t even a fight, merely a textbook takedown after a perfect set-up. The Cerberus and the Broadsword laid on their DPS, and I was soon back in TVN station. The Broadsword’s bubble ensured that I couldn’t save my pod even if I wanted to.
I found myself longing for a Rook again, the higher sensor strength and ECM capability might have at least let me live long enough to kill the Falcon. My PVP losses were getting very expensive, but I found myself addicted to the thrill of solo roaming, and I knew that I would not give up. Plus, a reader of this blog had suggested a new Rook fitting that I wanted to try out, so it was not long before I undocked again…
The Minimal Roaming Gang, Concept…
People who are not extremely skilled soloists (or glory-mad bloggers looking for stories to tell) generally prefer to PVP in gangs if they do at all. More members in gang means more backup, greater DPS, and allowing the fleet to have a variety of specialized ships able to deal very well with specific situations. WIth the benefits and added security that travelling in large numbers provides, most fleet commanders are eager to get as many ships in gang as they possibly can. This tendency leads to the inevitable blob of thirty or more ships thundering across the sky, smashing anything unwary enough to get caught by dint of sheer numbers. While effective, it rarely results in what could be described as a fun fight unless the opposing force manages to muster similar numbers or uses a clever strategy to seize victory.
As a result, some fleet commanders prefer to limit the size of their gangs. Some even go so far as to pare down their fleet to the absolute bare minimum needed to succeed. I would argue that in order to consider a gang fully-featured, it needs to contain three ships, each dedicated to a specific role: DPS, tackle and ECM. You can get away with just DPS and tackle, but ECM is still such a powerful force multiplier that I feel it should not be ignored in any gang. A dedicated ECM ship will allow your gang to take on less well composed or well prepared fleets well out of proportion to its size, provided your ECM pilot is good enough to keep himself more or less out of harm’s way, as he will be called primary first thing.
Which three ships should be used? That depends on the sort of opposition you expect to encounter and whether you plan on roaming foreign space or camping in one spot. I would recommend the following:
- DPS: Drake, Hurricane, Harbinger, Zealot, Sacrilege, Ishtar, HAM Cerberus. Avoid battleships; they are too slow for a quick getaway, which you will need. I am leaving the Vagabond off this list because while it is very survivable, it is too DPS light for its assigned role.
- ECM: Falcon or Rook. The Kitsune is just too tiny and fragile, though in a pinch you could use it as a jammy tackler. Use the Falcon if you want a cloaky scout, a prober, or the ability to mount a cyno generator if you’re the sort of crazy person who likes to randomly hotdrop stuff. The Rook in its post-QR form can provide a nice bit of additional DPS in addition to performing its ECM duties, so some FCs might prefer it.
- Tackle: For roaming, take an interceptor or other light, fast frigate-sized ship with excellent speed and sig radius characteristics. For camping, a heavy interdictor will round out your fleet nicely. I have never flown a HIC, but I hear the Broadsword is the best all around for speed, tank and an extra bit of DPS.
Don’t worry, dear reader, I can hear what you are thinking: “But Kesper, this blog of yours bills itself as being dedicated to solo PVP! Why are you blathering on about small gangs now? You cheating bastard, I bet your next post will be all about some lame NC blobby napfest op.”
Well, you caught me. This whole post was a clever ruse to distract you from the fact that after all my bravado at the end of my last post about how I was going to go out to Venal in my Harbie and go pop some TRI, I ran right into a White Noise gatecamp. I have to credit WN with an excellent setup. They used the gatecamp variation of the three-ship gang I described above, but the spot they chose was absolutely stellar. You can read all about the ensuing battle in the next post.
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. 
Curses, Foiled Again
So, it turns out you can fit a Curse out as a prober pretty well. I nano it out, with a passive shield tank, an AB and a tracking disruptor. The highs are full of medium neuts and noses, along with that precious probe launcher.
With Hammerheads, my DPS is not great, as my drone skills are a bit crap, but my hope is that between rat DPS and the neut/nos, enemy ships will quickly cap out, and the AB-nano fit will let me outrun missile DPS well enough while the tracking disruptor screws up turret ships. The only thing I have to watch out for is drone boats, right?
So thus armed I head back down to the Drone Regions. I find myself in F9, site of some of the biggest battles in the Drone Wars. It has been yet another desperately quiet trip, and not even the probe launcher is helping me to catch unwary ratters. The new scanning system is just so goddamn finicky and slow for combat probes.
Anyway, I am in warp to the XB gate when a pair of ED ships appear in local. On scanner I see them pop up at the gate… a Zealot and a Vagabond. Oh crap, I think to myself, I am so screwed. My only chance is to wait for them to aggress and jump through, then get safe on the other side.
Unfortunately, they’re smart. The Vaga aggresses and lays on the damage. After a few seconds it becomes clear that the Zealot won’t aggress. I realize that I might have a chance against the Zealot, as his weapons are cap-dependant and the Vaga’s aren’t. So I jump into XB- and hit the ‘burner, aligning for a celestial. Sure enough the Zealot jumps right after me, and he rips through my shield tank with his lasers while I neut him and sic my drones on him. I know I’m neuting his cap; indeed he should be just about dry… but no, his lasers are still firing, his point is still working… and then I realize that he fitted a cap booster rather than a sensor booster, just like I should have done when I was fighting that damned neuting Ishtar.
I am very frustrated at this point. The Harbinger is a bit big and slow to catch ratters; the Zealot, agile but a bit of a glass cannon and really hard to fit even with AWU 4. The Curse, way too fragile and neuts aren’t nearly the equalizer I feel like they should be (and hear that they once were). And probes aren’t really helping either. So what’s left? What will give me an adequate tank, acceptable DPS, sufficient maneuverability and has a little bit of an edge where both combat and survivability is concerned?
(If you say ‘Vagabond’ or ‘Ishtar’ I am going to hit you. What I meant to say was ‘what’s left *that I can fly*’.)
And then, as I pull out old EFT theorycrafting, I begin to get the glimmerings of an idea.
More Fun with TRI in Venal
After the previous night’s adventure with naamira and friends, I decided to log back in and play the cat and mouse game a bit more, perhaps scoring an easy kill or two in the process. TRI came to play not long after, and soon we were feinting with one another throughout the system of P-F. Finally only one Ishtar pilot was left in system, and getting bored I challenged him to a 1v1 at a planet. I knew he was at planet 3, so I warped to planet 2 and aligned immediately for p3. It proved very good that I had done so…
He warped in at 100km. I did not approve of this as my harbie is a pulse harbie, so I warped out… then warped back in again at 100km, right on top of the Ishtar. He was so suprised that I got a free volley on him, a point blank alpha strike that put him in armor with one volley. Pointed and webbed, he hit the MWD and crawled out of conflag range, deploying drones and neuting me. I switched over to Scorch, and found that even though he was repping quite a bit it wasn’t enough to tank my DPS. He was going down, slowly, and I activated my own MWD to keep him in range for the kill.
That’s when he violated the 1v1. Two more TRI entered system and warped in on us when it became clear that he was losing the engagement, a Stiletto and a Phantasm. Despite the additional DPS I held out long enough to pop the Ishtar before succumbing to the Phantasm’s withering laser fire mere seconds later.
All in all, I call it a win. A very ~~good fight~~ and the loss of a 50mill Harbinger to kill a rigged Ishtar worth almost four times as much.