Battlecruisers of Doom!

Last weekend Azx had an idea. Azx had a wonderful…awful, idea.

I have it on good authority that this is exactly what Azx looks like

“Let’s do a battlecruiser roam, I’ve had this Ferox around for way too long.” I foolhardily agreed. Actually I was pretty psyched about the idea. I hadn’t flown a Prophecy since the changes to the ship’s bonuses. It had gone from a primarily laser boat to a drone boat and I was interested to see what kind of fit I could get on it with all my new maxed drone skills. I was pretty pleased with the fit. It wasn’t ground breaking but had about 700 dps and an effective tank of something like 80,000 hit points. Not great, but not easily ignored either. And I was planning on losing the ship so what the fuck do I care?

We fit out and headed to lo-sec. Our first encounter was…odd.

Basically Azx got caught on a gate. But, the Vexors we were fighting started killing an Omen that we thought was with them. Then, basically, they all left. We had no idea what was happening. We were just trying to get dps on the closest ships before Azx died. And boy was he going to die if they had just kept at it. We were confused but it seemed like the tank on his fit was legit. Vexors can spit out some serious dps and seemed to handle quite a bit of it. And we managed to get on the Omen killmail so yay!

Our next fight went a little better. We caught a few guys, we think from the previous group, on another gate. We primary a Cerberus and manage to break through his tank and take him down. The fight went really well, right until Azx parked his Ferox in a stargate and got stuck! Getting stuck on an inanimate object is always embarrassing, but can be downright lethal when you have enemy ships landing on you. For some reason though they didn’t engage us and we headed to a station to lick our wounds.

The final battle went about how I expected the night to go. We warped into a hornet’s nest and were obliterated. I’ll say I thought we put up a pretty good fight all things considered. We made a few mistakes, but that’s what pvp is all about. A lost ship is only painful if you don’t learn something from it. Every fight you’re in is a lesson, and the more you analyze you’re performance afterwards the better you get.

I for one need to learn to OVERHEAT MY DAMN MODULES. I don’t know what it is, I just can’t seem to remember that it’s available to me. I even have thermodynamics trained to V! Anyway we had a blast and I managed to get some decent videos of the fights. All in all a great way to spend some time on a rainy weekend!

Sneaky Roam

Last week Azx, Jakob, and myself set out to lo-sec in a fairly odd fleet. We were looking for something a little more interesting than our standard Tech 1 cruisers and frigates, so we decided to roll out some heavy hitters. Jakob and I both piloted Pilgrims, and Azx brought out his uber-cloak Proteus. It was a sneaky fleet and it caught a poor Omen and Coercer unaware. Well the Coercer was actually just afk on a gate, so I guess anyone could have snuck up on him! o\

The Omen we found ratting in our lo-sec area. He never had a chance. In fact we didn’t even manage to get all our ships there before Azx exploded his ship.

The fleet did seem to work pretty well though. We were able to move from system to system without spooking too many people and we could pick our targets at will. I think we’ll definitely see this fleet roll out again sometime soon. Although I have to be honest, it was terrifying flying an expensive ship like that into combat again! I’ve gotten so used to losing a few million at a time!

A few days after that encounter I caught a thrasher ratting in lo-sec with the Pilgrim. It was a really clever catch and I wish the video had worked. I’m still having trouble getting the mic and game audio to work right with YouTube. I use the AVImux part of Dxtory, but the program doesn’t have a load bar, it just hangs when I run it. If I let it run for like a whole day, then force close it, the file usually works. But it’s super annoying that it doesn’t have a progress bar that works and I have to guess how long to let it run before knowing if it’s going to work. Does anyone know of a program that does what the AVImux program does as a standalone software?!

Good Fights and Some Lessons Learned

For those of you not from ‘MURICA!, I would like you all to know that this is the day Americans celebrate beating the Brits with loud noises and fire. It’s fun.

It’s also a day I don’t have to go to work. So I spent some time on Eve. Most of the time was spent ratting and hunting around in lo-sec. You can make so much money in there now while only risking a 20 or 30 million isk ship. It’s really pretty cool, and since you’re in lo-sec you can also come across some other players which can lead to some good pvp. In fact with the new addition of the tag rats in lo-sec, more players are hanging out in belts of low security systems where good fights can be had without the annoying mechanics of stargates, stations, and their associated guns.

Azx and I have been spending a lot of our time out there recently. We’ve lost a lot of ships, but never anything worth too much, and we can easily make back the cost of our ships with just a handful of the security tags the rats drop. We were cruising our way through some backwater systems hunting for this bountiful loot when we came across an Omen doing the exact same thing. We decided now was the perfect time to try our little fleet composition.

With just the two of us things get tricky. We can take most frigates simply because there are two of us, but you rarely run into another frigate that is willing to 2v1 on your terms. Often times you come across cruiser hulls in lo-sec who are soloing. So we needed a way to negate their dps, point them, and still hack through their armor. We came up with a pretty good solution I think. Basically Azx runs a brawling shield tanked Merlin with some blasters for a whopping 170 dps. It’s afterburner keeps him moving at a good pace even when an enemy ship warp scrambles him. I fly a Crucifier. Yeah it’s that Amarr frigate you never see in pvp. But I realized recently that it has a drone bay. I love drones, and I love tracking disruptors and the two go really well together in my fit.

Basically what we do is have Azx warp right in on the target if possible and immediately start putting damage on the enemy ship and point him. The warp scramble is important as it negates any MWD their ship might have, keeping their speed well below 1,000 m/s unless their an especially fast frigate. It also keeps them from getting to me, who is completely tank less with the exception of my two tracking disruptors and MWD. I sit at about 30 km and disrupt the turrets of the enemy ship while throwing my 100 dps into the mix. The result is, “hopefully,” an enemy ship that is slower than us who can’t hit us. The two tracking disruptors really play havoc on enemy ships as you can see in the first ever Capsule in the Void video!

I should warn you, I am still getting the kinks worked out of my recording system. It’ll take some time but I have the youtube channel up and running so it shouldn’t be too much longer now. This video just highlighted the fleet fittings I wanted to blog about so I figured I would post it a little before my videos were up to par. The audio too for some reason only picked up Azx’s voice. Which is too bad, because I am hilarious. Anyway you can see for yourself!

One interesting thing about the videos is it let’s you really go back and learn from your combats. For instance I definitely did not notice how long his drones were attacking mine or when he deployed them. Obviously it would be nice to pay more attention and catch that earlier in the future. Another thing we realized is I’m generally out of the fight and have a pretty good chance of getting away. Maybeeee we should store our tag loot in my ship before we run off to a fight. Lastly it shows the world what kind of friend I am as I willfully abandon Azx to his doom!