Mom Always Said I Was Good At Holding Aggro

Ok maybe not in those exact words, but I definitely recall a couple of fits she had in which exclamatory language was used with similar effect.

Last night was odd. Very outside the normal for my experiences with Eve and operating out of wormhole space. I logged in to find Azx in the POS. He’s heading out to a DED site he found that he’s hoping might be profitable. I wish him luck but no one has scanned in a while and I want to make sure our intel is as accurate as possible. Why hadn’t Azx scanned? Why indeed…lazy Caldari. Nothing new in the system but we have a connection to a class 4 wormhole that requires more investigation. Azx is busy with, whatever it is you do in DED sites. So I decide to check out the C4.

An Orca on scan! And it’s named Master Bob!! Our holy god of the wormholes! Fate has truly smiled on me today. I quickly warp to the BM  at the only operating tower only to find the Orca unpiloted. Well the C4 is empty and there are clearly some industrialist in the local corp so I take the chance to scan the whole system without scaring off any prey or attracting any unwanted attention. 4 ladars and a grav site later the system is scanned. Wow was that a lot of scanning for nothing. Hopefully the Europeans can catch something working one of the sites while I’m at work tomorrow.

It’s right around this point that Azx pipes up in corp chat that things hadn’t gone according to plan. Apparently he had lost his brand new Ishtar to the DED site. That sucks, aren’t you glad I’m broadcasting it all over the interwebs? Price you pay for flying with a blog sensation like myself! He asks me to grab a ship and help him recover his wreck since a lot of the good modules ended up dropping. Sure thing Azx! I grab my pvp Harbinger and adapt the fit a bit for some pve action and off I go. The site is an absolute bitch. First off when you warp into the area your frame rate dropped to about 0.5. There was debris and rocks everywhere and the nuets these things were throwing my way were out of control.

I almost lost the Harbinger when the nuets disarmed my repper and I got caught on some debris in the site! What had Azx gotten me into!? It’s too much to handle on my own although I managed to bookmark his wreck which is a start I guess. He grabs his Drake from w-space and we try to take the site together. While blasting away a local roaming group passes through. A lot of cruisers looking for trouble, but apparently no one with a probe launcher so we’re safe for now.

At this point we’ve warped in and out of the site a few times. Each round we get closer to absolute victory but it’s slow going. Azx decides to head out to repair some of his modules real quick, and maybe pick up a few replacement drones for myself. Of course with poor Azx’s luck tonight he hits a gate camp from the same roamers we encountered earlier. I think the convo went something like this:

• Azx: FUCK
• Azx: I’m so dead
• Azx: Wait, what?
• Me: What happened?
• Azx: They forgot to point me.

Well at least something went our way tonight! We resume work on the site. The nuets seem to like me very much, but the rat’s dps is pretty bad. So I basically become a passive tank drone boat doing my best to hold aggro while Azx does the dirty work. If an Amarr hull is good for anything it’s soaking up damage. Finally the site is finished and Azx cleans up the mess a bit. It sounds like he more or less broken even on the night so we can’t complain too much. But man what a weird night. I head back to our home system and grab my new Legion to try some anomalies with the new fit out. It’s still having some trouble staying cap stable with the sleepers attacking it. I think I’m going to have to drop the tracking computer for a capacitor battery. I also need a faction repairer on there. It can just barely keep up with the damage with the ancillary rep but really would make things a lot easier with the extra repair amounts. How can I steal one from Oz….hmm. Maybe tomorrow!

 

P.s. sorry for the lack of entertaining imagery! I’m still getting back into the swing of writing these things. I always forget to take a screenshot while fun things are going on haha.

Pillage the Village!

Summer Fridays get me home in time to log on with the corpmates for once. Finally I might be able to get something done! Like setup my PI? No, it still didn’t happen. Instead Snow finds a class 2 wormhole next door to our HQ system. Her scouting report shows two towers in the wormhole, but both are offline. No one appears to be in the system and the nine anomalies floating there are ripe for the taking. It’s finally time to pillage someone else’s wormhole for once!

The corp gets started without me. Neither of my Harbingers have managed to make it to the HQ yet, and on top of that neither of them are fit yet. So that comes first. I cruise around for a while buying gear and getting ready for some sleeper slapping. Once in the wormhole it’s business as usual for us. The C2 sleepers are pathetically easy compared to the C3 ships we’re used to. We clean up all the anomalies in about an hour and a half. Our Noctis team reports just shy of 200 million isk brought in. Not too shabby.

We toy with the idea of suckling the gas from the ladar sites found in the C2, but the wormhole just isn’t stable enough for another fleet of big ships to come through, so we decide against it. I’m immediately back in my Pilgrim. My bloodlust is high. Two near kills in as many days has me practically foaming at the mouth. I need to get a kill, today is my day.

I roam around for a while, Snow and Oz are also prowling about but not in anything too robust. Snow is helping me by scouting in her covert ops ship. Oz is in a Purifier, which without the bombs is less lethal, but the added dps from his torpedoes will certainly tip the scale in our favor if I happen to lock down say…a Myrmidon?

I find a Myrmidon sitting at a gate a few jumps from our HQ. He’s sitting on a hi-sec gate. Not entirely sure what he’s trying to accomplish. I can’t engage him here though. The damage I would take from those gate guns will tear me apart in no time. Against a frigate maybe, but I would not be able to break through the Myrmidon’s tank before being destroyed, even with Oz’s help. So I decide to keep looking.

Oz reports that he has found a Coercer. A Coercer autopiloting through lo-sec. What?! Who does that? A character less than a month old that’s who. Silly noobs. When will they ever learn, well maybe never, I should probably give him a lesson on what happens when you autopilot through lo-sec. Oz is tracking the ship and I move to intercept. I’m coming from a different side of the lo-sec chain but I have a good idea of where he’s going. After a dock up, the Coercer starts heading back, exactly the way he came. This is almost too easy. I know which gate he’s heading to next and warp to 10km of it, so I can pick up his ship. The autopilot is going to dump him 15km from the gate, which gives me plenty of time to lock him down and destroy him before he can reach it.

Sure enough he arrives. I haven’t bothered cloaking, he obviously isn’t going to notice a ship on his d-scan at this point. I have also aligned to the sun, I’m going to need to make a quick get away before the gate guns can chime in. My drones are already out and I lock the destroyer down. He never changes course, never speeds up, doesn’t do a thing but explode as my drones tear through the last of his structure. And it’s a good thing too! I’m at 14% armor at this point. I warp out and let Snow pick up the loot.

Oz and Snow feel guilty for killing a new player who obviously didn’t know what he was doing. Snow even scoops the 9.5 million isk worth of loot, AND FLIES IT BACK TO THE PILOT IN HI-SEC!!! Who does that?! Well it turns out in a quintessential sandbox moment, Snow was killed in lo-sec under fairly similar conditions a few years ago. The pilot who blew her up, returned her stuff to make the blow of losing a ship at that stage of the game a little easier to bare. She is now completing the circle and doing the same for someone else. Where else but Eve do you see this kind of thing happen?! I love it. Although I’m less a fan of giving up 10 million isk to make a player feel better but oh well.

I have a kill under my belt in the lo-sec chain, finally. It was cheesy and lame, but I won’t turn down an easy kill. Eve is a harsh place, and the only way to learn how to navigate through it is by learning lessons like these. Hopefully the pilot took something useful from the kill, although as Snow talked to him it seems like he was probably just being lazy more than anything. Either way I log off for the night to get some rest, excited to get back into it tomorrow.