Double Kill!

Shameless Unreal Tournament reference? Check.

I went home for the weekend and it was relaxing and great, but the whole time I was really itching to get back in the pod and go hunting. A lot has happened over the course of the week in-game, but I’ll get into more of that in the next Announcements thread I publish. For now it’s time to recap a great roam Azx and I went on last night.

Things started off the way they typically do on our roams. We met up at our favorite staging area in our Crucifier and Merlin and started cruising through some lo-sec systems looking for prey. Prey needs some context though, since it changes with every fleet composition you play. For us we were looking primarily for other frigates, or heavily turret based cruisers. This fleet has already taken down an Omen and I would very much like to see it run up against a Rupture or Thorax. While the blood lust draws us out time and again, we’re also out tonight to make some money. Clone pirates are top on our priority list, making us a cool million just for popping them and dropping some tags worth a few more in the process. But tonight things are dull. The belts seem empty and we come across system after system of pilots napping in stations.

After about an hour we’re starting to lose our focus and energy levels drop. We haven’t found any clones and the pvp targets are just as scarce. Finally we warp in to a backwater system and find a Magnate on scan. Magnates are not known for their military prowess so my guess is this guy is looking for data and relic sites. Ok well that and the fact that there are a bunch of core probes on my scanner suggest that. We buzz around the system trying to figure out where he might be. I launch a set of probes myself as I narrow in on which signature I think he’s working on. That’s the great thing about this fleet, my Crucifier has an empty high slot that we can fit a probe launcher into for just this sort of occasion. I get a hit in 2 scans and I’m off to see if I can catch me a hacker!

Sure enough the Magnate is hacking a can and I somehow managed to land within 3 km of him! I fire up the old warp disruptor and launch my probes while calling in Azx for support. The Magnate decides he’s not interested and warps away. Which is annoying, since I know I had a solid lock and disrupted him. Lame warp core stabilizers. Oddly enough the pilot of the Magnate deems his stellar performance worthy of mocking me in local. “You gotta be faster than that kiddo.” Something about being called kiddo by a guy flying a Magnate is…insulting to say the least. Luckily my quick wit came to the rescue! “Don’t know how much faster I could have been, seeing as how you were locked and pointed. Not much I can do about warp stabs.”

Good one Vult.

The hunt continues with us coincidentally following the Magnate through a few systems. We manage to find a clone so at least the trip has yielded some income. But just when we were about to give up hope, we find a Retribution ratting in a system all by his lonesome. A quick d-scan sweep and Azx is in warp to a likely belt and sure enough lands on our target! The fight is on and I punch the warp button to lend a hand. Azx’s tank is robust to say the least, but the Retribution is a tough nut to crack and can dish out a good deal of dps as well. I land about 20 km from the fight, lock the target and engage my tracking disruptors which immediately reduces the amount of damage Azx takes. But there’s little time to congratulate each other as another pilot enters the fray. A pilot from the same corp showed up on local as soon as we engaged the Retribution and sure enough an Incursus lands on our belt just as we finish taking down the first pilot. There’s not much he can do, the fit is a sad one, and he’s horribly out matched by our drones, tracking disruptors, and the Merlin’s tank-of-doom. He pops as well and the celebrating really begins! Retribution Kill, Incursus Kill, make sure to check out the killboard regularly! It should be heating up in the very near future.

Sorry guys don’t know why my mic still isn’t coming through on the videos, they definitely export with my banter!

A double kill to finish off what started as a horribly slow roam! Not too shabby. The loot is lackluster, but the kill mails are worth more than all the ships involved combined anyway. We haul the loot out and call it a night. Poor Azx always playing so late just to roam with me! Certainly appreciated, was a great way to spend a Sunday evening!

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!

Prosperity In Lo-Sec

It’s been an interesting few days for me. Our HQ system has been really quiet. No ore sites, no data, no relics, a few anomalies but I’m not really supposed to be running those alone. So what’s left to do? Roam in lo-sec that’s what! And it was very interesting what I found there. I dare say the last few days I’ve spent in lo-sec have almost made me want to relocate there permanently.

To start things off, yesterday I had some crazy luck and managed to find three of the new security status rats in my lo-sec chain. They dropped a cool 120 million isk for me which more than would have funded the ship I was hunting with that day. Now overall farming those rats is a lot more time consuming and you generally don’t end up with nearly that kind of cash. But for whatever reason I’ve been doing pretty well with it so far.

I’ve managed to get into a couple scrapes here and there, but never anything serious. I usually just get my Oracle into the sides of a gate camp which is fun, but not entirely productive usually. I like to think I’m doing anyone else who has to pass through the area a favor but who knows. The FW systems are interesting. Lot of people moving around quite a bit, but they seem to be very timid. Just today I warped into a small outpost with a Punisher. I found a Rifter in the plex, and he immediately warped off. WTF MinMatar?! I thought you guys had a little more backbone than that? It’s a classic duel the Punisher vs. the Rifter!

Well after messing around in FW for a while, Azx logs on today. As usual we have little to do and decide to grab some small ships and find trouble. I decide to buy a Retribution and fit a 10mn afterburner to it and see how it goes. The idea being you can scramble someone thus killing their MWD propulsion while maintaining your AB propulsion. It seems to work alright, I think it would do much better against turret boats of small caliber. It seems to have some trouble trying to hold it’s orbit with that over-sized afterburner.

Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’

Anyway we zip into one of our favorite lo-sec chains and start hunting. We ended up in some backwater system with a faction Osprey. We see he has logistic cruiser friend, but when we end up more or less on top of him in a belt we decide to give it a shot. We just want to get in a fight really, winning is just a nice bonus. I lock the cruiser down and open fire.

The fight was weird. He didn’t have a web which led to a very long fight. He eventually beat us, although I managed to escape while Azx killed his MWD. Azx’s Merlin turned out to be an absurdly tanked little vessel. With two of the ancillary shield boosters, he managed to tank the enemy’s damage with almost no effort at all. Well at least until he had to reload the repper’s charges. We knew we weren’t going to win but at least we got to shoot at something. Azx zipped back to our hi-sec base to get a new ship while I kept hunting.

Eventually we found a fight and a half. A Rupture was in a belt by himself ratting. We decided to give him a real challenge, those little rat ships were never going to give him a proper fight. Things started a little rocky. Neither of us were used to flying these ships yet and we ended up overshooting our target a number of times. Azx blasted by the cruiser and went out of range of his scrambler just as I came into range after overshooting him myself. From the outside it may have looked like some really fancy flying, but we actually were just spamming the approach and orbit buttons praying to Bob that the Rupture didn’t flee.

Death of a Rupture

But as it turned out he was just as interested in a fight as we were. And a hell of a fight it was. I even managed to get a video of it, well most of it. I’m still not used to hitting the record button before a fight like that! I’m still working on uploading it as the file is quite large, but stay tuned on that front. Anyway the fight was brutal. I ended up with about 17% of my structure left before the MinMatar bastard finally exploded. It was pretty epic if I do say so myself. We exchanged GFs in local and Azx bolted with what loot we could grab. Finally a decent fight to get the blood pumping again!

Anything For An Easy Isk

I ended up getting out of bed super early this morning. As I not so patiently wait for the server to come back online, I guess it’s as good a time as any to write another post!

Around lunch time the other day, while sitting at my desk in my office, my phone started buzzing with the ferocity of an angry hornet’s nest. The corp was off of work already, those damn Europeans, and gabbing away about what to do on Eve or other group computer games we play from time to time. This obviously did not bode well for my productivity as I immediately began to scour my favorite Eve blogs and other websites to satisfy my Eve lust.

Two frigates looking for a fight!

Azx then sends me a message saying he has two friends who are thinking of joining the corp and want to get into some more pvp. They were thinking of putting together a small lo-sec roam and look for trouble that night. My mouth practically started watering. This of course made the rest of my workday drag on impossibly long. Five more hours until I can log in and pew pew!? How am I to survive?

But survive I did and I raced home on the not so cooperative subway to meet up with the gang. Sadly by the time I did get home, Azx’s friends were asleep. Luckily for me Azx is a bit of an insomniac and he was down for getting into trouble. So I grabbed a pvp fit Punisher and off we went. We spent hours looking for targets, and we found quite a few. The Chej and Fensi chain of lo-sec systems offers pretty good 1v1 or small gang pvp to those that are patient enough to look for it. Just watch out for Ami. The system is a chokepoint between Amarr and the rest of that chain and gets camped A LOT!

We spent a lot of time trying to scan down lone targets, but the prey was too wary and we never managed to nab one. We also found the most terrifying corp name to date (see image below). We did manage to kill a new rate who dropped a recruiter tag worth 25 million, which I won’t lie, was pretty sweet. During our flight though the conversation turned to a dark subject. Azx had recently heard of a pilot who was using a Scythe to gank mission runners. He was interested in giving it a try, and I told him I would be more than happy to help him scan down the mission sites while he engages the targets. It’s a profession almost as old as Eve itself and it works a little like this…

Basically it operates under a few assumptions. The first, that mission runners typically fly pimped out ships often with deadspace or faction modules fitted to them. You’re flying level 4 missions after all, you need to be able to tank a good amount of damage. The second assumption is that mission running ships are slow as shit and use big ass fucking guns. All of this leads to a ship that is very vulnerable against nueting speed tank ships.

Do not mess with this guy…

But Vult, how can you attack a ship that’s in hi-sec without getting CONCORD’s attention? That’s easy, you get the mission running ship to fire the first shot. There is a huge number of characters in the game that do nothing but fly missions int he relative safety of hi-sec. A lot of these players don’t even understand how pvp works, or how kill rights work. As a result you can easily trick a lot of players, in very expensive ships mind you, into attacking you thus giving you the CONCORD seal of approval to blast them to tiny bits.

Little known fact in New Eden, IT IS NOT ILLEGAL TO SALVAGE A WRECK. If you loot it, if you open the container inside it and take something, that is illegal and the player who owns that wreck can fire on you. But salvaging the wreck itself is perfectly fine. I don’t understand the distinction from CONCORD’s perspective but whatever, it works to my advantage. So basically the idea is warp into a mission someone else is running. Target and salvage a wreck or even steal something from the wreck so you start blinking with a suspect timer. This WILL piss off the guy who just spent all that time killing the mission rats. He then shoots at you, which means you can shoot back. So long as you’re in a speed tanked ship with missiles or drones for damage, you’re going to be in good shape against that slow ass battleship. The rewards are you get enormous amounts of faction modules to sell!

So Azx and I are currently planning on giving this a shot to see what happens. It’s a relatively small investment and the rewards could be absurd. It’s not the most honest form of work, but honestly with the loot we could get from this, we just can’t pass it up. Damn! I’m done writing, but looks like it’s an extended downtime today so no early morning spaceships for me. Off to another long day at the office dreaming of Eve 😦