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Thursday, December 8, 2011

Sleigh Bells Ringing

  Well it seems my last post got Bob's, god of wormholes, attention in a pretty good way. While I lost my shiny new Proteus thanks to being barely out of jump range...that seems to be a recurring theme for me...and now I am broke, there is always fun to be had. And of course, my ECM tengu is a beast that has survived a ridiculously long amount of time.

  The first episode in relieving my blue balls of loss and no blood comes in the form of late night studying. I stayed up all night last night working on a project that decides if I graduate college or not. Oh how I am hating design. Anyways, I logged in to tinker around with a few things and hear that one of our corpies is trying to pin down an Archon. Apparently I missed a whole shindig of facemelt as usual.

  Oddly enough, this Archon was hard to catch and evaded for about 25 minutes. I didn't really expect much, so I shipped into my shield laser Myrm. I really need to get some better dps ships into wspace. I alt tabbed out of Eve and continued to work on my project, just listening. Another corpie went in to combat probe him down, hoping to get him. Now, this is where we got a bit fuzzy.

  The new combat rules of aggression are still something we are ironing out. Thankfully, as long as you keep aggressing a target they stay physically in game so you can shoot them. No more logoffski-ing caps just to get away, although they can still SD. Aaaany time now CCP. Since none of us had aggressed him in a while, he could just log off and be safe. Which he decided it was time to do just that. Our scanner got a complete hit, warped in and tackled him. It was about a 1.5au warp from where the Archon had been previously and so it is tagging him was a bit easier.

  But many of those online were not in wspace, they were off killing some boring Orca or something. So the few of us that were there piled in and started up the hurt. For only a handful of us, it went rather quickly thanks to no active reps. If he had logged back in and started them up, we would have been SOL. As it was, though, we plinked away until the monstrosity tore apart into hull fragments. The pod e-warped, but a quick probe fixed that issue as well. Cheap clone, but the carrier itself was nice since it dropped a little faction.

  Now for the main course. The real cherry on the cake. I've talked about encounters with AHARM before yes? Of course I have, they usually are fun stories. It used to be that we ran into them in lower class systems from time to time in all sub cap fleets. We'd tussle and have it out. Well now when we run into them, things are a bit larger. In this case, they scanned our chain down, meeting us at a hole we had camped. Sadly, my little Daredevil is not an interceptor and while I had initial point and had tried to apply dps, he quickly ran out of the bubble and went home.

  They knew where we were and they knew some of what we had in our fleet. From what we saw, they were gearing up and soon had their own force on the move. It wasn't long before clash of the titans began. They had rolled up in a shield fleet, complete with a mass of Sleipnirs, Tengus, and Basi support. Two Step, part of our current CSM lineup, even showed up to say hi. I don't think they have ever used ECM in our fights, so that tends to be one of our advantages when we tangle. Naturally, I filled that role and it was quite the nail biter. Their first attack saw our forces trading blows rather equally, until I decided to call their Phantasm primary. I don't normally FC a fight, but I had stepped up and started the list.

  Then things got hairy. They kept bringing in more ships and their dps was getting insane. Since we were fighting at knife range, I couldn't begin kiting as usual and those of us that our logi couldn't save right away had to jump out. That's when a situation gets complicated in wspace. You have to be aware of when you jumped and how many times, if you're polarized and how that polarity will affect your own assistance in the fight. As ECM, my primary focus is jamming and surviving. I will not jump in knowing I will be polaritied unless I am confident reps can keep me up long enough.

  --I just noticed how long this is already. Post will continue in part 2--

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