This post is not about epeen stroking, but it does involve some. If you can see the different. I hope you do because I don’t. So anyways; the Vagabond-class Heavy Assault Cruiser. Last autumn I made a video of some solo work with the Vagabond, and frankly I haven’t really been using it ever since.
If you have seen this video then you will have noticed my fine taste for rock music.
If you have not seen it yet, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHpUYDvX9rM
If you don’t want to see it, I’ll describe what’s there to see: a rather unorthodoxed Vagabond fit. But more about that later, first: History with Judas!
For the last 7 years, all Vagabond fits have been pretty much the same and therefore rather obvious: your standard Nano bullshit, smack some Overdrives and/or Nanofibers on it, a MWD, Shield Extenders, Tracking Enhancers, pimp it out with some hardwires or Snake implants, top it off with a Skirmish fleet booster, and you got yourself the perfect gimpship that nobody wants to fight you and avoids you. Nobody likes fighting Vagabonds (or Cynabals for that matter). All you’ll get are Cyno Rookieships are taunts in local! One of the more offensive things ever said were calling me a “nanofag”. I made a petition and the Gamemaster said to take the necessary actions and investigations, then closed the ticket. (If you want to fly an interesting “nanofag” ship though, you’ll want a Nano Shield Legion with Pulse lasers. I’ve flown it and it is awesome!) The grand Nanonerf came, and the year 2008 or whatever introduced a new sort of Warp Scramble that would disable MWD’s (previous to this Warp Scrambles would not disable MWD, but merely had a +2 strength. Which is kinda cool but not really). And so the Vagabond’s glory faded even more.
But then something unforeseen happened. Odyssey launched in 2013, and after years of the Vagabond being a buffer kiter, it received a Shield Boost bonus. Nothing broke, but everything changed.
Instead of kiting like a fairy I bring it in a lot closer; going with a dual-propulsion configuration, a Warp Scrambler and an Ancillary Shieldbooster. With a 5 times 7.5% bonus to Shield Boost amount you can overload an X-Large ASB to boost 1482 HP per cycle. That is roughly 65% of the Vagabond’s entire Shield hitpoints. BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! /RonPopeil. I just happened to have a low-grade Crystal implant set lying around. Which will rep 88% of its total Shield hitpoints in one cycle. Or to put it differently, the normal X-Large ASB holds 9 charges, but a Crystal set gives the boost bonus that would be equivalent that of 14 charges.
I could have gotten a Highgrade set, but that would cause a 10% over-boosting its Shield capacity, which is wasted and frankly not worth the 3bil ISK.
Last week there were some little events that might not look like anything interesting on the killboard, but I want to highlight the backstory of them.
I had set sail for the lowsec regions of Lonetrek, Black Rise and The Forge, and along my way came Mara and Passari. I jumped in Mara and 20 KM from me was an Orca aligning out. Just him and me in local Mano-a-mano. I knew I couldn’t tank the gate’s sentry guns with this limited local tank so I had to come up with different approach that just ganking him.
I bumped the Jaysus out of him. When he was spinning around nearly 2km/s I agressed him and drew sentry fire. Then I warped to the closest celestial (which was 15 AU away!) and warped back to the gate he was at. My aggro timer was still in effect so now I could shoot him without the sentries bothering me (excellent game mechanics here CCP!).
But all went not well. The Orca lost his shield, then his armour, and slowly his hull. But then a Tengu jumped in local. My awesome tank couldn’t keep up with his more-awesome Missile spam and I died next to an Orca that had 20% hull left.
I jumped my Vagabond-less capsule out to highsec, and there too was the very same Orca, mocking me!! If the Tengu had agressed the Orca before me, he would have gotten sentry fire, and I believe I would have killed him. But alas.
I got a new Vagabond and the next day I went back to Aedald - Molden Heath. A few jumps from Aedald was a little dead-end pocket with 7 fine lads it them belonging to the same corp. They undocked all sorts of fancy ships looking tough. Obviously I wouldn’t fight all seven of them at once, but I wanted to test a few of them. After 10 minutes it went quiet except for one fellow that seemed to very eager showing off his Omen. The pilot was only 6 months old and my mind started theorycrafting resulting in a simple plan: a 6 months old character would likely not be a maxed skilled out Omen pilot. I wanted to draw the Omen away from the Station, melt him before reinforcements warp in, and be victor with at least one kill; if I could survive a 1v7 fight with one kill I’d be pleased.
I started cruising around the sun a little while, whilst the Omen, and now a Caracal too kept undocking and docking. Eventually the Caracal disappeared again, but the Omen warped to me at the sun. And indeed he was no match for me, but meanwhile the Caracal appeared on d-scan again. Just when the Omen blew up the Caracal landed. Killed him too when a Scythe Fleet Issue appeared. I had a short brawl with the Scythe Fleet Issue and got him to low shields when also a Omen Navy Issue popped on d-scan. I started to run out of cap charges for my ASB so I decided to bail from the fight. When I was in warp two Drakes were on my scanner too.
Here is a picture after fighting a 800 DPS Ishtar.
