On Small Scale PVP

[this is a post I wrote on our corp forums after someone asked something about solo/small scale PVP, because he was a fleet-kinda-guy himself]

Small scale PVP is a lot harder because you’ve got to make your own decisions in combat, you can’t rely on a FC to tell you what to do. And even though small skirmish fleets can still have an FC, you still need to use your own flight skills and decision-making-abilities to make it through.

There’s basically 3 types of engagements in EVE PVP.
1. Ganks, one or two targets, easily outgunned and outtanked (often PvE targets?)
2. Gangs, be it small or big.
3. Blobs.

Point 1 and 3 speak for themselves. Point 1 is warp in and kill, solo or not. Point 3, blobs, you generally don’t want to fight this, with a few exceptions if you’re elite n shit, make pick off a few targets and GTFO before they get you (tis fun I tell you!). Fighting other smallish gangs is where it is at. And with the current state or EVE, you’ll still be outnumbered easily. So if you’re outgunned, you gotta outwit them: meta-gaming. That MWD will get you in or out a lot faster, but an AB will keep you going when you’re being scrammed by that Frig. What if you fit both? Jump in a Slave set or Snake set to exploit your ships strengths.

YAY OR NAY!

Again, in small scale PVP you’ve got to make your own decisions, and you need to base those decisions on your EVE knowledge. You’ve played EVE long enough to know what ship does what, and how efficient they can be, and what their weakness is. But you’ve got to apply that knowledge literally in a smaller scale.
In a fleet fight, a bounce of Zealots can rip through a Rapier in seconds, but when there’s only 3 of you, or maybe solo, a Rapier can cause some danger.
If an enemy gang had either a Falcon or a Blackbird with them, which would you rather fight? Maybe the Blackbird because it’s got a terrible tank, and relative low ECM strength bonus. Or the Falcon, because it’s got no ECM range bonus so you could kite the battle? Are you agile and fast enough to kite a battle? Or do you have an ECCM and go in balls deep? Maybe set drones on it while you’re being jammed.
Solo PVP and small scale PVP is about making instant decisions.  Know what you are capable of, and what not, and know what your enemy is capable of and what exactly not.

INTERNET SPACESHIPS!

Personally I’ve always preferred buffer fits, and nano/shield to be more specific. I’ve done most my EVE carreer as a lowsec PVPer, and I believe this is where you can really exploit the small scale meta gaming to a full extent. That means 500m fits on a 200m shiphull, 4b pods and T3 boost alts, yes, but it pays off if you know how to use these tools.
Again, preferable fits are buffer, and relative easy to fit. Rule of thumb is gank n tank. Get as much damage out of your ship while keeping a stable amount of EHP. But buffer and active tank both got their up’s and downs.
Buffer is nice but you’ve got to kill your enemy before they kill you, but you can generally focus more on DPS, especially when shield tanks.
Active tanking can be very efficient if you pick your targets correctly, but once they out-DPS your tank you’ll be done very soon. The only thing with active tanking is that you’re rather limited to certain ships with a specific tank bonus, ie Myrmidon or Cyclone, as cheap examples. (anyone did Marauder PVP yet?)

“PRIMARY IS … AS SOON AS HE DECLOAKS …” (actual Mr Digs EXE FC quote)

Hard to say anything sensible about this. Many people have writing excellent guide lines when to primary what when, and which above others. But in a small scale you’ve got to take advantage of what’s there. Yeah you could go for that Keres that’s got you pointed and kiting you at 30km, but you could also melt the Caracal being scram range right next to you. Make wipe out a couple of squishy Destroyers first before taking on the BC. Or if you can gather enough DPS, you might want to take out the 3-months old BS pilot first before taking on the Navy Cruiser flying around it?

LOLZ OMG PWND FAILZ LOLS

The best small scale skirmish PVP happen when you’re flying in your gang of bros and you don’t even need to tell each other what to do, because you all act on our own towards the same thing. You ask “we gonna take this fight?”. If the answer is Yes, and the fight happens and hopefully win without the need of coordinating anything, because you know what your wingmen are flying, and you know their capabilities, and they know yours.
And frankly, sometimes you just gotta take some risks. Last week I flew my solo Afterburner Vagabond into 3 AFs at zero, knowing well they could really hurt me, only to find out a 4th warped in, and a Falcon decloaked! I killed 1 AF before all the others ran away with the Falcon in deep armor.
And I’ve used this example countless times, but my best wingman was Kubiq, and him and me would take on 2 v 12 without voice comms, we’d just type primaries in chat, nothing more, and get out with 10 kills. I knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew exactly what I was doing. We knew what we could, and more importantly, what we could not.
We would fly two Curses with a 48km point range and 40km neut range taking on everything from small to big. And later on we’d fly Machariels against literally everything.

On Nanofags

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.

Now I just need to lose this Vagabond, because my next HAC will be a Deimos to try out. Which I’ve not actually ever flown in the past 7 years.

[VIDEO] Black Ops Providence

And here we are. Like I said earlier, Blops don't make very exciting material to watch, it are just ganking with hardly any movement, but here we go:

Black Ops Part 5 (THE DOWNFALL)

This weekend had its ups and its down. Its laugh and its cry. Thankfully, mostly laughs.

When we started Blopsing in Providence last November, kills were up for grasps, we were roaming the systems and pockets uncontrolled, no intervening, no counter-gangs or counter-drops. I think this was due the Halloween-war in that time, that the CVA and its allies simply couldn’t be bothered forming fleets. I may be wrong here, I don’t know.

Either way, things have changed since November. Most constellation entries and exits are being watched by gatecamps, mostly Interceptors - a god damn load of Interceptors.

Friday didn’t go so well. We killed an Abaddon-battleship but after that we lost two Cyno Tech-3’s under 30 minutes to gatecamps... So we kinda gave up on Blops for that evening. We decided to grab some Tech-1 Frigates and roam Minmatar FW lowsec for the next hour. We lost some Frigs, and we killed some Frigs and Dessies. Fun was had.

RAINBOW KESTREL FTW

Saturday was better. We got our Loki’s back set sail for Providence again. But this time we took a slightly different approach. From our normal Lowsec base we can only cover the north half of Providence, so we decided to go deep and set up a midcyno point in Catch, an adjunct Region that would cover the entire Providence. And with great success. The southeren pockets are much lesser watched by defense fleets and alike, and we didn’t run in any trouble. Our Blops sank six Battleships, a Battlecruiser and an Exhumer, and to top it off a Tengu and a Golem. Not a bad catch for the evening at all.

We decided to keep our alts in Providence and return tomorrow.

Sunday was rather interesting.

About an hour after downtime we returned to our Midpoint and continued hunting. The first system I got into we got a Rattlesnake and a Dominix sitting together in an Anom. There was an amusing detail here because when I jumped into system they were reporting me in local.

Brikulis > ze Underking ship type??

Halcona Motsu > nv

oskars > meh just kill him if he is causing any problem

A minute later he lost his Dominix and his Rattlesnake.

They spend a couple of minutes spamming Defense Fleets in local and getting Interceptors together and what not, but with no avail, except for the common local bragging and flaming.

Later on we got another Battleship kill, but after this one our little adventure took a turn for the worse.

Karashur had found yet another Dominix sitting in an Anom, like any other Dominix we would hotdrop. Except this one had a Cyno fitted. Not much to comment here; Cyno went up, local spiked, Panthers got bubbled. I had about 3 seconds left on my Micro Jump Drive cycle to finish and I would have gotten out, but just then I got shortpointed and got stuck. Two Panthers and two Pods down.

Nevertheless, we had a great weekend and we will surely return again. I’m not really bothered about the Panther loss, the 1.5B ISK loss is rather slim compared to the damage it has caused over the months and years.

Onwards to the next Executive Outcome campaign!

PS, I got most kills (and loss) Frapsed this time and I’ll try to get a new video together. Unfortunately, Blops don’t make very exciting video material, but we shall see.  

Black Ops Part 4

We’ve been deployed in Fountain for a few weeks now, so I haven’t done any Black Ops pew pew since then. I only do Blops in between campaign ‘downtimes’ as we call them. I still operate in Providence, which is a fair distance from our home in Cloud Ring, so we use jumpclones to get around.

The last Blops post was about the risks and chances of Blopsing, both in groups and solo. Interesting enough, a few days after that post we got some interesting encounters. I’m not going to summarise every kill, but there are 3 engagements I’d like to highlight.

I had Vargur and Dominix on scan in the same anomaly. Local was considerable high with 20 guys. I report them on TS and my mind starts spinning making all sorts of calculations and mostly assumptions. To warp to the anomaly anyway to at least have a looksie at them: Dominix and Vargur (in Bastion mode!) are 10km from me, not moving. The call is made and Cyno goes up. Dominix primaried and dies quick enough. I decided to shoot the Dominix first because I hoped the Vargur would disable his Bastion mode meanwhile (in order to run!), and having Bastion disabled would cripple his tank enormous. And this is exactly what happens, they both died: http://judasii.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22172148

Now if you look at the killreport very closely, you see that my Loki died five minutes after the Vargur’s pod! That was due a terrible mistake on my own side. When the Battleships died, local already went up and Interceptors appeared on D-scan. We were too far from the wrecks to burn around and grab it, so we just warped off with all haste. I kept the anomaly on D-scan to see what would happen to it because I really wanted the loot after checking the killmails.

All was clear for a few minutes so I decided to be bold and warp the Loki back and grab it. Just that very moment an Inty warped in and got me… Rotten bit of luck. Funny enough, the Blops also got on the Loki lossmail due our Smartbombs getting the Battleship pods. I’m not sure whether that’s a good or bad thing.

Two days later we get a second chance: Bastion Golem running an anomaly. This guy was TOUGH. With two Panthers we were punching 2k DPS in his face and he didn’t flint. He was clever enough to keep his Bastion up and I reckon he was overheating everything he had because he was tanking like a mother! We kept hammering for a few minutes (which is waaay too long for a Blops drop) and eventually he turned off his Bastion. His tank then finally collapsed and went down: http://judasii.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22219985

By then local spiked, Interceptors and Cruisers were on short scan and again we had to run and leave the loot. This time I didn’t go back. Lesson learned, but missing Marauder loot two times in a row kinda sucks.

My wingmen had already jumpcloned back home to Cloud Ring because we were going on the new campaign the next day, but I decided to stay in Providence that last evening. And I’m glad I did because I managed to solo a Megathron.

He was fitted to boot spending 6 lowslots on his armor tank! Unfortunately for him, he didn’t plug his Explosives hole, nor extra buffer. So my Fusion charges ripped through that rather quickly... http://judasii.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22232879

Later I checked the recorded combatlog. The time spend from uncloaking the Loki for tackle, until warping the Panther and Loki out and cloaking up again took less than 60 seconds. If you want hit-and-run skirmishes, I don’t think it gets much better than this. The wreck was looted and I was gone again by the time people had time to read their intel! I kept the Loki cloaked in local for my own amusement as I saw swarms of Interceptors jumping in and out of local and warping around anomalies.

OBVIOUSLY I didn’t Frapsed any of this, not even a single screenshot. :-(

Video: Let's not Play: EVE Online

Oh yeah, made this the other day. Figured I'd throw it in here. Have fun. o7

Pics or it didn't happen!

And now for something completely different. This post is going to be rather non-EVE related. As a matter of fact, it won’t be EVE related at all.

Last two week I’ve been very excited about my (still nameless…) new fan fiction. (See previous blog post!)

One of the first comments on my previous story was that it would be great to see this visualised. People were throwing in ideas about making videos, and illustrations and what not. Great!

But, well, videos is a tough one. I make EVE videos, but they’re PvP recordings. The fan fic story mostly involves characters, and not so much EVE ships. I can make a video of a dude walking up and down the balcony in the Captain’s Quarters, but that, needless to say, won’t do.

Now illustrations is a different thing. People may not know but I’ve got some experience with graphical designing like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, but another thing (even less people know this!) is that I also do oil painting. So to cut things short; I’m going to paint illustrations for my next fan fic.

Here is one example. Without too much spoilery; here’s a scene with 2 characters sitting at a booth table of a smoky lounge bar making all sorts of dubious deals, as one of them hands of a Neopad to the other. What I tried to achieve here is the light of the Neopad shining in their faces in the middle of a dark room.

I started with this little sketch I made while at work, literally a 30 seconds thing. All it does is make a concept of the visualisation of my imagination. It gives it a basic object layout of the canvas.

Secondly, put those shapes on the canvas, still very basic, throw some colours in there that I want to use and set the mood.

Add some stuff.

And some more. And result.

Hope you like it!