Wednesday, April 28, 2010

EVE on a different gear, redux

After making the decision to go back to my real-life buddies' alliance - I mentioned 5 in my last post but it's more like 7 or 8 - I was thinking things would be very quiet the way they always were at AMC, but I was surprised to find a bit more action than there used to be on the various channels, and as Letrange had told me the combat wing is kind of on the small side, but willing to go out and find stuff to kill at a moment's notice. The wing is made up of players ranging from industrialists finally coming around to training PvP skills, both in-game and practical, to veterans even more skilled than I am. And I'm really comfortable with the knowledge that if push comes to shove, the other industrialists of AMC can flip a switch and turn from carebear to kodiak in an instant. Carebear tears these guys do not shed. I would even go so far as openly inviting a third bunch of clowns to come setup a POS in our Grotto wormhole system, just so we can practice our eviction tactics!

So as I mentioned in my last post, the Welcome Back party was tons of fun, with 2 battleship kills and a Phobos for good measure. But in case you didn't know, the Bhaalgorn is a force to be reckoned with; when that ship showed up at the gate the fight was on our little Jihad gang started popping real quick. But go down fighting we did, and 81% efficiency is something to be proud of. And to all the people dissing the Claw interceptor, go back to the previous blog post, click the battle summary link, and check who did top damage on the Dominix... yeah baby! I didn't do much after that because I had to get downtown for the Montreal pilots' meet, but when I got back I went on a shopping spree and made use of the newly fitted Orca to haul an entire fleet of disposable ships, as well as a few interceptors and assault frigs for good measure. My bigger ships will be added to my hangar when they get delivered from that POS in Providence, though I do have one of my VagaCanes, because I do want to take a slightly more serious gang out than a Jihad in the near future.

Sunday started out really relaxed, with a blog update, the fitting of Rifters and Stabbers and Thoraxes (oh my!), and a clone jump to get out of my implants because I planned more mayhem; yes, the WB party op was done with +4s in my head... silly me :) At least I rarely get podded so all is good, I didn't have to replace them. The first op was run by my buddy Havegun and had a smaller fleet composition than the previous day's and after finding the Heimatar/Metropolis Low-sec to be very quiet we decided to head towards Caldari space. It didn't take long to find trouble because a few systems were full of people, probably on Faction Warfare ops, and even some carriers were out and about. We went through that real quickly in search of easier targets, and were soon joined on a gate by a pirate Dramiel. When the fastest ship in fleet is a Stabber, you will not catch that thing. But he did his job perfectly as he lead us away from the gate and two HAM-fit Drakes landed on us and killed our T1 stuff in no time flat. Lesson learned: do no engage a Dramiel unless flying one yourself!

Havegun had to leave the game for Real Life stuff so we took a break (it was also supper time in Montreal), but I then took control of the small fleet and had another pilot join us, Montrealer Uozag who is also new to The PvP. I decided to take a different route than Havegun to go on a Tour de Molden Heath. This didn't pan out too well though because there were even less people out in space, and all the -10s were staying docked and not falling for my noob ratter tactic; maybe having Clown Punchers as one of my previous employers is not helping in that regard! Anyway, after getting to the far end of Molden Heath I get everyone's approval to go to Great Wildlands, where at least we can shoot at anything and anybody. And we didn't have to go far to find a target. As one of my guys has to drop fleet and heads home he scouts 2 pirates camping the Teonusude gate in Bosena, but has he is saying this on comms a neutral Myrmidon appears in our midst, clearly on autopilot! The slight distraction of the scout report was enough to make us fumble the bumping attempt and the Myrm was able to jump to safety, for now. Seeing that there is traffic I thought maybe it would be a good idea to camp here a bit... and that was a good idea because the Myrm jumped right back in! We made short work of him but one of his buddies arrived in a neuting active-tank Dominix. There was no way our small gang was going to break his tank, and he started popping one cruiser after another, so GTFO was called, which allowed 2 cruisers to survive. But the Myrm.... dammit man, just look at that fit !!! If you do not see the fail in this fit you need to give me all your stuff and uninstall the client.

I spent the rest of the evening just tooling around, checked out the changes in LCSC's corp hangar since the time I left last fall (had to pick my jaw off the floor there!), and as Let mentioned I helped him get rid of some Amarr Navy NPC from that ever-so-nasty mission. All in all a most excellent day. I had missed flying Stabbers, but I did miss the punch of either the Cane or the Vaga. But no worries, it is looking like the very small AMC combat wing is getting back into the swing of things, and unlike what we did at the start of Apocrypha, when we were getting into wormholes and moving stuff all over New Eden, we will keep training from our base in Empire, and try to get a few more members each time we go out, and maybe even recruit a bit. Yes even carebear alliances can be a lot of fun when you put the effort at the right place.

Fly safe? Never!

o7

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