Just a Quickie

This has very little to do with this post.

Just a brief post to get my position down.

I stumbled upon Twilight Souls’ (Surely You’re Joking) C5.  After a few days of scouting them out, something terrible happens.  I’m jumping my bomber and scanner through a WH on the way back to the base C5 and as I jump my bomber through a wormhole it collapses instantly, leaving my scanner trapped on the other side. So now I am without probes in Surely You’re Joking’s C5.

What I do have is:
Max DPS fit Hound with target painter
4 EM bombs
200 torps
A bit of nanite paste

I can only catch them in non probable sites now, so my options:
Self destruct and get nothing. NOT HAPPENING!
Use my four bombs to disrupt their isk.  I’m just not sure if they are enough bombs to break their spirits.  I assume they have a decent stockpile as they are a well established WH alliance.

Final option, I noticed last time they awakened a sleeper site they left their noctis salvaging with only a devoter and various covert ops frigs for protection.  I could make just one large attack and attempt to kill the noctis next time it comes out before they kill me.

Mental……exhaustion….must….persevere

So someone once said wormholes are like chess.  Well chess is freaking exhausting!  It has been quite the exhausting experience trying to figure out the habits of wormhole space.  The decision to jump or not to jump alone can be mind racking.  Without an alt I don’t know how I’d do it.  Two sets of eyes makes wormhole movement and keeping tabs infinitely easier.  So I don’t day this enough (mostly because she doesn’t pvp) but, thank you (nameless) alt. *vomit*

Anyways, some may have noticed that I ave abandoned the previous wormhole I was in.  I just couldn’t stand playing a game where I relied on people I don’t know to log on.  Yeah I wandered through neighboring holes but in the back of my mind, I knew they could cut off my return at any moment, so straying to far was just out of the question.  This made life very VERY dull, mostly due to the fact that the target corp hid in their POS for over a week.  I mean seriously?  I’m one bomber, man up and give me a challenge!

While it probably wasn’t long before they tried to rat again (I guessed a week or so) I just couldn’t take the wait, even if I could have tried to ransom their serene ratting experience for a pretty price.  I wanted nothing more to do with the paranoia that they were all actually just on alt characters having a good ole time laughing at my expense (yes this thought seriously crossed my mind… twice).  So I set off once more in search of the treasure’s that hid deep within the depths of womhole space, but not before ninja’ing on this:

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=24184441

And to the loki and sabre pilot, you guys are full of fail.  You saw the orca leave into hi sec, and what’s the first thing you do? put a bouble up in the wormhole.  there were still people in system, obviously they would warn their orca pilot.  But thankfully you took it down and cloaked up.  Of coarse this didn’t stop you from attacking everything that came through and while this gave me a kill I find it very ballsy as anything that came through could very easily go back out into the safety of hi sec, bombers are paper thin soooo, gf gf.  I dunno, maybe it’s just me but, camping a hi sec wormhole exit just seems silly unless you got mondo super wamadyne alpha strike mode.

Moving on I stumble into a wormhole with a pilot just chilling in his pos.  So I start the research.  Now some of you know who this pilot is and why I have been logging off in his wormhole for the last week.  He is very good at losing some very expensive defenseless ships.  I’ll just leave it at that for now.  So fortunately this corp is tiny, and i mean on the scale where I am beginning to think it’s no more then 3 people with a bunch of alts so they are no real threat to surprise attacks and no real threat to closing up the wormhole entrance either, allowing me to roam farther and still make home in time for supper.

Anyways, not to bore you with the mundane details of waiting for some guy to do this thing that would result in the loss of a whatchmacallit, I did have a little fun with some “locals”.  We’ll start with the failure first as I like to end on a good note.

Puttering around I happened across a customs office (I believe they are referred to as POCCO’s?) bash by some Germans (just sayin, they were German) in 2x Oracle, Ishtar, and Gila.  Not exactly something my little bomber can take.  So I decide to wait til the office explodes and snag the one Oracle using Beam (long range?) lazorz.  Based on no kill mail link… I missed.  Not to worry, they went at it again on a second one.  So this time I line myself up between the Oracle and his pos and wait….and wait….. and wait.  Yeah, watching people bash a customs office with 4 ships sucks.  They actually traded the gila for a sebo’d sacrilege at the beginning (I assume because of me but I don’t know what this would accomplish) but later decided they wanted their dps back and brought back the Gila.  About an hour later (you guys are lucky, I’m skipping the amazing details of this hour for you) the job is done and they start moving… but only the oracle’s.  They leave behind the Gila and Ishtar as the other two warp out one by one.  At this point I don’t know if they are genius or just not paying attention but either way my chance is gone so it’s time to move on but not before I give them a piece of my mind!  After all they denied me my Oracle kill so while they were out setting up their new customs office’s I told them how I really felt:

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=24279376

Later I pop into the neighbor wormhole since my residential one is dead and because this neighbor has a hi sec entrance, so possibly more traffic as it’s 5 jumps from Hek.  I see a Tayra zipping around so figure I’d have a look.  The Tayra becomes a Heron and after a little nosing around in my home base the Heron returns and morphs into a beautiful Retriever and is joined by… guess what? Another retriever!  Followed by it’s alt the Myrm -_-  Oh well the Myrm is only 5 months old, whats the worst that could happen?

Well what did happen was retriever #1 went to the ore site while retriever # 2 finished up his fit at the pos.  So with my alt on POS waiting for the retriever # 2 to warp (one of the many reasons the alt is useful as I only have one point I need to kill the first before the second lands), I sat very still in the tall grass (ok, I was hiding behind a rock).  Soon as the alt reported that Retriever # 2 was in warp to ore site I sprung from behind the rock and pounce on my prey!
One volley! most shields down
Two volley’s! armor down
Second retriever lands and I start approaching that one!
Volley number three downs the first retriever and the point is quickly swapped!
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=24284086
Another three volleys let loose and the second retriever goes down!
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=24284085
Plus the pod!
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=24284084
The Myrm for some reason never leaving the pos, I guess he forgot he was dual boxing, lol.

I scoop the corpse and get a report from the alt that Retriever pilot # 1 has swapped to a drake.  Now normally I wouldn’t do this, but the guy was only a few months old so I was curious.  I let the drake land and I start this fight over 30km just to be safe.  Turns out I was right in doing so because 3 HAM volleys (and a target painter or two) later and my paper plane is in armor.  So I warp out of there and give a GF in local.  Thanks again Mr. Greenberg for coming back and giving a fight. (and thanks for being my drake guinea pig 🙂

Operation ‘Triple H’ (A.K.A. Suck It!)

Yesterday I was able to commence operation ‘Triple H’ (Holding Holes Hostage) and successfully  (mostly) completed steps 1 and 2.

Step 1:  find a hole and sneak in.  (done with one minor SNAFU)

Step 2: Make an entrance.

So I started off the day in a C2 I had found a few days ago.  It didn’t hold too much promise as it was owned by Russians whom are way out of my TZ but I decided to hang around anyway since it had a static C4 and Hi Sec hole.  When I logged in, something jumped out at me on Dscan instantly, additional ships on scan.  The ones that grabbed my interest the most were a Retriever and an Orca.  I finally thought my 2 weeks of searching had paid off!  This was, of coarse, before I knew that Orcas could give mining bonus’ from INSIDE the POS shield.  WTF is that, huh!?  It’s got a slot layout, it can do stuff.  Get that punk out of your POS!

Well, not to let the day go to waist, I set about finding the Retriever.  Lucky for me, the ore sites did not require probing 🙂  Get my warp in point, in this case a rock and BOOM!

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=24121859

But it wasn’t enough, I wanted MOAR!

So after watching the Retriever pilot reship to a blaster ferox (no thanks) and then a Tengu (Noped!) I continued into the neighboring worm hole. Empty and one exit 😦 Next hole over also empty with two exits.  Now at first I did not want to stray to far from my current location since it offered me people passing through, care bears and an active alternative timezone for weekends but I decided to try these two holes out anyways.  First hole was once again deserted and I had all but given up hope for the day but the second hole I entered had 2 command ships in POS’ and they were currently piloted.  Finally was looking like I found some activity!  After about 30 minutes of watching while doing some background checks more ships started to show up.  Two Orcas, a Moros, and a Phobos.  Crap! I remember this trick.  First they close the null sec exit, then they close the lo sec exit, And before moving on to the final hi sec exit they put their eyes on MY exit.  Well, now i figured I had two choices, burn back to my old hole too keep playing around in it for a while or wait and see.  I chose patience (not my strongest virtue).

All holes now closed up, I could only imagine they were planning something big in their new C5 sanctuary.  One Moros became two Morii(?), joined by an Archon and a Huggin.  Well well, looks like someone is trying to wake people up from their nap times 🙂 The fleet moves out and I follow.  Now for the part I am least fond of.  If there is one thing even more boring then PVE, it’s watching people PVE.  So I move my bomber into a position 40 km off the wreck ball they so conveniently are making with their tractor unit so that it is between me and a multitude of celestials.  What feels like an eternity goes by but finally (two beers later :/) the sleepers are gone.

Now earlier I mentioned a SNAFU, well I got DC’d at some point during their mission.  At the time I wasn’t in the mission I was monitoring the POS and the Eos/Sleipner orbiting it providing links.  For some reason I logged back in still sitting at the POS…. awkward …. Honestly, at this point I can’t even call myself a “Stealth” Bomber anymore.  Just a bomber here, apparently zero stealths needed.

Anyways, back on track they kill the sleepers and in warps a salvage destroyer, haven’t seen one of those in a while, under their protection. (I am assuming at this point it is because they saw me)  There was even a Falcon 80km off or so.  Fortunately I happen to have the counter for the falcon.

1) No target lock needed 🙂
2) I’m not going for the Destroyer, I’m going for the wrecks.

So as soon as the destroyer starts salvaging  I align, decloak and let fly a shiny electron bomb.(I use an electron bomb because it does more damage against barges and noctii then my racial shrapnel due to their inherent 50% explosive resist) In an instant I warp off and approximately 20 (looted) wrecks worth of salvage were wasted.  I’m not sure on what the value of that is, but I’m sure it’s enough to tick you off just a little bit.

Of coarse, the cormorant lived but that wasn’t really my aim.  My aim here is to inflict damage to their production, morale and psychological well being.   After a while they are going to want me to leave.  Sure they will put up defenses to try to prevent my work but I will still be a constant thorn in their side and soon they will strike a conversation with me asking me to kindly make an exit (to be honest, it’s their fault for trapping, although i had probes, me here in the first place).  And when they do ask me to leave, well, it’s going to cost them.  Plus this way I’m not in any way violating EULA.  I am simply holding a hole for ransom instead of ship.  I even have an entire back story for why I’m doing what I am doing, but that will be revealed when the time comes.

Also I’m sure everyone likes “local” tears but unfortunately the only response I received was “Well that was rude” and I did not respond back.  Two reasons; I wasn’t sure if they had my name yet so I want to maintain off their radar, and I would rather let their imaginations make up who I am instead of me telling them.

Finding the Right Hole

I’ve spent the better part of the last week trying to find a good hole to park my Brorator and my Hound:

One of many variants

Now I’m sure many bombers are not tanked.  I had another variant with a second ballistics mod instead of DC, a bay loading/polycarb rig and target painter instead of MASB.  So why did I go with this less damage and more (although still unknown if useful) tank?  I mean seriously, I fit a DC with a nano on an already fragile ship.

Basically I have never done this before, so I wanted to be able to live as long as possible in a wormhole accumulating experience before I die.  So I kept the standard nano for gtfo ability since bombers don’t handle very well and loaded up the tank over gank.

Anyways, I’ve been sliding in and out of holes for a while now trying to find a decently active one in my time zone.  I found some Germans over the weekend and after about a day they came out of their pos in 4 remote rep tengu’s.  I followed them from site and back to their POS till they brought out the Noctis.  Once I saw the noctis I felt excitement start to bubble up.  My first bomber kill, and I couldn’t wait.  So I warped to the last site that the Tengu’s ran and parked myself 40km off the ball of wrecks their deployable tractor unit dragged in and waited.  Ten minutes later I have a noctis on short range scan and I light the engines.  He lands as I am 35 km from the wreck ball and so 5 km later I decloak and bombs away! Then things started to go wrong on my end(which is to be expected on your first fight in a different ship).  So, before I continue let me explain a few things.  I was not in the pictured fit, I was in something similiar to the one described below it except I swapped the Bay Loading rig for a CPU rig and the afterburner for an MWD.

So mistake 1: When my bomb exploded it did 800 damage to my first volley of torps, effectively wasting dps and 12 seconds (i think) of combat.

2: I turned on my MWD, so what?  Well he launched ECM drones.

So what I should have done since it was just a slow Noctis is leave the MWD off so he targets me slower and when he does target me, turn it on in an attempt to outrun the drones and prevent ECM (doubtful).  Also, timing on the bomblaunching, not sure if there is anything except after the explosion since the radius is rather large and I feel will get my torps regardless.

So mission was a failure, noctis warped off in half structure just as a tengu showed up so I too, promptly warped.  Oh well, atleast I blew up a bit of their income in the bomb explosion around the wrecks.  Not wanting to stay in a German WH for the weekdays and figuring they would not make that mistake any time soon especially since it was a hi sec static I decided it was time to move on.

Yesterday:
I warped my probing alt in the Brorator into a C5 and was instantly greeted with ships on scan.  Had my thoughts been more on Wormhole logistics at that point I would have warped my hound in sooner because the ships I saw on scan were Dramiel, Heretic, and Orca.  They were rolling the hole.  Instead I warp my alt and finish a last moment check up in the previous hole with my hound.  Once I get my hound to the C5 hole from my C4 the Dramiel is in system.  So, not wanting to ruin my surprise, I watch.  Little did I know this was probably the wrong move but to be honest there wasn’t much I could do about it at this point since he was just sitting there.  Then in jumped the Orca and that’s when I realized what was happening.

As the orca jumps back through I bum rush the whole not wanting to miss this oppurtunity of an active hole in my TZ, stealth be damned!  All I could do now was hope this was all one guy multiboxing and wouldn’t notice.  Once through, I warp and cloak (thankfully I was more then 2000 meters from the WH… I didn’t think of that lol) just as the heretic was on short range scan.  After that, since they didn’t say much in local, they either did not see me or simply don’t care.

Now in the hole I start the ritual I decided upon.
Step 1: Find all the POS’s.  Well I did, two of theirs (one with a bubble that i made a warp around) and an Exodus. POS.  I later discovered that this corp (since this blog is brand new I don’t much care about revealing who it is, and like I said, they probably already know) Marketers United for Fairness must have been allies of Exodus. because one of their members was in their POS.

Step 2: Commence the long painful process of adding names to my watch list off of evewho.com and browsing the KB.  This is where I am confused.  If I am not mistaken Sleepers, especially the C5 kind love drones and have heavy tanks, yet I see a lot of pvp action in drone boats and ceptors, also aside from one loki, that is all I have on Dscan as well.  This puzzle to be solved later

Which brings me to step 3: Observe.  This is what I’m sure I will be doing for the rest of the week, so more to follow then.

About the Author

I will start off by saying that I don’t hold myself in high regards.  I’m not saying that I have no self respect or feel weak, I’m just saying that I do not think for an instant I am anything more then average.  Average (though at the moment it’s just speculation) at writing a blog, average at pvp in EvE Online (the focus of this blog), average at holding my urine (which is currently distracting me from writing a fore mentioned blog) etc, etc.   So now that I have gotten that out of the way and we are now all well aware of the fact that I may disappoint you, badly, I can continue.

I started out in eve years back much like anyone else I suspect.  I ran missions, stole from wrecks and once protected a corp mining fleet (don’t judge me).  After a while I turned my hungry eye’s to pvp, so what did I do?  I grabbed something really shiny and set out on my merry way.  As many people are sure to expect, I promptly lost said shiny ship. (I think it was a vagabond and I think I was outnumbered but to be honest, I can no longer remember).  What I do remember, however, is it was from that moment on I learned what to expect.  Expect to all ways be outnumbered, and treat ships in eve like cash in a casino.  Never go out with more then you can afford to lose and never expect to see it again.  Following these two rules has helped me through a lot of hard times.

 

I started to get my first real taste of pvp when I joined the corp “Bath and Body Works” even though at this point I was already very good at losing ships.  After a while, BBW reformed as the Nyan Cat Pirates.  We needed a new face to start a new play style.  Before we had been a bunch of random bro’s in random ships shooting at random targets.  In Nyan, we had a purpose, we had goals and fleet doctrines.  Times were good.  But still, that corp also faded away as many of the core members were inclined to try new activities in the eve universe.  Though even now that we are scattered across the map we still keep our pubbies open so we can organize and cause chaos and have our ships blown to bits.

So that’s the history.  What brings me to this moment, however, is the fact that even though I’ve been flying with great friends I tend to move (in RL) quite a bit and eventually my time zone got out of sync.  So for the longest time I have been revisting my solo work from those many years ago.  Even though I’ve all ways enjoyed the solo roam, there is only so much “20 guys just blapped my bitty cruiser” one can take.  Well, I guess that’s why a lot of time I fly nano but I find the damage to be lacking compared to brawling.  Regardless, I think that is what has driven me to where I am now.  I needed a change.  I needed to find something new for a while before I burnt out once more.  But how do I do that but rely only on myself?  Well, let’s see.  I don’t really care about KB efficiency because I play the game as game, not a second job where I feel the need to produce green results.  Also, even though I hate getting ganked, I enjoy the thrill of being outnumbered (and to be honest, I feel these are two totally different concepts)  So after much trolling around the internets I came across an idea that I liked, stealth bomber.  Not simply using it to kill ships either, but using it just as a tool to poke a thorn anywhere and everywhere in a corporations side.  Blow up wrecks, bomb mining ops cans, and general other shenanigans.  Why?  As my old and currently renewed friends in R1FTA would say, “Why not?”.

TL;DR? I’ve done stuff, now I’m doing different stuff