Friday 29 July 2011

General Boredom and then a Roam

Ill be honest when I got in from work last night I wasn't in the mood for going for some big roam around the local low sec, I will need to at some point so I can get a feel for the new digs (Caldari Space).  So out of a combination of apathy and boredom, I half heartedly went can flipping. This made the boredom worse so I logged my other character in.

Like many people in EvE I have a second character. Korg Leaf.  He's mainly being used out in Curse for a bit of null/low sec PvP.  I wouldn't say he was an alt as much as I can never decide on my primary account swapping between them as much as I change my underwear.  I will say this though it is quite nice having a second character as between the two of them I can fly every sub cap in the game, minus logi, with near max skills, Gallente/Minmatar on Leaf and Caldari/Amarr on Tronix.  This makes it very nice when it comes to roaming as you can fit in with pretty much any gang (besides caps).

Turns out I had logged into a slow night in Curse, so youtube was being linked regularly in corp chat.  This 'gem' stuck out for me -



Fucking funny.

Fleet Fights

Now back to last night, so going slow, we decided to ship into shield BCs despite Korg Leaf being a very good shield BC pilot I was jonesing(?) for flying a drake so I logged Tronix back in and cloned jump done to pilot my Dual Web Drake.

So after the fleet finishes forming we set off from Utopia. We have a mixture of canes and drakes with a flycatcher to bubble, a rapier to scout and two scimitars to do scimitar type things.
I believe the whole point of the roam was to head toward HED-GP to see if we could start something but we got as far as the Jamunda gate when our scout reported a Red Overlord Dram, Sabre and two Scimitars on the 1P gate in Jamunda.  They of course bubbled him and started shooting so he let them all agro and jumped through only to get caught by their actual gang on the otherside.

Now you have to wonder how he was caught, as I understand it they had assigned all of their drones to the dramiel pilot and he managed a decloak. Unfortunate.

Not to be deterred however we jumped in and warped to 1P, with the majority of there fleet agro'd on the otherside and the sabre, dramiel and two scimitars bubbled in on the Jamunda side our fleet made short work of them, the basilisk for some reason jumped in halfway through.

By this time the rest of their fleet could jump and did, I believe we had added some more bubbles to the mix just to be sure they couldn't run.  The enemy fleet would have been a larger challenge had they not made the error of agro'ing on both sides as they, originally at least, had more repping power but once the logistic ships had been cleared we made short work of their fleet. Unfortunately their Proteus and other Cynabal made it out :(.

At this point it was getting near most of our fleets bedtimes so we headed back, cutting what had started as a productive roam short.

Dumb Machariel Pilots

I have always maintained that Machariels, although very good ships, are not as overpowered as the EvE online forums would have you believe.  However this reputation does lead to some very bad pilots flying them when they shouldn't.  Last night was a shining example.

After the successful(ish) fleet earlier I went AFK to indulge in a great British past time, making a cuppa.  Once this was all done I came back to my computer only to hear that the fleet had something tackled in Doril that was making people excited.  Quickly undocking and rushing towards Doril to whore some mails, I hear its a Machariel pilot and just as I land on the Doril gate he popped (boooo!).
What makes this story funny though is this is his third Machariel he has lost to my alliance in 2 days!! Some people should not be flying those things.

Korg

p.s. I know this was quite a long post, I apologise for spelling/grammatical/general shitty sentence structure in this post.

p.p.s. After all the wait for my war dec votes to go through and I forgot to vote in any of them, Fail. Oh well another 24hr wait for me.

Thursday 28 July 2011

New Corp

So like I mentioned I have rejoined my corp 'The Mabinogion', fancied getting back into the Merc/War Dec high sec PvP.  Don't get me wrong I still PvP in other parts of the Eve-iverse, I just thought it would be a nice change of pace.

Until recently I had been in RvB, if you haven't heard of them they are two corps constantly at war and you join one or the other and just fight.  I left partly due to the fights being only in 1-3 systems around the HQ but mostly because I was bored at work and had a go at making a banner for my corp.  I was that happy with it I decided to fly under the banner of the Mabinogion again.

Here it is.










Not terribly original I know but I was happy with it.  Sort of trying to play on the Welsh in the corp name and ticker (Powys).

So on to last night, as I had only just rejoined there wasn't much I could do in the way of wardecs due to the 48hr timer so I decided to go scout round for targets in the local high sec area whilst picking up some mods and blueprints I had scattered around from the last time I lived in Caldari space.
Now usually I do a combination of things to find good people to dec.  Most of the time I just pick a corp at random in local that has more members than mine and/or claims to be a merc corp.  This usually helps generate some willing fighters, after all you can hardly claim to be a merc corp and then not fight when decced.

Last night, however, I decided I would try something different and trolled the belts looking for cans to flip.  In my trusty shield Kestrel, I jumped into Vellaine and started warping around the belts.  Where I happened upon a Retriever and Badger in a belt with a can out, bookmarking the can, I warped off and warped back to the can.
I flipped the can, and locked the two ships up, they both warped off to a station.  I waited for a minute or two, when the retriever pilot came back in a Caracal.  Warily I started orbiting him at 8km (mainly so I could leave quickly if he was AML fit) waiting for him to agro.  Suddenly I saw the box around his ship change red as a missile slammed into my ships shields.  They were heavies, this meant two things, 1) I can to a certain extent speed tank most of the damage from heavy missiles as he hadn't webbed me and 2) Caracals have poor fitting and you have to make sacrifices to fit a tank with heavy missiles so this meant he probably had little tank.  I quickly pointed him and started orbiting with my AB on, rockets firing.  Quickly his shield was stripped and then his armor and structure. He popped.
This wasn't a great fight to be honest, one of those lots of points on the kb but not alot of skill in killing him.

I moved on to Korama, using the same method, I started rolling through the belts again.  This time happening upon two pilots in an Osprey and a Badger mining into a can.  As before I warped off and warped back to the can, flipped and locked them up.
They didn't immediately warp off, and changing their corps standings I could see they had more friends in local.  After a few moments they warped off, I waited to see if they would reship to come fight me but they came back in the same ships and the Osprey locked me up.  Checking D-scan I noticed one of there corp mates was on his way in, in a Cormorant.
He landed and locked me, red boxed.  He was shooting me in a rail Cormorant, I had however made a slight error, thinking he would be blaster fit I was using a wider orbit so took some decent shot from his rails.  Once I had tightened my orbit though, it was over.  He died.  Once again not a good fight.

A little while later I missed a kill on a Maelstrom that had been mining as I hadn't realised he had agro'd, ah well you win some and lose some.

Not a great evening, the fights weren't great and I didn't find anyone that looked particularly fun to dec.  Even the lowsec roam was cut short because I dc'd and lost all my overview settings just as I had warped towards a gang.  Didn't lose my ship but still annoying having to do all my settings again.

Korg

The Mabinogion

Finally decided I am going to do a blog.

Having recently decided to go back to my war dec corp 'The Mabinogion', I thought it would be nice to write about my exploits whilst in this corp.  Mainly for my own amusement and partially because I always forget to press record on Fraps, this seems like a good way of recorded my fights and other things for my later enjoyment.

As I'm not much of a writer I welcome any criticism from my readers (If I get any) on how to improve my write ups.

Korg