Last night I found an Average Dark Ochre & Gneiss site. The first gravimetric site I had found all month, I wasn't about to let the opportunity to do a little non-belt mining pass me by. Things were going well for an hour or so. I sat around in my Procurer and mined 4,500 units of Obsidian Ochre and 4,500 units of Onyx Ochre with only the Angel Cartel and some rogue drones getting in the way. Those were easily enough to kill with a heavy missile Bellicose on overwatch.
I should have stopped then because I needed to get some sleep but with this perhaps the last grav site I would find before Odyssey and the changes to grav sites so I decided to press on. As I started munching on a Dark Ochre asteroid I saw someone enter the system and then a few minutes later Sisters probes in space. Someone was probing me down!
Did I do the prudent, carebear thing and dock up? No, I was greedy and wanted to keep mining. So while the Procurer kept mining, I swapped out the Bellicose for a Hound and stationed the stealth bomber 48km away from my barge.
When the interloper arrived, I suspected I was in trouble. I was confronted with a Pilgrim. At the time I didn't know it was the Amarr force recon ship. I just remember reading about Rixx Javix flying them, so I knew they must be pretty bad-ass. Yikes!
To say I panicked was an understatement. I fumbled at my keyboard and the Pilgrim scrammed me. I think he also was draining my cap, but I couldn't tell in the middle of the action. I forgot to launch the drones but I did remember to align to a station and hit the dock button. I then uncloaked and lit up the enemy ship with a target painter. I forgot to fire up the sensor dampener. I also managed to lock one of his Hammerhead II drones instead of the Pilgrim. That probably accounted for the lack of attention given my stealth bomber. The Pilgrim pilot didn't notice I was there with two ships until he saw his tech 2 drone go "POP!".
I think that made him mad because he forgot about the Procurer and came charging after the stealth bomber, allowing the barge to escape. Looking at the logs after the fight showed I had just enough capacitor to get me to the station. That's how close he got to capping me out.
At that point the Hound was aligned and firing Nova torpedoes. Explosive damage probably wasn't the best thing to use, but I forgot about swapping over to the thermal damage torps I had in the cargo hold. The Pilgrim did manage to get within 28 km before a burst of my afterburner extended the range out to 32 km. But at that point I figured I didn't have a chance of killing the ship so I warped off before he could get close enough to tackle me.
Okay, so I'm still pretty bad at this PvP thing. But while I fled the field, I did manage to kill a tech 2 drone, which means I won the ISK war, right? Too bad we don't get kill reports for that.
Counting the mistakes... too much work. :p
ReplyDeleteAnd the Pilgrim was surely neuting you, it has cap warfare bonuses (like its sibling, the Curse).
Unlike the Curse, the Pilgrim doesn't have a range bonus to Neuts, just the shared amount bonus, so, where the Curse can neut out to 37km with T2/Meta medium Neuts, the Pilgrim can only reach out to 12km.
DeleteYou can enter warp even if you have just one capacitor unit. If you lack enough cap to warp to the destination, the ship will just exit warp in the middle of the nowhere and rewarp with the cap it gained in the meantime.
ReplyDeleteYou can test it by draining almost all your cap with a shield booster and then warping.
A handy use for that is making perches to d-scan for bubbles in nullsec when there isn't an appropriate celestial.
DeleteInitiate warp (this drains your cap), cancel warp, rinse and repeat until you get the "you don't have enough cap to reach your destination" message, then allow that warp to proceed and repeat until you're at an appropriate vantage point.
Gevlon is right, of course.
ReplyDeleteThe thing here is to notice a few things:
1. The adrenalin rush. Did you enjoy it? I sure as hell do.
2. You escaped, so you didn't fare that badly.
3. You know what you did wrong, which was basically panic or you would have done a lot better. That's a start my friend.
Enjoy your PVE dashed with a pinch of PVP. That's what is all about, what makes the game interesting and fun. Mine all you want, take your measured risks, be always ready for a visit from your friendly local neighborhood pirates. :)
Here's a tip in case you don't know it: When you get a visitor in local start spamming the directional scan button (set to 360). It only takes a second to scan; if you don't know/remember what that ship type then another second is required to double click on the ship and a third second to identify the type. It will likely take another two or three seconds before he lands on you (if they are incoming). Time which you can use to prepare and make decisions "calmly".
One problem when facing Pilgrims though is their ability to warp cloaked giving you only the small window when they are entering system and if they drop cloak the last couple of km before dropping out of warp (unless they are shit) to identify them through d-scan :)
ReplyDeleteI'd say you did a real good job avoiding getting blown up! Keep it up
...Unless I'm the one hunting, then don't mind watching d-scan.
Pilgrims and other force recons/cloakies in general**
DeleteJust remember that a stealth bomber is more expensive as a mining barge.
ReplyDeleteWhat we need is warp disruption/scramble drones!
Save the ore you mined until after Odyssey as those ores get buffed. Or you can join the scams trying to sell 1 piece of Gneiss by pretending it is a Gnosis.
ReplyDeleteI do something similar in low with my Procurer. They have so much cap that it is quite possible to not notice that your opponent is trying to suck the ocean dry through a straw. So far all my opponents manage to warp away before my little hamster drones chew off more than their socks.
It's almost certainly better to use nova torps on a hound than any other kind. You'll get a huge bonus (15% per level) to explosive torps only. So even if you're hitting their strongest resist, you'll still be doing more damage than if you switched to an unbonused damage type.
ReplyDelete