Wednesday 19 December 2012

A Good Fight

Last night started out the same as most, I headed off on my regular roaming route, meandering through Essence, Metropolis and Placid in search of a fight. I decided to take out a Merlin, sticking to my Caldari roots, and with the hope that it's comparatively large tank would give me a chance against most ships despite being fairly slow moving.

As I slowly made my way to Placid I came across few likely targets, space was quiet, New Eden is a beautiful place so I enjoyed the scenery as kept moving.



Eventually I ended up in Melmaniel, with a Merlin on D-Scan. I started trying to find it, with Retribution's changes to the camera using D-Scan has become a delight, this video is awesome for showing you how to use it.




The Merlin appeared to be at a safe but as I had been scanning for him Rixx Javix, notorious capsuleer, appeared in system, flying a Condor. I considered my chances, the Condor would want to kite me and have a significant speed advantage but if I could get him into my optimum range his tank should melt fairly quickly, also it should be a fun fight either way so what had I to lose?

I warped to the sun and lay in wait....but not for long, the Condor was on my short range D-Scan, I readied myself for battle, and hoped that he would land on top of me so that I could web and trap him.

No suck luck, he landed about 180k away, no matter the fight was on. We both flew towards each other and started to engage. As I predicted he was staying away from me, and I couldn't get close enough to cause any damage. I overheated my afterburner and tried to fly to where I thought he would be. He whipped into range and his shields went down, whoosh and he was out of range again.

Then I have a slight interruption "What are you doing? Are you fighting?" My sister, curious as to the flashing lights of my keyboard. "Yes, can't talk now"

I check my mods for heat damage, afterburner nearly burnt out, I turn the heat off, it may be too late. My shields are slowly going down but I have time. Crap it- AB totally burnt out, I consider trying to leave the fight but quickly realise that I will probably not be able to outrun him. So I continue to the same routine, try to predict where he'll be and get there first. I succeed in catching him a couple of time, bringing his shields down low once but never manage to web him (I think, as a disclaimer this is how I remember things happening, I wish that I'd recorded it, to capture exactly what happened). And eventually my tank breaks and I explode. Good fights are given in local.

It was indeed one of the best fights that I've had for a while and I'm fairly pleased with how I played it. There are a few things that I would change:
1. The way my laptop is set up using my keyboard is hard so I have a Nostromo, I didn't  use it last night and my reaction time with my mouse doing everything just isn't fast enough. BTW shift plus F key is the best way to overheat. also I could have activated my web much faster doing this.
2. Ignore my sister, she matters not...plus although not is this fight, the other night I had Family Guy on in the background and got distracted warping to a gate and someone exploded me, external distractions are not good.
3.These I'm not sure about- Maybe if I had loaded Antimatter then my increased DPS could've done enough damage when I closed in on him to have destroyed his tank, without watching the fight though I'm not sure that I ever got in that close to him, I don't think I did, in which case null was the right choice.
Also had I carried nanite paste I might have been able to repair my afterburner mid fight, whether this would work in practice I'm not sure...

For those who find this TL/DR I had a good fight with Rixx and it reminded me why I love Eve so much, and why I wanted to blog too. I intend to blog about any interesting fights I have plus anything else that interests me and I have an opinion on, hopefully I figure out how to get Bandicam to work on my computer and there will be pretty videos of me exploding too.

6 comments:

  1. I think you made the right choice on ammo. I figured you might be manually moving into my arc, so I kept changing my orbit and manually pulling out and into lower and higher orbits. This is a new technique that I've been trying with the Condor and it seems to be working well.

    You did catch me twice with your web, but neither time was up close and personal. Both were about 7-9k range and I was able to slingshot back out of web range.

    During one of those you did get me almost thru shields, 87% or so, but two runs of the asb and I was ok. I ended up using 5 of the charges in the fight fyi.

    As you rightly said, this fight would've ended quickly if I'd have landed in range. The fact that I didn't made it extremely difficult for you.

    Well done. And welcome to the Eve Blogging community.

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  2. It was a good experiment for me too, keeping calm and manual flight can get a faster ship into range. If I'd being fighting a less experienced pilot then I think I would've won. I'm going to search out more kiters and see how it goes.

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  3. Welcome to the world of EVE bloggers! Sounds like you're starting to find your feet again in terms of getting "gfs". How are you finding the Merlin compared to what you've flown in the past?

    Re: nanite paste, I usually find that it's better used between fights than during. iirc you can't activate the modules you're repairing (which takes forever), and if a module's completely burnt out you have to re-online it anyway, which takes being at something like 90% cap. I'd generally only bother if I can't dock up for some reason.

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  4. Interesting recap Arianne and welcome to the blogging world.

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  5. Slower but more tanks, I think I need to modify the fit a little, I'd like to perfect a method of killing kiters, seeing as it seems to be a popular option. As to the nanite

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  6. Paste, I wouldn't usually rep in fight but with the reduced dps of a kiter and the tank I feel that I might have been able to repair the ab and really reaped the benefit of the additional speed, obv totally

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