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.