Back on Track

And I’m now back, from outer space…

Not really 😛 Unfortunately RL got quite busy and i had no time between all my other obligations to log into Mystery except to update her skill plan.

But now I’m back so you can expect to see more spectacular loss mails from me in the near future. To cap off what’s gone on whilst I was away,

Week 2 happened with no changes to my kill board or even loss board for that matter. Not that the other competitor’s have slacked off, Zombie Boomstick has joined me on 1 solo kill and Projekt Badass is currently up to 4 solo kills. I got a lot of catch up to do 😀

Not solo related but i went on a roam with two members of my corp today and found some interesting things out. The fight was quite stupid and if we had known more about the ships and their bonuses we could have avoided the loss.

Lossmail -> To paint the picture we had 3 frigates in our gang, my crucifier, a rifter and a slasher. We find a Thorax on a gate at 0 and lock him up. We worked out he was Blaster fit and we pulled into nice 10km+ orbits to avoid the damage (we weren’t worried if that was still in falloff range as dual Tracking speed TD’s sorta screw all over his tracking)we started our attack and finding us swiftly cutting through his shields he jumped the gate. Not a problem we thought, as we re-approached the gate and waited for our timers to disappear. Maybe we can get him to aggress one of us and then we can kill him. Unfortunately we played gate games with him 5 or 6 more times until we gave up.

Not wanting to dwell on it we packed up and jumped a few more system towards home when we saw him jump into the system we were in. Hoo-rah we thought  we’ll catch him when he is off the gate after he follows us through and then we will get our long awaited thorax kill mail. Seeing a Vexor on scan and not thinking anything of it, he rocked up and quickly made work of our slasher, then myself and finally our Rifter.

What the hell we thought. the guy was in a Thorax before, how did he just beat us now??

Double web, mwd and long point fit was the answer to why we got our asses kicked. It was unthinkable to us that he had re-shipped to something he knew would and could kick the shit our of all three of us. In retrospect it’s quite simple and smart to do. In Eve no quarter is given and no fight is fair. Words I shall remember from now on.

Was not an entirely bad roam, we did some offensive plexing and saw some awesome explosions. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the holidays have to bring.

Week 1 In review

Week one has now come and gone!

My excellent piloting skills have netted me a killboard that looks like this:

• 1 Ship kill
• 1 Pod kill
• 9 Losses

ISK Ratio of 9.6% and people fighting me have a 81.82% chance of winning. Not bad for a capsuleer that only has 334k SP.

Unfortunately RL stuff happened and I wasn’t able to lose login for long toward the end. On the Challenge side as a whole it seems quite a few more Loss mails went up but no new kill mails. Chatter on our in game channel seems to be great (even though my main pewpew time is just after DT which isn’t the peak time for most of the entries it seems).

I think going forward I will still grab 10+ of a ship type + fittings and lose them all until there are no more. It has been insanely fun so far and I cannot see that changing in the near future.

I’m looking forward the the explosions that week 2 will bring (hopefully them not me this time) and I might see you all around in New Eden!

Loss Reviews: #1-5

Looking back on my first 5 losses, one thing is pretty clear. This is not Null-sec. I gotta get this into my head as I am flying around more. Anyway onto the losses.

Loss #1

Loss #1 was a super quick loss for me. Ran at the enemy got destroyed, sat there and lost my pod as well!

Things I should have done better:

• Pulled range. My crystals have 14km optimal range. This would have shat over any range the blaster could give him.
• If I wanted to stay in range and brawl. I should have loaded and used the tracking speed scripts. Blasters have decent tracking as it is, but two TD’s and me orbiting at 1000km’s
  might have given me enough transversal to avoid some of the damage.
• Pulled my drones out. My drones at the moment are accounting for about ~40% of my damage. This extra bit of damage could have helped.

There isn’t much more that I could have done for this fight. I wasn’t thinking coupled with making the biggest error right off the bat there was no coming back from it.

Loss #2

Loss #2 was one the most fun in this round. Taking on a Battlecruiser was crazy but in the end I really didn’t expect to kill him.

This time I actually did some things correctly.

• Used Bookmarks to drop in nice and close on him. I  have never been good at making bookmarks and warping into them to pop-up at enemies.
• Launched drones correctly and quickly.
• Stayed under his guns. Having both Tracking speed scripts loaded it was a lot easier but he did not land a single shot on me over the entire engagement.
• Waited for him to re-aggress on the gate and take gate guns. HAHAHAHA, he got down to abou t 1/2 shield as well from gate guns.
• Followed him out from the gate at an angle. Increasing my transversal making sure he couldn’t land a shot.

Now onto the list of things I fucked up on:

• Did’t recall my drones after engaging him the first time.
• Turned off my Afterburner as he was pulling range on me.
• Completely missed the Thrasher landing on grid at the entrance to the small plex and the gate
• Didn’t launch Drones on the gate.
• Allowed the Tornado to slingshot out of my point range.

While this fight did go better than I planned I should have disengaged and warped to a planet as I saw that Thrasher land at the small plex. Going 1v1 against a Thrasher is hairy and having to do it while chasing the tornado was stupid. The main things I learnt from this fight was to watch the ranges and velocities. Doing that I could have seen that he was going to slingshot out and adjust my course.

Loss #3

In this spectacular fail-mail, I tried to jump a Stealth Bomber 30km’s off the gate…

I didn’t even have time to align to anything else. Stupid Gate guns.

Lesson to learn: Don’t fight on gates. They hurt.

Loss #4

This fight was so dumb on my part. There was actually three Minnie miltia members there, The first one was a Slasher that caught my attention. He was about 15km’s off the gate and so I got out to him and  locked him up. I was trying to get him to engage me when both of his buddies arrive on grid. At this point I felt as if I had two choices. First was to continue to play games with this Slasher or secondly to head back to the gate and jump through. I picked the second option, I had made it back about halfway when they all opened fire on me. Dear god. I don’t think I have ever seen my ship blow up so quickly.

What I should have down was burnt away from the gate. this would have meant that if they had shot at me, I would have been further away. Possibly far enough away that they wouldn’t have landed perfect damage. Had they engaged me they would have had to take a lot more gate gun fire to get to me and I could have killed the Slasher and got away (that last part is just really optimistic). In the end I should have learnt that I shouldn’t engage on gates. This isn’t null-sec gates hurt here.

Lesson to learn: Again don’t fight on gate like a spaz.

Loss #5

On the plus side of this one Kill mail + Pod Mail.

Warped into the plex bait ship was sitting there. Engaged and destroyed. Locked and shot the pod as well. Hindsight being what it is, I should have left the pod alone and got the hell outta dodge. But i had tasted blood and nothing could stop me from trying to get a pod kill as well.

Alas the Breacher arrives and swiftly puts an end to my killing streak.

Hindsight:

• If the ship is too easy to kill it’s bait.
• Once the bait is dead GTFO.
• Safe up and then look at the KM.

Heading forward

On the whole the first five losses haven’t been that bad and I have been starting to learn more about my ship with each encounter. I can see that I am going to bring in a different fit soon and test the waters with that. I have got a fraps recording of the Battlecruiser fight and of Loss #5. Depending on how I feel  later in the week I may end up posting them here to show you how I fail 😛

Fly safe o7

Late night Pew’s

So I had finished moving my 10+ ships and fittings to my lowsec jump off point and I decided I would go on a roam.

Obligatory lossmail #1.

This was hilarious and good for me in two ways.

First off, Yes that is a tornado. Yes they are a Battle cruiser,  no I am not crazy and finally yes I have a death wish 🙂 there was more to this fight than the lossmail lets on. I found the ‘Nado 100km+ off a novice plex, not sure what he wanted to do there but Fuck it i said, let’s see if we can get him pointed. Warp off from the plex sorta in the opposite way that the tornado was sitting and warped back in at 100 bookmarked this location and warped off in the other direction. Came back to 50km’s off that BM and bam 10km’s off the ‘nado.

Long story short got him pointed, then ran out of point range/almost out of cap and he got away to the gate. Due to aggression timer he was unable to jump through and I found him on that gate waiting. Woohoo, second time dinner here I come. I locked him up this time no aggression from me yet and start flying towards him but not in a straight line (the arty he had would have fucked me up) and he then attacks me. Td’s, point and guns go out on him. Moving out he saw that he attracted gate gun fire and was in a desperate attempt to flee the scene when an Autocannon thrasher comes out of the blue and shits all over me. Whelp that is me all over.

I cannot believe how long i had that ‘Nado pointed for and how effective I could be even only being 3 days old. This has been the first time i have actually been able to judge distances correctly and landed quite near my target by bouncing to bookmarks.

Tomorrow morning, I will write up a more in depth look into my loss and what I could have done better but for mow I will leave with the amazing shot of my shiny explosion.

So close, well not really 😛

Holy Skills Batman

~Always be prepared.~

I sat down the other night and attempted to do something with skill plans and moving ships… instead i logged into Kitteh and jumped down into low sec and died. Well shit, that isn’t a very good start. To top it all off I found out the next morning from the lossmail that I had bumped a Merlin with blasters and then sat in my pod until I died.

In my defense I was almost blind drunk that night. Enough excuses i said to myself, I need to get planning. So as I write this my hauler alt is moving 10 or so ships to my staging area with the fittings to get me started, in the mean time I have been reviewing my chosen fit and skills.

The ship i have chosen to attempt to solo with is the Crucifer. Not the first choice for solo pvp but what the hell, if I can skills the basics in this ship i can up size into a arbitrator/curse, both of which are known to be deadly solo pvp beasts. But don’t get me wrong this isn’t a run up in their face and blap away untill all that remains is a wreck type of ship, this is a careful kiter that excels in messing up the enemies turrets to achieve maximum annoyance.

The fit is fairly basic, small lasorz in the highs, long point/mwd/2x Tracking disruptors and damage mods with a fitting mod in the lows and a full 2 flights of Warriors and one flight of Hobgoblins to top it off. To sum up, fuck all tank small poke of damage and a shit-tonne of control. Control is where this ship is going to win in fights.

The plan with this ship all changes depending on what I am flying against. To sum up however, disrupt the optimal range of brawlers and flit around outside their range whilst whittling them down with drones and lasers and with other kiters/arty fits, switch to close range ammo and get up in their face using the tracking speed disruption to make them miss most of their shots. It quite simple on paper, which is good in the middle of the fight (hopefully I can remember it).

So far a few problems I can see me  running into is the fact that I cannot fit the MWD within the PG that my ship has available and the fact that with the MWD fitted I only get 24s of cap with everything running, granted I shouldn’t have to run the MWD all the time, my cap doesn’t give me a lot of time to kill the person. Hopefully I can ‘forget’ to point the enemy until they turn to run and then point them? Or if I lose a couple of ships in close fights I ~might~ splurge the time and money into getting cap boosting rigs.

Enter the next weeks skill plan!

I know this will take me over the first week by 3 days but shhhh…

Knowing what my ship is good at and what it needs help with is a big part of picking my skills for the next week. Engineering IV is an easy one the rest fall into helping kite and making sure I have enough cap to live out the fight as most of my modules will be running there will always be a need for it. The first week worth of skills are fairly boring, just setting this ship up for some future pew pew’ing.

My next week I will be getting some of the other ‘support’ skills to III and then start the list of which skills I need at IV first. That being said all of these skills are subject to change as the week drags on, any changes I can see will provide immediate help will be thrown into the mix as well.

Well I’m going to head out and pad my loss board a bit.

O7 see you out in low sec 🙂

PvP Career… is Go!

How do you get a blog about newbie pvp?

$5 steam sale on Retribution + 2 month pvp challenge on reddit. It’s like the stars them aligned for this very moment, thus started the life of Mystery Kitteh.

Such a humble start…

Hopefully this blog will serve as a place where I can track my progress as my killboard lossboard fills up. This should hopefully help me get better at PvP and at Eve in general.

I don’t like jumping into a challenge without a plan so in the next couple of days I’ll start planning my skills and hopefully come up with a way to get some good fights!

See you out in low sec!