Day 51 : Sunday Skill Queue Planning Fight

I take a Mining Mission today to see what goes on in them. I won’t be doing that again. Some interesting scenery was all it had to offer. I can grind reputation faster in other missions and reserve mining energy for real mining. Then again, the new ore bays will be available on Wednesday and these mining missions should be easy to grind out by sitting there for ten minutes.

I’m out mining normally while thinking about the getting a skill queue plan that doesn’t change every few hours. Even a basic plot for the next month would be good, even if I squeeze in the odd research skill or Planetary Interaction skill it is still going to be better that the current demonstration of poor attention span. While this is going on an Amarr frigate of a class called  “Punisher” warps into the local area and sits out at 20 K presumably scoping the area for trouble. I check the pilot. He is six weeks older than me and might not have spent the time I did faffing around in mining and refining so he is probably good with that frigate. I check the ship, its the most PVP combat orientated of the basic Amarr frigates. I have a fitted out version of the Gallente equivalent, the Incursus class, named “Pale Horse”. Now, I’ve been having problems fitting this ship in and around balancing power and CPU. It’s not ready by a mile.

At this point the guy loots one of the wrecks I’ve left lying around while mining. My drones have taken care of the rats. Fortunately they are in Passive mode so they don’t all zoom off to attack the looter and subsequently red flag me as I sit in this expensive, defenceless, beast of a mining barge. Mining is dull. My combat frigate might not be ready but what the hell. EVE is about conflict, lets have some. I start warping back to station and recall the drones as I do. The looter doesn’t react much.

I’m back a minute later, warping in at 50 K to check the situation safely before diving in. A quick scan reveals no other uncloaked ships within the area. A quick check of local doesn’t indicate my target has lots of pals waiting to jump in. This is it then. My enemy thinks so at the same time as we fire up speed boosters and head towards each other. I break off at a tangent about halfway in before triggering an orbit command. You never know - the radial velocity might help him miss me. I launch my single drone, and fire up the damage resistance booster and get ready with the web. Both of us web and scramble at the same time, slowing the headlong smash and making our ships twist as orbit commands change with the lack of speed.

The dogfight turns into a close range orbit duel, his lasers vs my blasters. Warp scramblers and then webs are dropped by both of us as capacitor issues start to take effect. I need mine for armour repair as he is through the shields already. Then I’m through his but my damage seems to slow at this point. He’s heavily armoured and I’m reducing his armour about half as fast as he is reducing mine. I’m also having power issues. As I hit 50% armour I realise I’ll probably lose this fight unless his lasers burn him out of power before he can finish me off. I’ve a split seconds time to make the choice of fight to the death or run. I can see I have just enough power to slam on the afterburner if I cut out the repair module, risking a good shot cutting down to the hull. Screw it, I’m running. As I come round part of the orbit  where I think the direction is right, I break orbit and trigger the afterburner. He doesn’t react fast enough so suddenly I’m out of short range guns and travelling fast. I recall the drone and hit warp, noting that the front of the ship appears to be on fire.

Warp to where? I’ve been ready for this kind of thing before and I’ve a couple of safe spots in system. One is almost out of range of directional scanner, it is in the middle of no where. I sit there running the armour repair breathing a sigh of relief. There is hull damage I can’t repair out here so I know I was within one or two shots of being blown to hell.

Rather than feel like a coward, I feel great! I survived my first PVP battle! I made some tactical decisions that seemed to  pay off. As my in game bio quotes : “I laugh in the face of danger. Then I hide until it goes away”.  

My enemy then asks in local system chat where I’ve gone. I reply with a laugh that I am hiding. I’ve nursed my wounds for long enough though, I need to dock and repair the hull damage. Just to be safe, I warp to 100 K out from the station. Sure enough a red dot hangs in the distance, lying in wait. I laugh for real, and in local chat, and zoom to my second safe point designed just for this purpose. There is an answering “dammit” and a laugh in local. Not only has this been an enjoyable rush, and an education, it has also been good natured. The aggression timers are about to finish so the fight is all but over. I stick “gf” into local chat, EVE shorthand for “good fight”. I’m surprised when I get one back, I’d have thought my dashing off made for a poor fight. I guess at least I entered the fight, came back to take a cheeky look before the aggression timer was out, and engaged in some banter.

I enjoyed that a lot and it showed me a lot about my fitting weaknesses. The skill queue plan is sorted. I’ve already knocked up a basic 4 week plan to cover all the holes I found today. I need to get into some more scraps like that. I know they won’t all be as equal, or as good natured, but the surprising amount of adrenaline rush was worth it. Nothing in any other MMO has had that level of physical response. After all, what am I earning all this cash for anyway? I might as well spend some of it. At worst the outcome could have been covered by spending an hour and a half doing some mining. Finally an easy calculation to make in EVE.

EVE Track of the Day

The Eve of the War - Jeff Wayne

PS - this for three reasons : tomorrows Mars landing, this evenings fight, and the sadly amusing fact of the word “eve”. ;)