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New Merlin Does Good

I was sitting in Auner wondering what to do.  I  had spent much of the morning sneaking in modules and ships with my hauler alt and had plenty to choose from.

Maybe it's time to put together a Merlin now that I have Caldari Frigate skill up to IV and Small Blaster Specialization at III.  I sorted out the items in the warehouse, remembering to use a Miura Bull(tm) approved medium shield extender instead of the small, and soon had a neutron blaster equipped Merlin ready to face the vacuum of space.

I headed out to an asteroid belt to shoot a rat or two just to see how well the blasters worked.  They seemed to do ok - with one shot the Angel frigates were turned to space dust.  I set the orbit range to 500m because blasters have a very short range.

While shooting the rats I noticed a destroyer on scan - a thrasher.  I thought that would be a very good test of the merlin - if I could get under his autocannons, I might be able to destroy him before my ship turned to a burning wreck.  But I did not have high hopes - my frigates usually die to destroyers.

I headed to the top belt to make it easier for him to find me.  While I waited I cruised away from the Angel frigate and battleship that were guarding their precious rocks.  When the frigate got close, I destroyed it in one shot.  Nice.

Then the thrasher landed.  The pilot was named Kolt and I saw that he has been playing since 2003 and has a -9.7 security standing.  An experienced pirate.  I assumed his destroyer would be well equipped and I started making plans to get my pod out when my destruction happened.

Fortunately, he landed more than 100k away from me.  My plan was to fight up close - the closer the better - and so when he came in my direction, I kept moving away from him.  After a minute or two I decided to bite the bullet and take the fight.  I headed to the sun and figured that he would follow.  I chose to land at zero in hopes that he would do the same so that we would be very near to each other at the start of the fight. I had no hope of approaching through the barrage of 7 autocannons that a thrasher carries.

I landed and waited.

Soon I saw him on dscan and a few seconds later he landed.  3k away!  Perfect!  My only hope was to get in close.  I had noticed at the asteroid belt that his speed (4k+/sec) indicated that he had a microwarp drive - so when I scrambled and webbed the thrasher it was pretty much dead in the vacuum.  I set my orbit at 500m and started pummeling him with my hybrid charges.

Death came quickly to the thrasher.  I might have taken a glancing blow, but hardly more and Kolt's ship was soon a fiery heap of wreckage!  I scooped up as much loot as I could from the wreck (noting that it had been an arty thrasher - to explain the lack of damage to my close fast flying frigate).  But I couldn't get all the loot into my hold - 3(!) Covert Ops Cloaking Device IIs had fortunately survived the explosion and were too big to  fit.  For those I had to return in the station and head back in my own destroyer (due to the larger cargo hold) for retrieval.  It was a very fortunate drop for me...

Afterwards we had this postmortem in local:

Jack Dancer > gf
Kolt > lol pressed to zero , my bad , gf
Jack Dancer > I was hoping that might happen...
Kolt > yep i had already figured that out in warp lol

My first impressions of the blaster merlin were very favorable...

New to Eve? Here's some advice...

I recently popped out of the station in Auner looking for trouble and noticed a destroyer on scan with the pilot’s name still associated with it.  I checked and the pilot was less than a month old.

After scanning the FW sites and not finding the destroyer I thought maybe he was ratting in one of the asteroid belts.  My first scan found him.

I headed his way (warping to zero) – turning everything up to only 10 (a one month old character shouldn’t be a challenge for my slasher, even if he is flying a destroyer - so no need to go to 11).  I landed just 3k away from him and scrambled his warp engines.  The battle was short and I’m not sure that I took any damage.

Afterwards the pilot asked for a conversation and we chatted.  He started off with, “What could I have done better – I’m new.”  An excellent opening line for all of you noob PvPers out there – if you want to learn, feel free to ask whoever destroyed you.  Most of the time we’d be happy to help.

I told him that there really wasn’t anything he could have done once I landed on top of him like that.  He was doomed.  But we talked a bit about what he could have done prior to me landing on him, and I’ll mention that here (along with a couple other things I’ve thought of since then…).

1. Change the name of your ship to something other than, in my case, “Jack Dancer’s Rifter”.  “Titanic” might be a suitable name…  No reason to give people total insight on who they are attacking.
    
2. If you have a choice of asteroid belts to rat in, choose some with a bunch of other belts nearby.  For instance, instead of going to Planet II’s single belt, go to one of the 6 belts that are near to Planet VIII.  That will give an evil person a tougher time sorting out which one you might be in and maybe give you enough time to escape when he lands at the right planet, but at the wrong belt.
    
3. Don’t rat at zero.  If you land at a belt, burn away from the rats and get some distance between you and where Bad People™ like me might land.  The rats will follow you.
    
4. Use local – when you arrive at a system, check out everyone that’s in local.  If you see someone named “Jack Dancer” (THE Jack Dancer!) and he’s a member of a scuzzy bunch like the “Black Rebel Rifter Club” and he has a minus 6.5 security rating – you should be very, very careful.  A trick that I learned at the Agony Basic PvP class (I highly recommend that class!) is to click on someone’s name in local and then hit <ctrl>-A (on a Windows™ PC) to highlight everyone in local.  When someone new comes into the system, you don’t need to figure out who it is – their name will be the only one not highlighted.  You can look at their info and then highlight everyone again.
    
5. Use dscan – if you see a rifter or slasher or merlin or ? on dscan right after some low life with a very negative security status has arrived, it might be a good time to head for a safe spot.
    
6. Learn how to use dscan to your advantage by lowering the scan distance.  Change the 2 at the start of the distance (2,147,483,647 ) to a 1 (1,147,483,647) – it will cut the dscan range in half (to about 7au) and you’ll know when people are getting close.  Or take the 2 off entirely (147,483,647) and it’ll cut the range to about 1au so you’ll know when people are breathing down your neck and will arrive in a matter of seconds.
    
7. Of course, for any of these dscan tricks to work – you need to constantly be hitting the dscan button.  Every 5 or 10 seconds when you think danger might be lurking nearby.  Every 30 seconds even if you think you’re totally safe.

That’s it for now.  Anyone else have any advice for noobs to avoid Death by Pirate?

The Ultimate Rifter Fit - Again

I know that I previously linked this excellent fit - but with all the talk about rifters here, I thought it would be good to link it again.

Here it is - the ultimate, best, never to be bettered, rifter fit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU2f4KlPvgc

Check it out!

Long Live the Rifter!

A lot has been written about the rifter since the frigate balancing last year - it's definitely not the dominant ship that it once was.  But on the other hand, it's not totally useless yet either.  I have hangers full of rifter hulls - a couple hundred of them spread across the worlds of Eve - and fly them quite often, if for no other reason than to use them up.

Tonight I popped out of the Auner station to see if there was anything of interest and scanned a merlin in one of the FW plexes.  As opposed to the rifter - the merlin is now one of the darlings of pvp.  A vicious little monster with tank and massive damage from blasters at close range.  Massive damage.  Blasters.  Close range.

My alt in RvB flies merlins and I know what they can do - so my plan was to use barrage ammo for it's additional range and try to stay away from the fire spewing from the blasters.  I set my orbit distance to 6,000 meters on the way to the plex and checked to be sure I had barrage loaded.  I turned all the knobs up to 11.

I landed on the gate and jumped thorough.  There was the merlin, just 3,000 meters away from me.  I immediately hit the orbit button and activated the overheated afterburner to get some distance from him, targeted and hit all of the right buttons.  He was scrammed, webbed, and taking damage from my autocannons and rocket launcher.

At first I was taking more damage than I was dealing (looking at the logs he hit for about 450 damage with one shot before I managed to gain some range).  But I had an armor repairer on the rifter and always hope that my opponent is shield fit (to give me hope at times like this when I'm behind early in fights).  Sometimes that hope is well placed, and sometimes not.  In this case, I was right.  The merlin was equipped with a Miura Bull Approved Medium Shield Extender(tm).  So while I was behind on damage, I was still not in my main pool of defense (my armor) - while he already was losing his vital shield defense.

When I had my orbit established at a bit over 6km from the merlin I turned off the heat on everything but the guns and the rocket launcher.  No need to burn up my equipment and lose by default (something I'm all too familiar with...).

The damage from the merlin slowed down to nothing.  7km is too far for his blasters to have any effect - but well in range for my autocannons with barrage ammo.  While I was doing steady (not spectacular) damage, from his side of the fight came a steady, "Commander Sertan misses you completely".

The battle was won.  I remembered to turn off the heat on the guns and rockets (to save them from burning up) when I started going quickly through his armor and soon Commander Sertan exploded in a fireball of death and destruction.  I was only halfway through my shields and my armor was undented.

Afterwards we exchanged GFs in local and

[ 2013.02.18 05:38:58 ] Commander Sertan > if you would have landed closer, i think i would have had you
[ 2013.02.18 05:39:06 ] Commander Sertan > or at least it would have been a LOT closer
[ 2013.02.18 05:39:26 ] Jack Dancer > Definitely a lot closer.
[ 2013.02.18 05:39:59 ] Jack Dancer > Those blasters are vicious close in...

But this time I got lucky and didn't land close.  This was a fight against a well fit merlin with a very capable pilot - but even the lowly rifter has a chance depending on circumstances.

Seattle Area Eve Meet-up!

If you are in the Seattle area on February 23rd at 5pm then you might be interested in a gathering of Eve Online players at the AFK Tavern (great name!) in Everett (1510 41st Street).  It looks like 20 (or more!) people might be attending.  Including Jack Dancer.  WOOT!

Check out the forum thread for more info:  https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=143159

Lovin' Babe! What a Month!

Looking back at the month of January is pretty startling.  Check out my killboard (not something I obsess over as regular readers might have noted…) – I have more kills in January that I’ve had in all of my previous months in Eve combined!  Jack Dancer was born on May 11, 2011 and in the year and a half previous to January 2013 he only had 26 kills (many of them discussed here).  In January he had 36 (previous best month was 5 back in September).  YOW!  And he had a 2-1 positive ratio of kills to deaths (36 kills vs. 18 deaths).  DOUBLE YOW!!

Some of January's numbers were due to participating in the Tusker Free For All (13 kills and 8 deaths).  But mostly two factors have boosted my PvP activity and success:

1. The move from Heild to Auner
2. Joining RvB with an alt

Auner is an excellent system for PvP.  Check out the map – Auner is a side system off the main route between high and low sec in Metropolis.  People have to detour to end up here.  Most traffic goes Hek-Hror-Resbroko-Hadozeko (or vice versa).  People have to take a turn off the main route to get to Auner.  That means we get a variety of miners, ratters, and FW participants looking for a quiet spot to ply their trade.

Auner being a contested Faction Warfare system is a great PvP incentive – there are often FW complexes available for FW people to do whatever it is they do in there.  Me, I just land and shoot whoever might be around.  It’s been fun and I’ve had some excellent fights from the FW crowd.  They usually fly PvP-fit frigates or destroyers and many of them are very competent pilots.  And I often head out through Resborko-Hadozeko-Klogori-etc. for solo roams through the FW systems.

I'm also getting confident enough to take on bigger targets.  When flying a rifter or slicer I'll take a crack at destroyers and faction frigates (and have had some luck against both of them).  Check out this thrasher killmail and this firetail killmail as examples.  And even 1v2s (like recently when I was able to kill one rifter but not the other (though I had him in structure when I exploded)...).  I came so close to victory that I tried it a second time with those same pilots with identical results.  And then there was the Stabber Fleet Issue that I tackled at an FW site that led to a fun (and surprisingly long) fight with me eventually blowing up when he was able to slingshot into enough range to have his guns hit me.  But I think xxWarchildxx might have almost been slightly nervous for a short while during that duel...  Almost...

Another very important factor in my recent PvP success is having an alt in RvB.  I’ve been having a lot of solo fights there, learning alot, and enjoying it very much.  I’ve even flown in a few fleets.

This past weekend RvB had a Free For All with 30,000 (thirty thousand!) free T1-fit frigates of all types.  I skilled up my character so that he could fly any frigate and shoot any weapon.  I flew everything from a Rifter to an Imicus to a Punisher to a Executioner to an Ibis.  It was great fun to jump into a frigate, see what it was equipped with (some had only remote reppers and no guns - others might have one laser, one autocannon, and one railgun - and some might be excellent ships like a dual rep Incursus).  It was a real learning experience to fly all the different frigates and fighting against them - plus having more than 100 opponents churning around a gate/station/belt fighting each other was amazing.  A favorite was flying the dual rep Incursus for the first time (I was on 21 killmails with that ship before it finally exploded) and it might be a focus of Jack’s future training.  The Frigate Free For All was great fun.

In the two months that I’ve been in RvB I have more than 200 kills (and more than 100 losses).  It’s been a great way to get experience and learn to relax a bit during combat.  I highly recommend RvB to any new pilots out there looking for PvP experience.

Of course, all this fun has come at a price with Jack Dancer's security status now down past the important -5.0 point (appropriately dropped to those depths when podding an Eve Uni player who was sitting in a Imicus at zero on the sun in Auner with scanning probs out...).  So now that I'm a red flashy character any forays into high sec will come at the risk of being shot at by everyone.  Looks like I'd better settle in and enjoy Auner and the neighborhood...