Friday, December 13, 2013

AAR: Battle of 7-UH4Z



AAR: Battle of 7-UH4Z 

TLDR: Very cool multi round fight with Gentlemens's Agreement.

Last night was much like any other night. Roll a hole, scan, jump a hole, scan, jump another hole, scan.. more of that.

We had a C5 connected to our home and I choose to go that way, while others went down the static. Nothing special, a few nulls here and there and that chain ended in another c5/C5. I come back and start up some other process.

Cloudhunter seeing some null  holes on siggy, went to go do what he does best. Kill null sec ice miners in his interceptor. 

He jumps through one of the null holes and says on coms “ There is a Cerberus On Null 1” .  We were like wtf? More wtf because null sec people don’t often sit alone on a wormholes. So we formed a fleet. 

Jray in a Vigilant,  Cloud in his Taranis and myself in a Raptor. I jump through first and there the Cerberus is, 0 on a wormhole to a c5. I call point the cereberus puts his warriors on me. I set a tight orbit and burp my mirco to out run the drones. Vigilant calls secondary point and we expect the Cerberus to run into the C5.  A manticore uncloaks at 70k from the hole. With the vigilant holding the Cerberus I drop point and microwarp to the Manticore and Cloud follows behind. The Cerberus drops.

Cloud and I make short work of the bomber with my Raptor (that thing is a beast on dps btw).  Stiletto shows up, then a Sabre. Our own back up starts showing up now too. Kremit in his brutix goes for the sabre. BTW that sabre pilot was skilled, just sayin. I come in with my Raptor to assist with the sabre, while dodging the stiletto.  Enemy Omen Navy issue lands on grid and burns to the now trapped brutix. Then a deimos lands.. then a Rapier… we figure our time in this null has past.

Sadly Kremit's Brutix and pod was the cost of our commitment. GF all around.  

The SUSU fleet retreated into the hole fully expecting the null fleet to follow to finish us off. Nothing. We kept wondering why the Cerberus who was point blank on the hole didn’t jump to safety ?  We hole jumped into him, we had the disadvantage. If he jumped into the C5 and back again he could effectively ditch half the dps on him and had real chance of saving his ship. /shrug we couldn’t figure it out.

When faced with more numbers, do we hide in our POS? NOPE fuck that. I reshipped into my experimental Rapid Heavy Missile Raven !!(Code name Star Fighter) I asked for brave pilots to return into god only knows how many angry Null sec dooders. Cloud steps up with his neut Armageddon and we drag another guy in an Exequror.  Lets do this!

We go back in for round two.

I jump in my Raven, Clouds Armegeddon, and someone with an Exequror (ASB shield battle ship with armor logi, PRO I know!)  and there are a few ships there. Deimos, Cyclone, Omen Navy, Rapier, Scythe, Stiletto. Omen navy is primary, we do our best but with the slow lock speed of battle ships, my raven is already taking massive damage long before I even unload my RHML.

I do what I have always wanted to do with a RHML and outnumbered. 

DEATH BLOSSIM !!! Last star fighter eat your fucking heart out! I shoot my missiles at all the things!  Missiles fly out of my ship at all random directions. Not sure if enemy fleet thought I was retarded because I might have only scratched all the ships around me.:sadface: Guess the game doesn't work like the movie. Dreams = Crushed.

Reloading both ASB and RHML. I couldn’t stay on field, I had to jump back leaving cloud and an exequror to fight.

With what could only be described as a feat of great ‘bumping magic’. The entire Null fleet bumped the Armageddon off the hole, and webbed him. Unable to return to Bobs warm embrace, the Armageddon couldn’t last. He went down. He took a Sacrilege with him. Gfs all around.

With the failure of my Raven, I decide to ship into a hurricane. We charge into them for the 3rd time, this time 3 hurricanes with 2 Augorors and 2 Execquror. Our reps are holding and we are popping little ships left and right.  Deimos… down.. Cyclone… down.. , they can’t break us.

Then arrives a Megathron, and we destroy that. Then arrives another megathron, and we destroy that too! Each time one of the little frigs that were there, would come in, for a whatever reason and we could catch them, double web scram canes ftw! Ships exploding everywhere, it was GLORIOUS!

Eventually we are like ‘are they going to stop?!’ 

What was super odd, they didn’t use the wormhole at all. They were fighting at 0 on a wormhole and refused to jump through it. Even when their ships were in structure. We couldn’t figure it out. Random conversations in local after the fight they told us, they wanted to brawl… Which I guess is what they did, but without using all the tactics avail I felt bad, because each time we got chased away, we jumped into the C5 for safety. Sometimes...

Our own guys lost all sorts of shit on the wormhole they could have jumped back through, but their reasoning was, and I'm quoting. "Fuck you, I found this content" Which is a legit excuse in my book. 

The Null sec guys withdrew and we brought a Noctis to scoop the wrecks. Great fight!

Cethion calls out over coms. “There’s a dram popping my PI hauler.” We were like… wtf? How did the null guys get into our hole? We then spend some time figuring out where the dram came from and sorting that shit out. Some random c4 guy came in to pop a PI hauler and promptly left.

During that time, a convo opens with one of my alts. “Hey you want to fight more?” I said, “ Some of our guys are logging off for the night, but if you bait, we are required to bite” He said “Awesome”.

A few minutes pass and we sort out the dram threat. One of the Null pilots jumps into the C5 and talks in local. “You guys coming back?”  Duh.. of fucking course. I jump one of my alts through and get eyes on the Null fleet.

4 Raven at 0 on the hole, 3 Scythe at range, 1 Firetail, 1 jag. 1 Stiletto.  

Private convo opens up to me. He says “You have seen us, we haven’t seen you. What are you bringing?” “I say Armor” He asks “Equal Numbers?” I said, “we have some guys who are going to sleep but even if we are outnumbered, we are going in anyway”  -- He says “Sweet”

Round 4:  Let’s do THIS!!

We figure they have about equal logi, but we are somewhat low on DPS, we bring --

1 boosting Astarte, 2 Hurricane, 3 Augoror, 1 maluus (low SP guy wanted to fight too), 1 Celestus.  

We figure the with the scythes at range, we could damp them into coming in closer and we could switch to their logi. It was a solid plan, but once we got their logi totally damped, we simply didn’t have the DPS to take out those Ravens.

What made it worse, each of the ravens dropped a full flight of ECM 600’s and jammed out our logi. I tell the dps to target ECM drones to assist the logi pilots, but we can’t get them all down before we are forced to run back into the wormhole, again. It didn’t help that a Falcon showed up either.

We wait our polarity timers out and return.

I tell the Maluus his primary target is that god damn Falcon, he is to hold his jump cloak and damp that Falcon to nothingness the second he uncloaks. Still not enough dps to kill a single raven. Those guys were BRICK tanked.  We did manage to get some frig kills as brave little frigs came in to the fight to get some pop shots, but alas .. we had to withdraw again.

GF’s all around.

What blows my mind is, they could have followed our crumbling fleet back into the c5 on at least 6 or 7 occasions. They could have saved ships they would have lost (all the frigs) if they simply jumped into the hole. But didn’t. They just died.

I’m not sure if we were violating some kind of Null honor code by using both sides of the wormhole to our advantage, but we did, cause that’s what wormholers do. /shrug.

Super big thanks to everyone who brought the null fight! Good to know that not everyone docks up and hides when they see wormholers.

o/ Pleasure. 10/10 would fight again.

The butchers bill

1 comment:

  1. When I was very new to wormholes, I lost a ship while we were fighting on a B274 at 0. I simply assumed that, like gates, you couldn't jump with aggression still up. Maybe these null guys built their combat intuition around gate fights rather than hole fights?

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