A good weekend for our small W-space pvp corp. mining corp. Special thank you to Foedus Latro for being one of the best W-space FC's in the game! Awesome content generator with his creative shenanigans and his ability to withstand my level of trolling/bullshit. We are recruiting experienced W-space pvpers, miners, send convos/mails to Foedus Latro. Or join "Isogen5" channel in game.
TLDR: I give a weekend battle report for some wormhole based activities, videos, kills, tactics and story telling from the perspective of a grunt in an active W-space PVP corp.
I'm sorry for the length of this post, I know some people feel that blogs are for just five paragraph essay based ramblings. Usually they are... but I was on a roll, so FU.
For the Newbies---
I know we have a bunch of newbies in EVE recently and I don’t
think many of them know about this type of play style. With that in mind, I’m
going to try and describe the ins and outs of being a w-space PVP gang.
Bob(w-hole god of destiny) and his glorious randomness
shined on Isogen 5 this weekend. Billions
were destroyed in fight after fight, I’ll do my best to recall the details of
each one but the point of this post is to show you that W-space small gang
warfare is alive and well.
Friday-
Well the below post made while I was a little inebriated right
before I went to sleep. It is what it is.
Backstory:
Iso5's goal is to seek out targets in W-space and sometimes null.
When we find people in our scouting travels, we try our best to interact with
them in some way, even if they outnumber us. Even if it seems like a lost
cause. Our play style is totally dependent on players interacting with us.
How we accomplish this, is by rolling (intentionally closing)
our hole connection to create a new exit. Once the new connection is found less
than a minute after the old connection was closed. We then send out scouts in
all directions possible to try and find targets. Once we get about 3 connections
away from our home, we return and do it again.
Well on Friday, one of our scouts came across a crit
wormhole(significant mass/ships have used this connection to reduce the
integrity of the connection) connected to a C5.
A few things that make this find significant. First, why is
it crit? Second, are the people who made it crit, still around? Wormholes don’t
just crit themselves so someone clearly interacted with this connection within
the past 18 hours. As a scout, you look for these types of traces to find your
prey.
The most common reason why a hole would be crit is a
defensive tactic used by wormhole groups to limit the amount of ships that
could possibly use it to attack them.
The main downside for us to finding a crit connection is; the
pure amount of ships/firepower we can use to attack people is very limited. 200
million mass or less.
So our scout jumps in and finds sleeper wrecks on scan. Wrecks
on scan means potential targets have interacted with sleeper NPC’s within an
hour or less. Not only that, but they will most likely be salvaging the wrecks soon due to how much work it is to
create them and their NPC loot.
Well we can’t really kill the people who made the wrecks
because of the crit hole, so we decide to try and steal or destroy the wrecks
themselves.
Bombers.
We start by moving into the crit hole and forming up on one
of the players who is salvaging the precious NPC loot.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43397770/ -- Catalyst destroyer
fit for salvaging.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43397792/
-- Mobile tractor unit #1
Right around that time we noticed a hostile Rapier on scan
and then cloak up. This Tech 2 cruiser is designed for removing frigates/bombers
from the universe, if it was so inclined. Lucky for us the owners of these wrecks don't shoot at anything other than red crosses.
Now before you start to feel bad for the poor C5 residents. That we just exploded and took their stuff. I would like to point out, we are
there with frigate ships only. They are paper thin and our entire fleet could
have been chased off/destroyed by a single Tech 1 Cruiser. That solo rapier would have ended us... instead it hid in some force field.
The thing is, the residents of this C5 have become so pvp
risk adverse, even attempting fights grossly in their favor are off the table
for them. That’s their play style. That’s OK, but we won’t sit around and
wait for them to conform to our play style.
Now if you recall I said I had been drinking. Well when Foedus
our FC tells us to go to the next MTU to destroy it, and explicitly says the
correct one… well I wasn’t paying enough attention.
My little bomber exploded because of sleeper
NPCs. I then spent the remainder of my time trying to bump hostile ships with
my pod, then Foedus tells me to leave or face his punishment.
We got one more MTU.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43397920/
--- Mobile Tractor unit #2 – notice the pod.
I returned back to our home system and got into my own
salvaging destroyer.
I then flew back to the C5 with the intention of salvaging
some remaining sleeper wrecks to recoup my loss of a bomber. 40 million isk was
salvaged and this more than covered the cost of my bomber.
Net result + 10 million some ISK and a funny story.
Saturday:
The annual W-space battleship roam, lead by Lazerhawks!
Lazerhawks has been doing this for a few years
now, with different levels of success. Iso5 was invited to bring some battle ships and have some fun. To sum up the activity; We waited an hour to jump 2 times
and get blobbed by 3x our numbers. Op success!
Here are some kills I
was a part of.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43418175/
-- Dominix
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43418183/
-- Dominix
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43418387/
-- My Megathron.. I don’t have skills for most T2 large long range weapons
because I live in W-space and most situations don’t call for it.
I bought full insurance for the ship and had every intention
of losing it. After insurance costs/Mods/Rigs.. the ship might have cost me
about 100m isk.
Later that afternoon…
I was headed back from K-space into the warm embrace of
W-space and I was reminded again of how dangerous high sec can be.
It seemed like some dastardly criminals in catalysts were
attempting to take out a Bowhead. So, I did what all decent person should when surrounded by criminals, shoot at them.
When I finally made it back into our home, we had a direct
connection to Curse (0.0 Null Sec) that required our inspection.
Thankfull,y some null sec folk in this area liked to fight
too!
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43423020/
-- Cynabal
They liked to fight so much that they found our wormhole,
jumped in and started shooting one of our towers.
Not many k-space folk do that. We responded in such a way, that we showed
them exactly why, not many do that.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43424987/
-- Jaguar
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43424992/--
Jaguars POD.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43424981/ -- Sabre’s pod.
They ran all the way back to their Null sec, and we followed them with bigger ships!
We found ourselves sitting on a null sec gate attempting to
get the enemy fleet to commit to our side of the gate. I jumped through the
gate just to see what was on D-scan. Sure enough and their entire fleet was 1 AU from
the gate waiting for us to jump on an Absolution bait ship they put out. I
bubbled their side of the gate and jumped through to kill the bait Absolution. Good
thing I put up that bubble there because the escalation fleet was forced to burn
through the bubble while we burned down the absolution.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43425197/
-- Absolution
The resulting fight was EPIC! We didn’t totally kill their
fleet because we were slightly outnumbered but we did get a few notable kills
before one of the archons arrived.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43425360/
-- Zealot
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43425379/
-- Zealots POD
When the archon finally showed.. the FC told us to GTFO. At
just the last moment I was pointed/webbed/scrammed and exploded.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43425385/
-- My Cerberus.. O well
Just when we thought the fight was over, the Null sec guys
warped archons x2 and a fleet to our Null sec hole. We shipped up again, bringing 3 guardians, Nag
and T3’s. No fight was had, the null guys left.
I'm not making that up. From a later conversation with one of the null sec guys, they said we out shipped them with guardians. So we responded "Should we have brought two archons instead?"
Good on them for bringing the fight to us! You guys are making inroads to becoming actual people.
This wasn’t the end of our Saturday fun.
Remember those guys on Friday we stole the sleeper loot
from? Well we just happened to have a scout in that hole from the previous night, and
they were back at it. They even used the exact same tactic of critting the hole. We mustered the troops from both Iso5 and Skyfighters and build
an epic bomber wing!
We seriously thought we could take down a Moros with a bunch
of well-placed bombs and persistent torpedoes. We had 17 brave bombers to shove through
that crit hole to try and murder those risk adverse site runners.
As it so happened while we were waiting for the perfect time
to strike, an entirely different group of people had been prepping a log in trap
for the site runners.
Not wanting to be left out, we 3rd party'ed and
chaos ensues. The video tells the tail better than I ever could, but I’ll
attempt to summarize the events.
Our bombers were equipped with range damps and target lock
damps. The log in trap fleet had minimal logi support, and the support it did
have, were spread way out. What made it worse for them was they attacked in the
middle of an escalation wave. The sleepers did most of the heavy lifting for us
and the site running defenders. Bombs were launched and wrecks, ships and pods
were destroyed.
Watch the video and you will see chaos.. o and me learning
to not get stuck on POCO’s with my bomber. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f04RSTM38cE
Here are some of the kills I was on.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43426207/
-- Typhoon
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43426266/
-- Proteus
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43426408/
-- Some dudes pod.. that was stuck on a poco with me.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43426423/
-- And of course .. their mobile tractor units.. lol
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43426479/
-- Mobile tractor unit
I stopped the recording mid-way because I thought the
fighting was over, turns out Foedus scanned out the log off attackers, log off spot. We tried
to kill 2 bhaalgorns and a guardian with some bombers. It didn’t work out well
for us, but it was one hell of a fight!
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43426523/
-- My bomber
Sunday:
Well Sunday started out slow, so Andrew was like “Hey lets
bubble a gate, in our Null sec connection and see what happens”. My normal view
on gate camping isn’t a positive one, but we were that bored and our chain was
being scanned by some other guys at the moment. Since it was directly connected
to our home, what could go wrong?
To put it plainly, I’m not good at gate camping, I’m not
very good at EVE either, so when a solo Phantasm approached me to break up my
camp, I should have run.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43447344/
-- My Enyo…
Lucky for me, Andrew uncloaked his Rapier at just the right
time(after I died) and picked up where I left off. Since our direct connection
was to our home, some other guys came in to sort out the Phantasm menace.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43447420/
-- Phantasm
This pilot was angry that we would dishonor him so much by
using a falcon so he called us names and left. Seriously, null sec residents are filthy
honor-less animals, so fairs fair imo.
We sat there a while longer, till our Phantasm pilot came
back in another ship.
Which we promptly killed.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43447845/
-- Scythe Fleet Issue
I’m guessing he didn’t notify his intel channel we were
camping that gate, because a dominix jumped into, and died.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43448585/
-- Dominix
I had gotten another ship from my stash… and then lost it. https://zkillboard.com/kill/43448505/
-- Crow – didn’t want that ship anyway. O well.. Dominix dead.. op success.
I’m guessing that dominix pilot didn’t want to save his null
sec buddies the experience of being killed, because a second dominix jumped from the same system
one minute later… and died.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43448626/
-- Dominix
It was raining domi’s … so when we saw +1 more in local chat and gate fire, we thought .. “Another dominix?” Nope. The previous 3 pilots
killed by us in the exact same spot, wasn’t enough for us to be put onto their intel
network. … and a Thanatos decided to test the water – and died.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43448847/
-- Thanatos
And again.. I died https://zkillboard.com/kill/43448749/
-- Tristan.. – I was running out of better tackle ships or I was getting tired
of trying to save them.. who knows.. but shit exploded and I was happy.
After all that excitement, the day wasn’t over yet!
Foedus managed to trap out his Orca, while rolling the hole
and was forced to come back in through our new connection. This worked to our favor because the people who
lived in our static thought the orca was alone… and vulnerable. It wasn’t, it
was bait.
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43452586/
-- Proteus
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43452605/
-- Proteus
https://zkillboard.com/kill/43452606/
-- One of the pods
Foedus later said he felt bad for ganking those guys. Which
is crazy to me, because if our “Orca Rescue Response Fleet” ORRF for short wasn’t
there, he would have lost an Orca. We were going to use that Orca to haul our mined
Isogen. We are a mining corp after all.
An interesting two weeks you had. While you spent your time catching ratters I spend my time ratting together two carriers (had to replace the first one, lost it in the first month).
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