[Jester's Trek] A tale of two battles
A tale of two battles
I'm not usually much into EVE battle reports on this blog. That said, two fights I was in this past week really illustrate some of the points I made in my blog post back in February about EVE small gang, where "small gang" here is defined as "between 5 and 25 ships". It's still dying in null-sec... and sometimes it requires heroic efforts to make the soon-to-be-corpse stand up and take a few steps.
The first fight is this one, which took place on Sunday:
http://www.rotekapelle.com/killboard/?a=kill_related&kll_id=101954
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=22816957
The eve-kill battle report is badly scrambled, so use the Rote Kapelle one. I provide the eve-kill one to clarify a few details. This fight started with a GeoCorp/Rote Kapelle armor HAC gang roaming through Provi. The core fleet was about 18 or so: four Guardians plus about a dozen mixed armor HACs plus a small number of tacklers. Moving through space, we got intel on a slightly bigger NCdot gang: also four Guardians plus about 16 armor HACs plus a small number of tacklers, about 24 total.
They were bigger than us... not much, but enough to move cautiously. They were better comped than us, with a solid core of well-tanked Sacrileges supported by Arazus and Lokis... also worrisome. But instead of fighting us, they ran away from us, deeper and deeper into a dead-end pocket and we obliged them until they were at the ass end of a dead-end constellation in which they couldn't dock. And there, they camped the in-gate to the constellation against us, launched drones, and set up at their optimal ranges.
We got on our intel channel and asked a little help, and a little help is exactly what we got: five or six Ishtars with a few more tacklers and no logi. The NCdot fleet jumped a scout into us and refused to fight as long as they were "outnumbered." Meanwhile, we weren't real excited about jumping into them since the bulk of their fleet was FinFleet who are known as a ridiculously strong capital ship alliance. It was virtually assured they had a triage carrier or two on stand-by.
And so the fight wouldn't have happened at all, except Rote Kapelle member Ben Booley volunteered to sacrifice a triage carrier of our own to get us the fight (docking his Guardian in the process). We moved in a cyno, he insured the ship, we jumped in, aggressed, started losing ships, and lit the cyno. Needless to say, NCdot did as well, bringing in their triage carrier. And so the fight was pretty even with both sides killing each other's tackle ships and Guardians. In addition to Guardians and cheap stuff, we knocked down a pair of Arazus. They knocked down a pair of Deimoses.
Thanks to smart target-calling and target-switching, we then managed to break a couple of NCdot Sacs. At that point apparently deciding we weren't going to bring in any more capitals to go after their triage carrier, NCdot brought in seven additional carriers and three dreads to break ours. Needless to say, we had exactly zero interest in escalating against NCdot, so we left the carrier to die, deaggressed, and left the system.
It was a fun fight, but:
- it's somewhat aggravating that one of our members essentially had to pay a billion ISK to get us the fight; and,
- it's clear that the fight never would have happened without his willingness to do so.
On the flip-side is another "fight" we had last night. No eve-kill link for this one because no kill-mails were generated.
This time, we were roaming Curse during USTZ in a small flight of four or five light missile Heretics, plus a Sabre for bubbles and myself in a Hyena. Our scout jumps into a system to find a Dirt Nap Squad Ferox off-gate. He tackles the ship, we go in, I web down the Ferox and we start applying DPS. Two more DNS appear, a Talwar and an Enyo. Then the system fills up with another ten DNS in a variety of small and medium DPS and tackle ships. They arrive on grid very quickly.
We reduce the Ferox and the Talwar to armor, the DNS tacklers fail to lock any of us down, and -- now outnumbered two to one -- we disengage and warp off.
It's a situation where if DNS had been willing to sacrifice the Ferox, they could have trickled their tacklers in a few at a time, the tacklers would have caught three or four of our fleet including my Hyena, the Sabre, and a Heretic or two, then they could have called in their DPS. But unwilling to sacrifice the Ferox, they swarmed the system, didn't get any tackles, and didn't get a single kill.
And ironically, had the Ferox died, both sides would have declared it a good fight: we would have gotten a Ferox kill and maybe one or two of their tacklers. They would have killed at least 120 million ISK in T2 ships. Sure, we could have stuck around as well. But... yeah. The Ferox kill would have been worth losing a few ships... but not our entire fleet.
Anyway, just the kind of "fights" that I'm continuing to see in the 5-25 ship meta.
Source: A tale of two battles