New year: Beginnings and Endings

With the new year come new changes, some good and some bad. The biggest change has come for me in RL and thus I will be relatively afk from EVE for the coming month. However a corp without active leadership is not a good thing and I have refused to let renegades slowly wither and die in those circumstances. For that reason I have closed the corp down.

Over the past 3 months I had a lot of fun running Renegades and I hope all our members feel the same way. There has been some good times and some bad. But I think I can say that overall we had fun and played eve the way I think it’s supposed to be played. Too bad that the blog will now also end as I won’t have time for it either or the eve time to play and thus have something interesting to write about. I had 2 interesting subjects for a post that now will never be seen, our awesome Christmas op and we had a hilarious encounter with an indy corp that tried to move into Brin, but all good things must end. I had fun flying in Renegades and writing this blog, I also hope some people actually had fun reading it. Who knows I may pick blogging up again one day, we will see.

For now I wish you all a Happy New Year and we will keep our motto going in spirit: This can only end well!

Gank night

Last Saturday me and Lex joined a SHC Gank Fleet for some fun. These fleets are run every once in a while and are organized by the Scrapheap Challenge eve forums. It basically is a bunch of people from all walks of EVE coming together for a suicide fleet through 0.0. Every fleet also has a theme as to what ships you must bring. This one’s theme was rockets, in honor of their new buff in the latest patch. So everyone was sporting Maledictions, Vengeances, Hawks and Breachers. We gathered our 30 odd man fleet in Otsasai and started out with making a giant conga line while we waited for everyone to get ready. Then a flashy Cerberus warps to our station about 100k off and cloaks. He probably failed to notice that we had about 10 Maledictions in our conga line, so burn for him we did and low and behold. Decloaked, tackled and dead within 10 seconds. Now that’s a good way to start a roam.

We headed out and as soon as we jumped into our entry point of M-0 we found a camp to smash. Caught in their own bubbles and by insta locking interceptors a Crow, an Ares and an Arazu quickly met there end. We had only moved 2 jumps at this point so things were looking good. We headed it out to a station system further down the pipe. This was mostly uneventfull beyond the random travelers we caught. That stopped when we hit the station system. Suicidal as we were we set up on station and proceeded to shoot whatever undocked. We waited for a bit and sure enough an idiot in a Maller aggressed, so naturally he died. The next one was smarter with a smartbombing Armageddon. However rockets do have nice damage at range so we stayed out of 5k and nuked him. Thinking that was all we would get, we moved off to the outgate when a straggler called that a Hurricancane had aggressed him. So naturally we all hurried back to help murder it. Turns out there was a whole pack, so we murdered the other 2 Hurricanes as well as a bomber that was foolish enough to decloak. Now having pretty much cleared this system of any fighting spirit, we moved on to more fertile shooting grounds. We picked another Hurricane, Deimos and Purifier kill up on the way, before we hit our next destination.

12YA-2, now that was a fun system. We barged in, warping straight to station again, put up some bubbles and waited. Not 10 seconds later a Hulk warps in! We could not believe our luck, so we set to work at destroying it asap. But wait there is more. Not two seconds after we killed the first Hulk a second one warps in! Points get called and rockets fly as the second one makes a pretty explosion too. Everything else quickly safes up after this hilarity, so we move on again. We repeated the exact same trick in the next system. Jump in, put bubbles on the station and wait. Sure enough a Tempest warps in. he had apparently been ratting or plexing or something, because he already had mayor armor damage. We light it up and as were killing a Drake warps in to the bubble from a different angle. Interceptors start burning and call point, he’s not going anywhere either. We murder the Tempest and move on to the plucky Drake, who takes a bit longer to take out. But eventually he also succumbs to our mighty rocket fleet.

Wondering why we haven’t been slaughtered by a massive Northern Coalition gang yet, we move on again. In P-2 we run into a Drake  so we proceed to attack as usual, but here is where things get weird. For the next 5 minutes Drakes keep warping in consecutively and succumbing to our wondrous rocket fleet. Until finally after four hours of roaming a 50 man TEST fleet shows up to end our wonderful ramble through the north. Both me and Lex bite the dust and pod ourselves home. So remember: This can only end well! And in this case it actually did.

Amamake Rage

As our killboard quite clearly shows we have been on vacation for the past week. Leaving our normal base of operations in Brin for the insane twirl of pvp that only Amamake can provide. As part of our Rifter program I moved 50 Rifters including fittings at the cost of the corp over to our new office in Amamake and we had the fun commence. I wish to add here that I even won a bet with Von on if my cyno alt would survive. See I moved the Rifters in with my Jump Freighter and of course I did this in peak EU timezone. Lighting the cyno with my alt in a normal Heron frigate, to all our surprise I actually lived out the full 10 minutes until the cyno ran out. No one even came to gank it!

Anyways back to the much more interesting explosions. Our vacation week starts out great, after I go off for dinner. I had literally logged of for 10 minutes, when sure enough, the guys probe down an help kill a Rattlesnake. Seriously a Rattlesnake, in Amamake and it was missioning. Granted the fit wasn’t the greatest, but still. After I came back from dinner, and yelled on comms because I just missed that, we continued on with our killing spree, killing frigates and destroyers in quick succession. We thought we bagged something nice when we caught a Vagabond and swarmed him with our 3 Rifters. Then a hostile rapier decloaks, but we quickly surmise that he is neutral to both parties. So we shout in local at him to help kill the Vagabond, as that is a much tastier targets then a bunch of Rifters. The Vagabond enters structure and we warp off, not wanting to lose our ships to the rapier and thinking the Rapier will easily finish it off anyway. However hilarity ensues when low and behold the Vagabond warps off in structure as the Rapier had no pointed it. In all honesty we should have just traded the Rifters for the Vagabond, but damn that Rapier failed. So smack ensued in local, while we hatched a plan to now murder that Rapier. After all that would be justice, right?

Getting another friendly aboard we set our plan in motion. The entirety of the plan consisted of springing there trap and then swarming the Rapier in hopes that it died before we did. Sure enough they sprung there trap and engaged our lonesome Rifter in top belt, so we went for it. We got point on the Rapier as their support warped in. They now had one Rapier, one Fleet Issue Stabber, one Taranis and one Thrasher against our three Rifters and one Taranis. However we had the upper hand as our friendly decloaked his Falcon and presumed to jam the stuffings out of any hostiles on the field. We quickly burned the Taranis to prevent it from eating up our Rifters and continued munching on the Rapier. It went boom shortly after. The Thrasher was next as the Fleet Stabber had quickly moved away and was now well out of range. He was no match for our mighty Rifter army and we got our last pretty explosion of that battle. They smacked more in local, we laughed on comms and thanked our friendly neighborhood Falcon as we parted ways.

The following days we got many more kills and much hilarity, as the poor T1 Rifters killed T2 and faction hulls. Mostly interceptors but some unfortunates like this Dramiel and another Vagabond. Even one on one some didn’t stand a chance, lie this poor Navy Slicer that Von caught. In the end our total rampage ended like this. 105 kills against 61 losses, 59 of our losses were T1 frigates. One particular highlight I still think are the 19 Interceptor kills, which just proves that T2 doesn’t always beat T1. This ends our lovely vacation in Amamake, though I have left the Rifters there. You never know when we might go back after all. Now we’re back to our normal routine of engaging SCUM. and ridding the universe of anything that looks like a mission ship. I look forward to our future kills and as always: This can only end well!

Eve Uni still loves us and pissing of some Russians

Last Wednesday we were roaming around heading for a favorite stomping ground of ours: Taff. Time to pick some fights with SCUM. When we arrived no one would play ball as our giant fleet of 2.5 Ishkurs (yes that’s 2.5 as Vons internet was still crap :P) was too much for the 20 odd SCUM in local. We chatted some in local and got one of them irritated apparently. He was in a Hurricane so we challenged him to a duel to back his smack up. There were however 2 others in local who had joined in on the smack and after a couple of redocks we knew they were going to dishonor the duel and try and gank us. Still we like a challenge and went along anyway. But as predicted the first Hurricane was dual rep fit and took a while to go down. As he approached low armor a second Hurricane and a Cyclone showed up as backup and we warped our remaining Ishkurs in. First Hurricane went down but the second Hurricane was sporting neuts and they were eating us alive. We primaried it, but the cyclone had pulled range and was now able to hit us causing us to die in a fire not long after. The Hurricane was in low armor when we died, but oh well at least we tried. We now also know for sure that SCUM will not honor duels so neither will we with them anymore.

We headed back in our pods when we were convoed by an Eve Uni fc we fought before asking for a fight. Apparently he wasn’t having luck finding one so he asked if we were about. Fights are always nice so we obliged. I will add that we didn’t know what they had at this point, I had told him we only had five people online at that point and asked if he outnumbered us more then 4-1. He said no, so I agreed to engage at that point. We had gotten some reinforcements in Brin and shipped up to something bigger. Heading out our gang consisted of one Dramiel, a Curse , a Hurricane, a Drake and a Vagabond. We agreed to meet in Ingunn and chose the sun as our battleground. We landed and soon enough they started popping up on d-scan a mix of frigs, cruisers and battlecruisers. In total they had about thirteen people so the game was on. I had us spread out before they landed and it was good I did, they had tried probing us out, but now they landed at least 20k off most of us. The blackbird was our first target and we did a good job at pointing most of them and picking them apart one by one. We only lost our Hurricane, but exchanged it for 10 kills on Eve Uni. Was good fun and the Uni pilots enjoyed it as well. At this point I would like to put up a nice battlereport link showing it all, but somehow the killboard is acting up and throwing this fight and our second one together so I am just going to link it all at the bottom.

Anyway, like I said above there was to be a second fight. The Eve Uni fc said he’d like another fight and asked if we could wait till he had refit the fleet and taken them out again. As we didn’t have anything better to do I agreed. While we were waiting for GCC to go down we also bagged this Mealstrom that was missioning in the same system. On an unrelated side note, 15 minute GCC is seriously too long, but I will leave that discussion for another time. We went home to reship and picked up an additional member bringing our mighty fleet to six now. We trudged back to Ingunn to meet Eve Uni once more. The fleet had gotten a new fc in the meantime though and this one was a lot more suspicious as to what our intentions were. As our intention were to do nothing but kill him we got things sorted. They had more people this time though. There fleet was around 17 people but now also sporting a battleship. Now normally this wouldn’t worry me and at that point it didn’t, in hindsight it should have though. We started the same way we had last time, fighting at the sun. We popped some frigates when they burned over and then things went wrong. Both me and Lex had gotten the same idea and went balls deep into their fleet in an attempt to point the Megathron so it couldn’t warp off while we picked their fleet apart. The problem with that was we overlooked the amount of tackle the Eve Uni fleet had. We both got scrammed by more frigates then we could deal with which allowed the Megathron to get into weapons range. Now I know people have been complaining that blasters suck, but when webbed and scrammed and within 2k of neutron blasters those things hurt like hell. Both me and Lex went down one after another. The others did do a good job at keeping range, so the Eve Uni fc made the right call and left the field soon after. We were still hammering them and they could not get into range. In the end we got 5 kills for the stupid loss of our Curse and Drake. Not as good as a result as the first fight and certainly not ISK efficiency wise, but hell it was fun. Total end result as per the mashed up battlereport looked like this. Props for the Eve Uni fc willing to just setup a fight like that and hope we run into each other again soon.

From there we are going to fast forward to something with less fighting, but much more hilarity. Last Saturday me and Von were chatting on comms when he suddenly calls out he has probed out an Orca in a tower, even better it’s a small tower. Curious as we are Von warps to it in his Vagabond and I ship to my Curse to go take a look. Then Von suddenly calls out a Hurricane has left the pos shield and has engaged him. We quickly get point and warp the Curse in. He tries to run back to the tower, but it’s no use. The Curse lands, his MWD cuts and the Vagabond eats it alive. This pissed the owners of the tower off a lot though and they started cursing at us in local, in Russian. So we did the only logical thing and now demanded a ransom for the tower we weren’t really planning to kill. The only protection it had was one warp disruptor and one cruise missile battery, so we set about incapping those mods with the Curse and Vagabond. This seemed to piss them off even more and a very long string of Russian appeared in local, some of which made even no sense to Google translate so who knows what it meant. They finally seemed to get bored of cursing at us and both of the Russians left. We finished incapping the mods by bringing in an Abaddon as it made it go so much faster. But we kept in mind that the Orca was seemingly still in the pos. I leave the field at that point to go drinking with some friends in RL musing about how to catch that Orca.

I come back later that evening, as usual being piss drunk, and find that Von has put together a small fleet and is actually attacking the tower. So I come onto comms, grab a harbinger and start bashing away as well. We even get convoed by one of the towers Russian owner for more smack, but he still won’t pay the ransom or say anything particularly sane so we grab Google translate and start saying weird stuff back. At one point Von said something along the lines of we will steal all your eels and rape them or something and he left the convo. We at that point had all but died laughing so we couldn’t care less. Then suddenly for no apparent reason the shields drop, the tower goes offline! We had only been attacking the pos for like 15 minutes, so it definitely wasn’t us. We, especially me here being drunk and all, looked at the tower befuddled for a while before we figured out we can now attack the pos mods. We shoot the corp hanger, but nothing drops. Suddenly local spikes and we start aligning out. Sure enough a couple of minutes later a 25 man mixed cruiser and battlecruiser gang lands on us and we warp to safes. They smack in local a bit and we smack back, but they leave after a couple of minutes, so back to the tower it was. I was now very close to passing out though, so I wisely docked up and dragged myself to bed. Or the couch in this case as it was closer. Von continued the fleet and went back to the tower after I logged. They popped the rest of the pos mods in quick succession, but then something awesome happened. They popped the Ship Hanger Array and the Orca dropped!

We of course didn’t have anyone on hand to actually fly the Orca though so a hurry was made to get some alt in there to fly it away. As I was told the alt wasn’t far of, but it was too late. The 25 man gang from before powered through and warped to us at the same tower again. We made off and sustained no losses, but they secured the Orca. So end result, Orca lost, tower killed and some Russians pissed off. I am still calling it a good night. Now just before this blog post goes up we have declared war SCUM. so we can engage them on gates and stations without aggro. Should mean a lot more fun to come and as we say: This can only end well!

A ratting carrier in top belt?

Yep you read that right, a ratting carrier in top belt in low sec. Last Monday afternoon Jayde was out and about when she called a small gatecamp nearby in Gultraten from Mean coalition. I quickly undocked my Curse and burned over as Jayde got aggressed on the gate. As soon as I landed things went hot. Jayde got tackled in her Cane by a Crusader, Jaguar and a Zealot. We primed the zealot as I set my neuts to work on everything there. Almost immediately after seeing my curse the Zealot started to MWD away and ran as fast as he could. He was heavily cap boosting because even with 2 neuts running on him he was still very fast, but not as fast as my Curse. I had this and then Jayde called that she had burned out her guns. Not good. But still, Curse vs Zealot is a done deal, right? Well normally I would agree. I had however also forgot to stop overloading something, namely my warp disruptor. With the zealot at half armor it gave way and I was left looking befuddled at my UI telling me the zealot had warped off. Oh well was fun and we move on. Both the frigs has also bailed with the zealot now out, so I warped to station to rep my mods.

I docked and repped my mods when Jayde suddenly called out on comms. She had warped of the gate to top belt and found a carrier sitting there. She quickly bugged off again since her guns were still burnt out, but I couldn’t resist. I undocked and headed to the top belt. Sure enough there it was, an Archon carrier and it was actually salvaging an NPC wreck. I could not resist. Point on the Archon and I called jayde to get back here as fast as possible with repped guns. At the same time I shouted at the Mean gang in local. Only 5 seconds after I was convoed by the Mean fc and the game was on. They were burning to reship into something to actually kill the carrier while I kept kiting the fighters as best I could while holding point. Jayde in the mean time was having problems as her mods went offline after she undocked and she needed to redock to online them again. As the minutes past by Mean finally showed back on the field again. A crusader of theirs got point on the carrier and I tried to bug out. It was too late for the Curse though and it died after sustaining too much damage from the fighters. I hurried to reship into something with more firepower while Mean started pounding on the carrier. After a quick refit to my Abaddon I was back on the field and introducing the carrier to my lasers. I had brought Del over as well since I reckoned we’d need all the firepower we could get. Most of the fighters were popped by the time I got back so the carriers damage was almost gone. With ten people now swarming around it, the carrier began to buckle and soon enough we got a pretty explosion. The carriers fit is horrible and the pilot was too be honest extremely stupid, but damn that was fun. Totally worth losing the Curse to hold point for.

We exchanged pleasantries in local with Mean and split the loot equally. This took a while though since we needed haulers to scoop the fighters, damn those things are big. But still nice kill and some loot with it too. It’s a good day already and its only halfway the afternoon. We had some more fun fights and good kills, like this Scythe Fleet Issue, and some less fun fights. Like here where I lost my curse due to not paying proper attention to range. If I had paid more attention we would have bagged a few more kills without any losses, but oh well shit happens. We live to fight another day and always remember: This can only end well!

More Eve Uni and introducing SCUM.

First things first though, I took the top spot on The Ladder! Right now with that out of my system let’s get on with the actual blog post.

My last post ended with me fighting an Eve Uni gang and having a blast, but apparently Eve Uni really likes us. Only 2 days after my fight with them, another corp member ran into a gang of theirs. Lex uses a different approach then me though. I usually tend to wade in head first and hope my buffer holds long enough for everything else to die. Lex uses his nano Drake to great effect for drawing out larger gangs and popping weaker links when they present themselves. Which is exactly what he did with the Eve Uni gang and to great effect. He spent a while following the gang, proceeding to pick them off one by one. Now don’t get me wrong, I have a huge amount of respect for what Eve Uni does for new players. But in gangs they have a tendency to well, let’s say bring disproportionate amount of numbers and/or ECM. So props to Lex for picking them off so successfully!

Now I would like to introduce you all to SCUM. There a low sec alliance living close by to our home base of Brin. There also one of our favorite targets around as they have a tendency to always undock something to fight. So last Tuesday me and Von ventured to Taff looking for a fight once more. Him in his epic navy Omen, which Von blogged about here, and me in my trusty nano Curse. After hanging around for a few minutes and Vons connection being as fail as always, even though he did bag this Raptor kill, we got a response. SCUM came out in a t2 frig gang of about 15 people and aggressed Von in a belt. His Omen being much faster he quickly pulled range and started pounding away while i warped in. Of course thanks to Vons maneuvering while I was in warp I had a great landing point. Right in the middle of their frig gang! I was instantly scrambled by 4-5 frigs, though it should have been more. I think they were just stunned that a Curse had warped in at 0 on them or something, because I managed to neut or kill the frigs that scrambled me and pulled range. After we both popped a couple of them they decided this was not working and wisely warped out. End result looked like this. After that they reshipped to battlecruisers and recons, so we decided this was more than the both of us could take and headed home to drop of our loot.

Back home some more people started logging on and we were about to head out again when suddenly my internet died, ugh. Apparently the net was out in the whole neighborhood so I missed the rest of the evening. Sad for me because not long after they popped both a Tengu in a wormhole as well as a missioning Megathron. But then again I am pretty sure we will have more fun fights in the future, so remember: This can only end well!

A gentleman's duel and Eve Uni's revenge

This was something I actually wanted to add in on my last update but I thought it had gotten long enough already so I shoved it over. It does deserve to be told though so I am going to start with it here.

Dame Death is a friend of mine in EVE and we’ve both been hanging around in the same public channel for quite a while now. We both like good fights and we both tend to run in expensive ships and try our luck. So in the end it was really inevitable, we needed to arrange a duel. The date was chosen Thursday evening 21^st of October. His Sleipnir against my Legion, which I had actually bought of Dame. But before the duel we had already spent several times discussing potential fits on both ships so we knew the general layout of what the other would fit and had agreed not to change it with this knowledge in mind. So beforehand I was bound to my plated Legion fit without a lot of neuts against his XL-shield boosted Sleipnir, not ideal for me. But I had wanted to find out how this would stack up against a Sleipnir for a while now so we were on.

Finally the day was there and I was late, ugh. I got tangled up in rl stuff so I still had to buy and move a large chunk of my fittings and I could feel dame was growing impatient with the waiting. When I finally got my act together and fitted the ship we were ready to go. We warped to the same safe spot and dropped fleet so neither would get bonuses, after a countdown we started. Dame started kiting me at range, my scorch lasers hitting him but his XL-booster keeping him up nicely. I tried some maneuvers to get him within my 18k overloaded web range but to no avail, all the while he was chipping away at my rather massive 200k EHP buffer. Then I noticed something I hated, he had popped out light ECM drones. Now don’t get me wrong, it was fair. We hadn’t agreed not to use this ECM, I just have a general hate for it. Of course I made this know loudly on comms and he was even nice enough to not use them all the time after that.

After about 5 minutes of maneuvering around I finally managed to get Dame within my overloaded web range. If this was due to my maneuvering or him just wanting to go close to finish me off is debatable, but in any case the worst happened at that time. The ECM drones got a jam off! When the timer finally ran down I rushed to put my web and neut back on him and chump away. But my armor was now vanishing a lot faster since he had gone close with Phased Plasma, punching me right in the thermal hole. However my neut was also doing its stuff and I even managed to cut his Invulnerability Field at one point. This was going to be close, I would only need about 2-3 volleys to finish him off once his shields went but I was almost out of armor now. I overloaded everything I had and I saw a sliver of armor damage appear before my legion gave way to his overpowering amount of dps. There I was in my pod looking at the wreck of what had been a rather expensive legion, but damn that had been fun. Good fight from Dame and it had been close.

We already agreed that this needs a rematch!

Fast forward from that to yesterday. I was hanging around in our home system having just had a ladder match against Fey. Was fun, we dueled in noobships and I won, so good stuff. But anyways we just had our match and had docked back up when suddenly in comes an Eve Uni gang cramming in. They were spotted on station so I did the only sane thing I could do and undocked my Bhaalgorn. A Thorax aggressed so I went for it. The Thorax blew up in only 3 volleys and I started going after the Canes, which they had 3 off. I got 2 down before even reaching half armor when the Uni gang decided that apparently this had been a bad idea and ran. End result looked like this. There were about 10 of them in total, with 3 canes 2 cruisers and about 5 frigates, but this is all I caught. Fey is on there because she undocked a frigate and tried to swat some drones, but alas the station guns found her very quickly. Lex shows on the battle report because one of the canes I killed hung around 100km of the station in a pod, he was easily probed out and dispatched by us both. All in all good fun.

Later the cry came out as apparently we had mauled a small Eve Uni gang (again they had more but we took no losses so the kb doesn’t show it) this weekend as well and apparently this was a revenge action of some sort. If true I want more people like that to come looking for revenge! In any case fun fights and remember: This can only end well!